05.09.2018
Episode 58: Laura Gerchik, General Manager at Biologique Recherche
Summary
Laura Gerchik, General Manager of Biologique Recherche, explains why the company doesn’t jump on every new marketing trend or churn out an endless parade of new products. Steady in their approach, confident in their product, she thinks, “What we need to think about is that consumers are so much more educated today.” The same could be said about her life—she came to the studio with notes on hand. So consider this episode an argument for knowing when you’ve got a good thing going—and when to just stick with it.
Transcript
| Announcer | Welcome to Where Brains Meet Beauty, hosted by Jodi Katz, founder and creative director of Base Beauty Creative Agency. |
| Jodi Katz | Hey everyone, it's Jodi Katz, your host of Where Brains Meet Beauty Podcast. Thanks for tuning into this episode, it features Laura Gerchik, she's the general manager of Biologique Recherche, and I'm probably really mispronouncing it, so apologies to all my French-speaking friends. But if you want to hear it pronounced the right way, please tune in to the episode, Laura does a much better job than I do. If you missed last week's episode, please tune in, it's with Stacey Levine, she's the co-founder of Glow Science. Hey everybody, welcome back to Where Brains Meet Beauty. Today we are joined by Laura Gerchik, and I'm going to butcher the name of the company you work with, so I'm gonna let you say it first. |
| Laura Gerchik | Okay, it's called Biologique Recherche. |
| Jodi Katz | Biologique Recherche. |
| Laura Gerchik | Yes, perfect. |
| Jodi Katz | If I said that in France, in a pharmacy in France, people would know what I'm talking about? |
| Laura Gerchik | If you said it in France, you would say Biologique Recherche. |
| Jodi Katz | And give it to me, the USA version. |
| Laura Gerchik | Biologique Recherche. |
| Jodi Katz | Biologique Recherche. Welcome to Where Brains Meet Beauty. |
| Laura Gerchik | Thank you, thank you Jodi, thanks for having me. |
| Jodi Katz | It's cool for you to be here. I just want to let everyone know how we met, and we met through my business coach Alan who you met, I think he did a workshop at your office, is that right? |
| Laura Gerchik | Yeah, we actually did a team retreat with Alan, he's fantastic, he was recommended by a friend of ours, and he's just a great coach. |
| Jodi Katz | Yeah, I get hours and hours of amazing things out of Alan every time we talk, so he's a huge value for me. And he actually was so excited after he met you the first time, he's like, "Jodi, I just met this wonderful woman in beauty, you need to know her," he was like a kid in a candy store, so excited to connect us together. |
| Laura Gerchik | I love that, he's just so enthusiastic, he's so amazing, and I was really thrilled when he introduced us as well. When I got the call I was like, "Alan is the best." |
| Jodi Katz | This is not a paid commercial by Alan, it's just Alan is Alan. We're sitting down together in a recording studio, and Laura brings her notes in, and I want to mention it because it's really well organized. I gave her the questions ahead of time, which I do for most guests, and she wrote in her thoughts, and I'm impressed by that skill of preparing. What does preparation mean to you, is it something that's always part of your life? |
| Laura Gerchik | I think it depends, I think right before we just got into it, I mentioned that I usually feel like I do better when I don't necessarily prepare everything, but I think it's important to think of the things that you want to get across, especially when you're limited in time. |
| Jodi Katz | I was always that 20-something who was going on a job interview, and I wasn't prepared, and it took me a really long time to realize, "Duh Jodi, you're not gonna get the job if you're not doing your research, or you're not walking in the door with a point of view." Now I prepare, but it took me a long time to get there. |
| Laura Gerchik | I understand, I actually really did always prepare for that, and I think now being in management I realize how important it is, because we're interviewing people. You can tell the difference between someone who is completely prepared, and someone who is just winging it. |
| Jodi Katz | Yeah, I was definitely in my 20s a winging it kind of gal, and then something started to shift. I think when, after I had kids, I just wanted to be less chaotic, so I would take the train into the city, the train before the train I needed to take to get somewhere on time, because I spent all my 20s rushing around and being late, and I just didn't like that anymore, it didn't feel good. |
