CEW: What’s been your career path in beauty?

Leslie Tessler: I’ve spent my entire professional life in beauty. I used to manage marketing for Kérastase; I launched Shu Uemura Art of Hair; I went to work for Dr Dennis Gross. Personally, my grandmother was a massive influence on my life. She always took care of her skin.  She passed away at 98 and had almost no wrinkles. I always found creative expression through makeup and saw it as something anyone could do to make themselves feel better.

CEW: What led to the burnout you experienced in 2010?

LT: I was unwell – physically, emotionally, mentally. I hadn’t had my cycle in over two years. I was so focused, driven, a true Type A. When it started to manifest physically, I realized, This is shampoo. It’s not worth my health. I had to remove myself from the business for at least six months. I landed on Argentina as the place to go. I had never been to South America and I didn’t know anyone there. But I listened to my gut. I learned Spanish and did Pilates, but you can’t do that indefinitely. I was introduced to the GM of Coty for Latin America, and they brought me on to manage fragrance for Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. My six months there turned into 11 years; an Argentinian husband and three children followed. It was a bigger life change than I had anticipated.

CEW: How did hanni come about?

LT: I was eyeing the body care category as both a consumer and with my beauty hat on.  I have dry, reactive, sensitive body skin. I had huge, barely used bottles of lotion on my counter. It always came down to time. I have three minutes for a shower, if that. That was the lens through which hanni was created. I wanted to make products that were better than the traditional offering, no lotions or creams, the most important thing being that this will make our customers’ lives easier. We launched in 2021 with Shave Pillow, a gel stick for dry shaving, meant for easy on-the-go rinse-free shaving. That set the bar for the types of products we were going to be developing. We were approached by Sephora the week we launched; they were just starting to double-down on body care and hanni offered a lot of newness people hadn’t seen before. We launched in half their doors, and now we are in all 600-plus doors. That set our business on a completely different trajectory. We had expected to grow slow and bootstrap and now we had to go out and raise institutional capital to be able to support the growth. Then we launched Water Balm, a spray that replaces lotion but feels like water on the skin. It dries down in 15 seconds. We fast-followed that with what is still our hero product, Splash Salve, an in-shower moisture treatment. We have 10 SKUs now, and a lot of our products selfishly have come from a personal pain point.

CEW: Who is on your team and what are all your roles?

LT:  It’s three of us full-time. Jennie Pan is co-founder and COO. She was employee number four at Birchbox where she set up all the operations. We launched during Covid, but she made it so that we didn’t have issues with our supply chain. She’s exactly what you want in a COO. Ann Kohatsu is Head of Product. She was my former boss at L’Oréal, and we’ve worked together off and on for 25 years. She has the contract manufacturing contacts and is fundamental in the development process.

CEW: Given the combined track record in beauty, was it easier for hanni to hit certain metrics?

LT: Our collective experience gave us an advantage in that we knew what we were doing. But also, 10 years is a long time to be out of beauty. When I left New York in 2010, digital marketing was just starting. Kérastase had just launched an e-commerce site. When I came back to the U.S., most of my friends in the beauty industry had left. The relationship with Sephora happened because a mom I had met on the playground in Buenos Aires had worked 20 years ago at Cost Plus World Market with the woman who was now head of skin care at Sephora. When I sent out the email announcing the launch of hanni, she forwarded it on. Amazon has been an interesting surprise to me. I came from luxury beauty, so if you’d asked me two years ago, ‘would you sell your product on Amazon?’ the answer would have been, ‘there’s no chance.’ But I’m a firm believer now that you have to be where the customer is. I don’t care where people are buying hanni – Sephora, Amazon, our own e-commerce site. On Amazon we were able to get the brand to over a million dollars in run rate in a few months with very little spend.

CEW: What are some of your more pressing concerns today about your business?

LT:  We’ve accomplished a lot, but post-burnout, I make sure that everyone on my team is taken care of. I’m still so hard on myself. From the outside, it looks amazing – and yes, it is, but I need to celebrate that a little more instead of focusing on what’s next. There are moments where I think, ‘is this ever going to work? Am I going to run out of money?’. It’s been frustrating for us because we see the reaction of customers, we see the repeat purchase rate, but we are still thinking, ‘how do we shout about this?’ It’s a difficult thing to do in this crowded space.

CEW: In terms of customer outreach, what has proven most effective?

LT: When I was with Kérastase, I spent a lot of time on the road, meeting with salon owners and talking about products. With hanni, I still like these roadshows. I recently spent a few weeks in East Texas visiting 20 Sephora doors. I try to hit at least one major market every six weeks. Most founders don’t take the time to go into the small towns that are outside L.A. and New York. The southeast is one of our best markets in and out of Sephora; Charleston, Savannah, Birmingham – they don’t get a lot of love. Going hyper-local and digging deep into these markets has been really effective for us. You go into a Sephora in Soho and say, ‘I’m a founder’ and they say, ‘cool, there are 10 more over there.’ Nobody cares. But hitting the ground and making those personal connections, that’s everything and we see the spikes. I’d much rather be with beauty advisors talking about hanni rather than writing marketing emails at my desk. That fills my cup.

CEW: What advice can you share about preventing the degree of exhaustion you experienced before?

LT: It’s all about managing life, and being really intentional about time. I schedule time for myself every day, whether it’s moving my body, or reading a book, ideally both. I turn off my phone on weekends. Everything can wait till Monday. It’s a challenge, because I have to fight against my nature to keep doing things. And I never miss Friday pizza night with the kids. I will take three red eyes if I have to, but I am always home with my family on Friday night.