Rodial founder Maria Hatzistefanis: 15 lessons in business

Even though I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I knew the woman I wanted to be.Since I was a little girl, about nine years old, on this tiny remote island back in Greece where I was born, I would go to this one newsagent that had only international magazines and save all my pocket money to go and buy those magazines, go home, close the door and go through them. I was absorbing everything, the fashion, the style, the beauty.

I graduated from English literature and I was working as part of a magazine, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do – all my friends were going to the US and something was driving me to business, I don’t know why. I went to the US and studied business and graduated and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So I got a job in banking of all places, in corporate finance, and that brought me to London. In the beginning, I was learning a lot – it was an exciting industry to be in, back in the day. Then a couple of years into it, I became a very bad employee, showing up late, not doing my projects on time and not surprisingly, one day I was called in and I got fired. It was a devastating moment for me in my mid-20s to get fired, that was my first corporate job, but that was the moment I realised I was ready to start my own business.

I knew Rodial had made it in year five. We were about to launch our first anti-ageing serum. I got this brown box from the lab with this beautiful bottle, I tried the product and me and my team of three at the time loved it. I was looking at the designs that our designers put together and it was a white bottle with the name ‘anti-ageing serum’ and I said to my team, how are we going to launch a product called ‘anti-ageing serum’ in this massive market where you have the Estée Lauders, the Lancômes, the L’Oréals of this world and they all have massive advertising campaigns, we’re gonna get lost. So I was looking into the list of ingredients and one of the ingredients related to venom. So I said to my team, let’s call it Snake Serum. and they said wow, you’re going to take us out of business. But we capitalised on the name and made the product black, we did a photoshoot with snakes and snake charmers and sent the product out to press because back in the day when I started we didn’t have social media, and it became viral. We started getting calls from Japan, Germany, Australia, everyone wanted palettes of Snake Serum. That was the moment that I thought, okay, we are here to stay, we are doing something. A lot of people who start their own business say to me, “I’ve been doing this for six months and I’m not successful, I want to give up” and I say, it took five years to see any progress, you can’t be expecting a lot within six months. That was a eureka moment.

The biggest challenge is listening to other people when I need to listen, and not going against my gut feeling. Every time I’ve made a decision that my gut feeling was telling me not to do it, but I listened to others and I went with it, I regretted it every single time. One of the things that I’ve learned even 25 years later when there’s a lot of analysis, there’s a lot of numbers, there’s a lot of people around me, is that if I feel something isn’t right for the brand, and I can’t really prove it, but my gut feeling is telling me that, it’s 100%, go with your gut feeling.

Inspiration comes from different places. We’re celebrating ten years of the Bee Venom range this year, and the inspiration behind that product specifically was that I was in LA and I heard about this facial called the Bee Venom Facial that Gwyneth Paltrow was talking about and I went to a spa to experience it. You go into a room all covered up and they release bees for a few minutes and they do their thing, they sting you, and your cells start regenerating. So I thought, why don’t I take bee venom and instead of putting our customers through that process, let’s put it in a jar and see if we can replicate similar results. That’s how the idea of Bee Venom came about. One thing about Rodial is we need to get excited about a new ingredient or a product, we are not one of those brands that are going to be launching something every month for the sake of launching it. We may have a gap of a few months of no launches because we want to find the next big thing.

I have written a book called How To Be An Overnight Success and on the first page, I say it took me eighteen years to be where I am today. There’s no such thing as an overnight success. And this is the story of our Banana Low Lighter – I created it eight years ago, and I always had the vision of this one product that you put under your eyes and whenever you have shadows on your face it reflects back the light and it’s not about your skin colour, it’s about light and a reflection to make you look awake and refreshed. We launched it and for a year I wasn’t happy with the packaging or the formula. We changed five formulas and an equal number of packaging to get it to what Banana Low Lighter is now. I had this vision of the product, I believed in it but I knew we weren’t there yet. Banana Low Lighter took off during the pandemic when everyone was at home and we were just launching the packaging that you may have seen it in now and everyone went crazy because everyone was on their screens and wanted an instant product to apply and suddenly it became an It product for complexion. It’s a long story with a lot of iterations but it emphasises the point that there’s no such thing as an overnight success.

A lot of people say to me, is Rodial a new brand, I just heard about it – this is a good and a bad thing. Bad because what have we been doing for the last 25 years for people not to know Rodial has been around for a while, but good because we have this new customer who is discovering us for the first time, which is super exciting.

Rodial stays ahead by looking at the various trends and getting inspiration but at the end of the day, we focus on our core and what people know us for. Everything we do we think of our customer, if there is a gap within our range. We never launch something that we feel is unnecessary. We keep on trend but everything we do is a team effort. I don’t think I would have been here without my team who inspires me. We have great brainstorming sessions. I like to have a very young team to bring me new ideas and trust my team to collectively decide on where we take the brand next.