| Laura Gerchik | I completely agree, even me, I just wanted to make sure to be here on time, I think you actually get a lot out of it when you're on time, you can free your mind, think about something else, and you're not just rushing into things. You really take a beat to mentally prepare in a certain way before getting anywhere. |
| Jodi Katz | Yes, the whole mindset shift that happens when you're not frantic running late, and I actually was, not late for something this weekend, but I felt like I didn't have as much time to chill before an event than I wanted to. And I hated that feeling of driving and being like, "Oh I'm only gonna have 20 minutes," and I really need 30 or 40 or whatever. It reminds me that I need to just set the alarm a little earlier, right? |
| Laura Gerchik | Oh, yeah. |
| Jodi Katz | Get my butt out of bed a little earlier. Let's talk about something really simple first, how will you be spending your day today? |
| Laura Gerchik | My office is just a couple blocks away, and when I get there I will be checking in on a training that we have going on, we're really big on education, so we utilize our space to do trainings. And probably like everyone else who sits in this Where Brains Meets Beauty chair, our days are just chaotic right now, it's very hectic. So I just signed the lease for a new office space in our building, that means a lot of back and forth with the building architects, and our architects, it takes a village. We have an upcoming training for our US clients, so that's coming up, that's planning for a 170 person event. And also we're doing a lot of digitalization right now, so I'm bringing in QuickBooks and that takes a whole team work to make sure that we're rolling it out well, and Salesforce as a CRM tool. That's probably a peak into at least a little part of my day. |
| Jodi Katz | As general manager, you're basically like president of the office in the US, is that the equivalent? |
| Laura Gerchik | I run all the US operations, we have some marketing functions here to support the distribution activity, we have a PR firm, so it's a lot of coordinating, it's a lot of helping other people to do their jobs as well, our account executives, things like that. |
| Jodi Katz | I didn't know your brand until I met you, and now that I know of it, now I see it everywhere. Why is that, is it like a secret in the industry? Why haven't I heard of it before? |
| Laura Gerchik | It's funny, I get that all the time, "We never heard of you, and as soon as we found out about you, we see you all over." It was a very niche brand, and very word-of-mouth, so everyone, there was such a huge loyal following for Biologique Recherche, and I think in recent years we've developed and we've grown the company and the business so beautifully, in the US and of course internationally, because the brand is now in 77 different countries. I feel that people are really realizing that the cat's out of the bag, and that this well kept beauty secret is everywhere, and it's huge. I think the other wonderful thing about that is realizing we're a 40 year old company, that is almost in this startup mode, and that we've been around for a very long time, but we're just beginning to be discovered. |
| Jodi Katz | Is there a founder? |
| Laura Gerchik | Yes, there were two founders actually. The brand was founded by Dr. Yvan Allouche, and he was a medical doctor and biochemist. And by his wife, Josette Allouche, and she was a physiotherapist. So the brand has a very high tech and high touch approach to skin care, a very hyper-personalized approach, and of course very results driven, we're really obsessed with results. What's interesting is, when you think about it 40 years ago, the landscape of beauty was just so different in skin care, and they developed a brand that had no artificial fragrances, which was crazy at the time, that was incredibly concentrated in active ingredients, so we start at 20% concentration, so we go up to over 80% in some of our professional care lines. And that had biological, marine, botanical, and also that's a professional skin care line. This is a line that's an aesthetic brand, so it's really prescription-only, by the aestheticians that work with the line. So there's a whole knowledge-based and educational portion that comes in. They also had something that was I think very unique, which was not to categorize skin, so we don't conceive skin in the sense of oily or dry. What we believe is that the skin is ever evolving, the epidermal cycle is 24 days, it's gonna regenerate itself 1,000 times in its lifetime. And in that evolution, you have to really take a snapshot of skin, so we refer to that as the Skin Instant. |
| Jodi Katz | The skin what? |
