7 lessons from serial beauty entrepreneur Evette Hess
Meet the esmi Skin Minerals founder
Evette Hess’s advice for business success
- Customer experience is key
Puts customer experience at the forefront of every decision even if it costs you. Think about what your customer wants and deliver it.
- Naivety and tenacity can pay off
Hess admits that many of her ideas – such as adding treatment ingredients to make-up products – are the result of a combination of optimism and naivety.
- Be authentic
If you’re preaching self-love, self-care or self-empowerment, you should be living and breathing that as a leader and also making sure everyone in your workplace is also living and breathing those things.
She may be the founder of three major beauty brands, but Evette Hess still jumps on social media occasionally to reply to customers’ comments.
“I really love it,” she confides. “I feel like it’s a direct line to your customers – and you can see what everyone’s saying. So, I do ‘like’ the posts and I’ll reply sometimes.”
This dedication to customer service, together with a passion for beauty, are two of the reasons Hess is one of Australia’s most successful beauty entrepreneurs – albeit one who keeps a relatively low profile.
From her base in the Gold Coast, Hess presides over three beauty brands – PONi Cosmetics, esmi Skin Minerals and Lip Heroes – and although she prefers to avoid the spotlight, her brands’ parent company, Makeup Cartel, is worth tens of millions.
Last year, esmi Skin Minerals was ranked fourth on the AFR Fast 100 list, which measures the country’s fastest-growing companies, with 115 per cent YOY growth from 2015 to 2019. Esmi Skin Minerals’ The Uncomplicated Cleanser was also among the bestselling 10 products in Australia, according to Afterpay’s Fashion and Beauty Trend report, and last year a private equity firm invested in Makeup Cartel.
“The process was actually a lot longer than I anticipated. It wasn’t success straightaway by any means.”
The beginning of an empire
That’s not to say it has been a straight line to success. Hess was working as a beauty therapist when she came up with her first business idea: an easy-to-use brow product containing growth ingredients. “At the time, thicker eyebrows were just coming back in, and [women] had plucked their eyebrows to death.”
It took another 18 months of painstaking research and development to get the brow kit ready to hit the market in 2013. “The process was actually a lot longer than I anticipated, and it wasn’t success straightaway by any means,” says Hess. But, slowly, word spread and PONi Cosmetics began offering a wider range of products, including its cult tubular mascara The White Knight.
The arrival of esmi Skin Minerals
Three years later, Hess was ready for round two – launching esmi Skin Minerals, a vegan, cruelty-free, mineral make-up brand aimed at women with specific skin concerns.
“I’d been working in a cosmetic clinic, where we’d be doing intense treatments like peels and skin needling, and the women would go away and put on all-day make-up, which would set the treatment back because it wasn’t allowing the skin to breathe.”
Her solution? A clean make-up brand, infused with skincare ingredients like hyaluronic acid and niacinamide. Three years later, Hess launched her third beauty brand, vegan lip product line Lip Heroes. And she’s not done yet. “I think entrepreneurs are creative and they can see potential around them all the time. I do have more brands in me.”
“I think entrepreneurs are creative and they can see potential around them all the time.”
Constantly innovating can lead to long product development times. “Our esmi Acai Duo Skin Treats had over 200 revisions… that was borderline being dropped – but it’s actually one of my favourite products now.”
Regardless of deadlines or pressure, she adds that “being respectful is really important. When I first started out, it was very easy to lose sight of the people that were supportive because you’re so busy. But now I’m just very grateful. I’m humbled that people choose to give us their all when they work with us.”
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