When I started Rodial, there was no social media. There were no influencers and the only way for us to get publicity was through celebrities. Very early on, we connected with a lot of agents and publishers and make-up artists, especially in Hollywood, sending them products and hoping their clients would use them and talk about them to the press. There was one year we did the Oscars After Party goodie bags with the Snake Serum, it was the year all the Jennifers were attending; Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, and on the back of that a lot of those celebrities gave interviews. Some of them obviously have deals with big companies but when they give an interview about beauty, they always pick one product that’s not within their contract and that year they all picked Snake Serum. So that was the first time we had big success with a celebrity and we continued sending products. Mario Dedivanovic the make-up artist used one of our products on Kylie Jenner before a photoshoot and she posted about it and it became a big thing – we were getting a lot of emails from people. This was when she was about 16, so a long time ago. My team said why don’t we do a campaign with Kylie Jenner – we thought they were not going to even answer our email, but we emailed that evening, thinking we are never going to hear back. The next morning, we have an email from Kris Jenner saying yeah, let’s talk. So go big, have a vision and you never know how things can turn out. On the back of that, we did a couple of campaigns with Kylie Jenner, one in London and then we went to LA for the second one and then about a month later she launched her own Lip Kit and range so she’s been off the market since. Kim Kardashian did some work for us too on skincare products but I think the days of working with celebrities are probably behind us because most of them have their own brands now, but we still send products to publicists and make-up artists but our expectations aren’t what they used to be.

My first book came about because I was getting a lot of messages on Instagram from young people who wanted to start their own businesses, asking for advice. I was getting so many business questions that it was impossible to answer them on DMs or comments, but there’s a lot that I have to say to help young people who are on the journey of starting their own businesses. I’m very honest about some of the mistakes and some of the failures I’ve made and I feel my books are very real because you see exactly what’s been going on. Business owners were saying to me at the start, “it just takes a lot of passion and hard work and that’s it,” but there’s a lot more than that. There’s a lot of frustration and there’s a lot of days that you’re like, why am I going doing this, shall I quit or days that you don’t feel you want to do this anymore, but you have to figure out how to keep on going and be motivated. It’s not easy.

Say yes to opportunities and figure it out later. In the summer of 2022 I got a call, one of my friends used to run the Simon Cowell empire in the UK and that he moved to Greece to work for a TV channel where he was the CEO and he called me and said, “Maria we’re doing Dragon’s Den Greece for a season, would you like to be a dragon?” If it had been the UK calling me I would have said yes because it’s where I’m based, my business is there, my family, it’s my adopted country now. So I said no, because deep down I am a person of comfort and this sounded like a lot of inconvenience and very little benefit, so I said no at the beginning and then I went back home and had a chat with my husband who always says yes to every opportunity. He said, go and do it, I’ll take care of our home, and I spoke to my team and they said we’ll take care of work, go and do it. So I was flying every Monday for five weeks, filming Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and then flying back on Friday to be in London for the weekend. It was one of the best experiences I’ve had. I’ve met amazing people, I got inspired by a lot of new businesses that I saw on the show and it gave me a new level of energy that I didn’t have before. That told me to say yes to more things. So if you’re invited to do a project and you feel it’s an inconvenience, you don’t know who you’re gonna meet, what you’re gonna learn, you’re not going to gain anything from sitting on your sofa or from being at a desk all day, you’re gonna gain things by putting yourself out there, meeting people, saying yes to opportunities, going to industry events, connecting and networking. Say yes to opportunities in the moment and figure it out later.

My ultimate piece of advice for someone who wants to start out is a quote from the Dalai Lama, “the journey of 1000 steps begins with a single step.” So you just need to take the first step. Anything you want to achieve in life, whether that’s business, a project, in your career, it’s sending that email, making that phone call, filming that first video that’s going to be awkward, giving that first speech that’s going to be awkward and you’re gonna regret it later. But, you know, unless you do your first, you’re never going to do your one hundredth. Everything you want to do in life, you have to make that start. My motto in life right now is make it happen.

I get asked a lot so what’s what’s the next big thing for Rodial. This year, it’s all about celebrating 25 years of Rodial, being relevant, coming up with revolutionary products and bestsellers, celebrating that and sometimes in life it’s not about the next thing, it’s about taking a step back and celebrating what we have. I’m very proud of what we have achieved and I want to take this year to celebrate it. I have written three books. I said I’m not going to write a fourth one and now I’m writing the fourth one. I’m combining my working life and my business, having my creative projects on the side that give me joy and then being able to spend time with family and friends and have some fun moments.

If I want to feel more confident, I dress better and I do my make-up. Most days when I go to the office, I have my hair back, I do skincare, SPF, Banana Low Lighter, not proper make-up. On the days that I really want to feel confident I will wear something that I feel more sexy in, I’ll wear a heel, take more time on make-up and immediately feel more confident. There are days that they’re more utility days so I’ll wear oversized trousers and sneakers and that’s my day at the office or days like today where I need a bit more confidence to be out there, I take it up a notch.

You don’t decide on your future, you decide on your habits and your habits decide your future. If you want to achieve something, just sit down and put together what habits you need to implement to get you to your goal and discipline and consistency with those habits will get you what you need.