| Laura Gerchik | The Skin Instant, the instant is like a snapshot or a photography of your skin in that moment. So when you're looking at the skin, you're really recommending something that's going to evolve, and we're gonna accompany someone in a very dynamic way over their lifetime, and tweak and adjust their regiment. |
| Jodi Katz | I heard you on the phone before, and you were speaking French like a French person, are you French? |
| Laura Gerchik | I am very bi-cultural, entirely bi-cultural. I was born and raised in New York, I went to school at the Lycee Francais, I was raised in a French household, so I went to French school. I lived in France afterwards, both as a student when I was studying abroad in Paris, and later in my adult life when I was working there, right before moving back to New York. |
| Jodi Katz | Right now I'm watching you talk, and listening to you talk, and you're like an actor, you're super American-New Yorker right now, but then you can just turn on- |
| Laura Gerchik | The super French, yeah, absolutely. I really think it's the best of both worlds. |
| Jodi Katz | In your household growing up, would you be speaking French at home? |
| Laura Gerchik | Yes, absolutely. My mom was raised in France, and so she spoke to me in French, and it was important that I be able to correspond with my family, my grandparents and cousins and so forth. I think it really gave me a leg up in life, I think it was a great skill to have. |
| Jodi Katz | The school you went to, I lived on the Upper East Side a few years ago, so we were right near that school. But I think it looks different now, than it used to, it had a whole makeover. |
| Laura Gerchik | Yeah. When I was growing up, it's an amazing school, and it was a beautiful school, literally in terms of New York real estate, because we had these gorgeous townhouses, and these grand halls that were our school. And there were four buildings in Manhattan on 72nd, 73rd, 95th, and 93rd, so all throughout the Upper East Side, and then they opted to move to a building on York and 75th that they built, that I'm assuming was probably more adapted to their needs, and more suited to their needs. |
| Jodi Katz | You had the storybook version of that school. |
| Laura Gerchik | Yes, I did, I had the old school diehard storybook version of that school. |
| Jodi Katz | Would you guys go from the 70s to the 90s for different classes? |
| Laura Gerchik | No, you would actually, it was depending on what grade you were in. So 72nd was kindergarten through I think 6th grade, and then you had a couple of years at 73rd, which I never went to because they bought that school actually after, so I only had 72nd, 95th, 93rd. |
| Jodi Katz | That's cool, so New York. |
| Laura Gerchik | Yeah, very, quintessentially. |
| Jodi Katz | I just had a bus to take me to high school. |
| Laura Gerchik | We didn't have that, it was public transportation. |
| Jodi Katz | Or your feet. Okay, what does Biologique Recherche ... |
| Laura Gerchik | Recherche. |
| Jodi Katz | What does that mean? |
| Laura Gerchik | The literal version of Biologique Recherche is biological research, and it came from Josette, I believe who named it, and she was inspired by the fact that Yvan always tried to relate the different elements of nature to the different functioning of the skin. He was very inspired by that. I also think the second thing that is important to note, is the word research in biological research, because we are a tremendously R&D driven company. We believe, we actually invest most of our funds into research and development, way more than marketing, and think that it's really part of insuring the longevity of the brand, and really anchoring the brand in the long term. We work with doctors and pharmacists, to PhDs and engineers and all of those types of profiles in France to formulate the products. And we formulate them in our own laboratory, which I think is important to note, many brands don't. And we're the last research laboratory in [inaudible 00:12:44], which is where our lab is, it's right outside of Paris, and the last industrial site. |
| Jodi Katz | Wow. Let's talk about you, now that I'm updated about the brand. How did you get started in beauty? |
| Laura Gerchik | I got started in beauty fortuitously, I before this had two different careers, my first in New York was to work for the French government in economic development work for indirect investments. Then I moved to Paris to pursue a career in commercial real estate, so I was working for Cushman & Wakefield for several years before. And I was living in France, I traveled to New York to visit my mom, and at the time my mom had a project to potentially open a spa, a Biologique Recherche called Embassy of Beauty, owned by [inaudible 00:13:35], which is our flagship. It was on 57th Street, across the street from where I grew up. And the partners were here, Dr. Allouche was here, and we visited the space, and I'm in real estate so here I am asking a ton of questions. When we got out of there, Dr. Allouche maybe a little jokingly [inaudible 00:13:53] said, "You should come work for us." And I was so happy in France, so I wasn't ready, I was like, "Thank you, no thank you." And then fast forward many, many years later, and I'm living in Paris, and I'm very close to the founders of the company, at least Josette, because unfortunately Yvan Allouche died over a decade ago, and she came to me and said that they were looking for someone to run the US, the US general manager, and wanted me to interview for the position. I thought about it, and I was at the height of my real estate career, quite frankly I was I think almost six or seven years into my real estate career in France, it was a very male dominated industry, so it was needless to say hard to pierce through, and it gave me food for thought. I thought about it, and I had the interviews with the owners of the company, so it was Dr. Allouche and it was Rupert Schmid, and [inaudible 00:14:53], we very much consider it's a second generation family business, and they offered me the position. I thought it would be a great challenge, so I thought to myself this is an opportunity to run a team, to acquire different skills than the one I had, and also to contribute whatever I had already acquired in my career to the position. I come from an entrepreneurial background, because my mother always had her own successful businesses in fashion in New York, so I was ready for the challenge. |
| Jodi Katz | Your mom was having a meeting, this was years ago, you just happened to be in town, is she in the beauty business at this point? Why was she having this meeting? |
| Laura Gerchik | She was in the fashion industry, which is a tangent of beauty, and she was very close with the Allouche family, that's how I initially knew them. I think that they were just discussing this as a potential project, there was a lot of possibility, and that's where I happened to come in. |
| Jodi Katz | So she's a visionary friend of theirs going for a meeting, and you just happened to be there. |
| Laura Gerchik | Exactly. |
| Jodi Katz | That's really cool, talk about right place, right time, even though you weren't ready. |
| Laura Gerchik | I wasn't, no. The time came way later, I'm talking years later. |
| Jodi Katz | Why didn't you think to enter the fashion business, considering you saw it through the eyes of your mother? |
| Laura Gerchik | My mother exited fashion, she sold her business a couple years ago, about the time where I was moving to France. I think it was also basically a bit of a shocking time, when you think back, it was right before Lehman Brothers, I had just started working in real estate, fashion was not doing very well. Brick and mortar still unfortunately today is having another dip, and there were just so many brands that were out at the time, the Zaras and the mass-market fashion brands that were just eating away at luxury. My mother was in luxury fashion, she had worked with Armani, Versace, so really visionary people at their time. I think maybe that also had something to do with it, the designers were just so unique back in the day, and I grew up in that generation, and I think that maybe at least for the last couple of years, there haven't been as many wow factors, especially like a Gianni Versace. I wanted to do my own thing, walk on my own two feet, and I never excluded fashion, but I definitely feel now that beauty is just so tangent to fashion, and it really feels like home to me. |
| Jodi Katz | What was the name of her store? |
| Laura Gerchik | She had multiple stores throughout her career, she had this huge stunning showroom, very industrial showroom in the Garment District on 37th Street, it was called [Agem 00:17:32], and she had all of New York's big celebrities that would come in, it was a really cool time. I remember Rachel Hunter and Rod Stewart came in when they were married, I remember trying to find Rachel Hunter some shoes, it was really cool times. And then she had a store on the Upper East Side on 72nd, between Lexington and 72nd basically, and those were her two stores. |
| Jodi Katz | That's cool. You find this opportunity, you think okay, I'll run this business, but you've never run ... I guess being a commercial real estate person, you're your own business person, you'd say it's pretty entrepreneurial? |
| Laura Gerchik | I think I had grown up already basically helping my mom, working with my mom from a very young age. I graduated college early, and when I did my mother had asked me to run her business for a while, so I had experience with that. And also when she sold her store, right before I moved to France, it was a difficult time, my grandmother had just passed away and we had a deadline to give the keys back, so I had to run her business while also working in my old company for a little while. So I think it was always inherent to me, and I'm a people person, business development, sales, all of those related industries and fields had always just come naturally to me. |
| Jodi Katz | It's so interesting to me, because you willfully took this role on where there's so many hats to wear, I'm thinking about how I'm an entrepreneur, I started my own business to not do all the things you just listed. I was so, had blinders on, I'm just gonna make great creative for brands, I'm just gonna do cool things. And all these other things that you mentioned, I had really not even considered. You did this willingly, which I find very fascinating. |
| Laura Gerchik | Maybe age has something to do with it, you never know. I was 30 I think when I came back to New York, it was about five years ago, and I think maybe that had something to do with it. The desire to do great things, and make an impact, and contribute. |
| Jodi Katz | That's so cool. So you are walking into around where you know how to do some things, but you definitely don't know how to do others. What do you think has been the biggest lesson in the past few years of running this business? |
| Laura Gerchik | Can I only pick one? |
| Jodi Katz | No, you can pick as many as you want, we have all the time in the world. |
| Laura Gerchik | I think that the experience in and of itself has been a lesson, recruiting, meeting people, building a team that has coherence and that get things done, also choosing what kind of style manager you want to be. I think I shared this when we were having our call before our podcast, but I unfortunately did not have good managers, there's a lot of people who find inspiration for mentors, and that was not the case. For me, my management style was most certainly to just take what I had and do something completely different, to do something that also was representative of what I wanted to leave behind. I think that those are all some of the takeaways, then you also learn that you're a facilitator to other people, you learn that you have to be, you can't just sit in a corner and decide, "I'm gonna do this today, because someone else is gonna come knocking on my ..." I actually have no door, because we're an open space, but someone's gonna come standing at my desk, and they need me to be able to do their job. So if I want things to go well, I also need to share my time that way. Those are just some, but I probably could keep going and going. |
| Jodi Katz | This skin care market now I feel like is so cluttered, sometimes I say, and I mean it, I half mean it and I half joke, that I want to vomit because there's so much "New, new, new." Why can't I just love what I have? Is this new thing really that different? I feel it more in skin care with color, yes, there's tons of new, but color trends change, textures change. The idea of artistry just feels different, of course you want another paintbrush and you want another tube of paint, that's the way it is for color. But with skin care, am I evolving so much that I have to try something new every three months or six months? How do you approach this chaotic frenetic new, new, new part of the industry? |
| Laura Gerchik | You're kind of obliged to in some way, but I also try to put blinders on and not pay attention to what anyone else is doing in the industry. Because if you do, I feel that you're wasting your time trying to emulate someone else's model, which we never do. Frankly, it's not just me, as a company we have a vision and I think that's the important thing, is there's vision, there's strategy, you have to set a strategy, you have to stick to it. As an example, we're a 40 year old company, even our second generation partners, owners, what they've done is to maintain the idea and the ethic of the founders. And we've just continued that vision, basically. It's really just an extension of the origin of the brand, and that's what makes us strong. I think that is our strength, is to say we're a professional line, it may be tempting to go into eCommerce and mass market and retail sales, because they're astronomical compared to a professional line, but that's not what we're doing. We're offering tools to professionals to be able to really give the best quality of advice and the best quality of accompaniment to the clients that we see every day. And that's what we do, and that's what we're good at, and there's no reason to try to do anything else. There's a lot of clutter, you're right, but I think that what we need to think about is that consumers are just so much more educated nowadays. I'm recent to Instagram, I was not on Instagram for a long time, and I'm realizing that there's such a strong community out there of people who are hungry and thirsty for knowledge, and just more refined into understanding. So when I explain something to them, for example try to use an all Biologique Recherche regiment, give it a shot for a couple months, it's so hard talking about how people have all these products. But they'll understand that we're designing an ecosystem for skin care, and that we know how everything is going to interact with each other, so we can control that environment and make the necessary changes. |
| Jodi Katz | That's cool. So what advice would you give someone who said, "I'm gonna develop a skin care brand, I'm gonna just launch something new"? |
| Laura Gerchik | For sure to have a true vision, to have a strategy, and to just not digress off of the path that you've focused on, and to be sure of yourself. You got into the business, or you're thinking of getting into the business because you have a vision, and people have, I always joke that you have as many opinions as people you ask, so just don't ask and do your own thing. |
| Jodi Katz | Right. A lot of entrepreneurs early in their cycle of developing their brand reach out to us, usually just to chit-chat, and I really do sort of poo-poo the process of starting a skin care brand these days, if you don't have access to resources, when I say resources I mean money, if you're not really developing something we've never seen before, I don't recommend taking this bucket of money that you've saved up or a family member gave you or whatever, and investing it in this. Which I think is a weird thing for an entrepreneur to say to another entrepreneur, like don't do it, but how can you possibly win if you don't have something that's not really differentiating? |
| Laura Gerchik | I couldn't agree more, honestly I think you said it right, I think you have to have something that's very unique, a unique concept, and I don't think that there's no room for it. I think what's interesting is technology is changing, and I see even for us when we're formulating, there are different ingredients that allow us to do things today that we weren't able to do before, formulations that we weren't able to do. Everything, as an industry we're getting more refined, which means that there's a lot, but also there are doors and options that open. That being said, I think people always look at the cash-out, all these companies being bought out, and that's just what is happening in the industry. We're one of the few privately owned companies, we don't report to shareholders, I think that gives us such a level of flexibility and allows us to do things the way we want to, and the right way. But I think that you have to look past that cash-out and realize that there's a lot of sweat equity that goes into starting any kind of company, but definitely a skin care company. |
| Jodi Katz | I do think that people new to the industry who are looking to start a business, they're in it just because they think it's a quick cash, and it's so far from it, so far. |
| Laura Gerchik | Absolutely, so far. |
| Jodi Katz | Let me just ask a question about the customer who's going into a spa that she trusts, is she asking for your brand to the aesthetician? Or is it just something that they're using, then are they selling her the product to take home? |
| Laura Gerchik | Absolutely. I think it's a bit of both, I think obviously like I said the cat's out of the bag, and the brand has a lot more visibility than it did a few years ago, at least definitely so since I've come on board. So people are definitely asking for it, and that's one of the reasons that we're growing as well as that, people are going back to wherever they live in the US and going to their local spa and saying, "I had this amazing facial in New York," or in Paris, or wherever they had it, and asking for the brand. That's wonderful. But I also think that part of it is the educational role of not just the aesthetician, definitely the aesthetician, but also about all the people who support. So all the front desk staff who we educate about product knowledge, anybody who's on the "sale's floor" we really go to great lengths to ensure that the methodology is well represented. I think at the end of the day, we're a craft brand, and you can have the most wonderful product, and we do of course, but at the end of the day if your aestheticians aren't well trained, and the quality of the regiment that they recommend to you isn't spot on, the quality of the treatment isn't spot on, then you're gonna have a bad service. We take great pride, and we go through great extents and great lengths to be able to ensure the quality throughout the world, my job is only throughout the US, so I hope that's already a part of it, but definitely throughout the US. |
| Jodi Katz | Let's switch gears before we close, let's talk about what do you do when you're not working, because I can imagine running the business, your brain is always on, how do you spend your time outside of the office? |
| Laura Gerchik | A big blank, sorry. The last, I've been here for five years, so about five years, it's really been a lot about work. I took this on as my baby, and it makes me proud every day to know how much it's grown, so I think now it's really about finding the work/life balance, and taking care a bit also of myself. I'm not the same either I was when I started working, so I've started to go to the gym, I got a trainer, I definitely am trying to enjoy more of what New York has to offer because I travel a little less as well, and there's always a trade-off. Trying to go to museums and opera and all those things that I love, I've also tried to start reading a little more, which is something I definitely didn't have time for before. |
| Jodi Katz | Can I tell you my approach to life/work balance? |
| Laura Gerchik | Please do. |
| Jodi Katz | I put the word life before the word work, I don't know if you noticed that. |
| Laura Gerchik | I did. |
| Jodi Katz | I have this system of what I call buckets, and I visualize them, so I have a work bucket, a kids' bucket, a husband bucket, a Trader Joe's bucket, because I'll tell you why, a sleep bucket, sleep is super important to me, a friend's bucket, and a Bravo Real Housewives bucket. What it does for me, is it helps me visualize where I want to bring my attention to, so if I have a day where I'm like, meh kind of day, or a really hard week, and I'm experiencing a feeling but I just can't really figure out what that feeling is, I can think about what bucket needs to be filled up, which tank is low. Sometimes it might be just the joy I get out of doing the mundane, like going to Trader Joe's, just making sure that I have a Thursday afternoon, where I'm not in the city, I'm working from home, I go and I do an errand. The mundane is so joyful for me now that I've realized that I need it, I really enjoy it. Or with the kids, the kid's bucket is not me feeding them or making sure they brush their teeth, I do that of course, it's really about spontaneous fun. If I'm feeling eh, maybe I need to do something fun and weird with them. So I encourage my team to think about their buckets, what's important to them. And when I need to be alone and I need quiet time, that's my Real Housewives time, this is sacred, this is my moment to escape. Anyway, I would encourage you to figure out- |
| Laura Gerchik | My buckets. |
| Jodi Katz | Yeah, and they change, and that's okay too. Right now, Bravo Real Housewives is really important to me, maybe in a year, god forbid, maybe in a year they won't be important to me anymore. But right now, that's what I need, I'm filling all these buckets every day, it's not like I'm crazy. |
| Laura Gerchik | No, it's when it comes up. |
| Jodi Katz | Yeah, when I've had this feeling, something's missing or something's lacking. |
| Laura Gerchik | I think I'll give it a shot. I think for me, I traveled tremendously, almost a weekly basis, it's hard to have any kind of routine when that's the case, but it's what needed to be done, and I definitely don't have any regrets. And I'm continuing to travel, I have a business trip this weekend to go see the Four Season's Spa directors, and I look forward to them, because I think as you continue in the industry also, the people that you meet become friends, and so there's a part of fun in it as well. |
| Jodi Katz | When you go visit these spas, are you ever getting treatments? |
| Laura Gerchik | No, that is the funniest thing, when I tell people what I do, they just have a vision of me on a treatment table at a spa every week, do as I say, not as I do. |
| Jodi Katz | Could you? |
| Laura Gerchik | I don't think I'd have the time for it, if I wanted to get treatments, I have this amazing network of partners who are all so generous, who all honestly beg me to come in and have treatments. And they do, they give me treatments occasionally, and so I'm really blessed, I just don't have that much time. |
| Jodi Katz | So if I had your job, that would be one of my buckets, I'd be like- |
| Laura Gerchik | Spa bucket. |
| Jodi Katz | Yeah, even if it's a 15 minute hand massage, whatever, anything. Thank you so much for joining us today, this is so interesting to get to know you and learn more about your brand. Your wisdom, especially. |
| Laura Gerchik | Thank you so much, thanks for calling it wisdom. Thank you for having me Jodi, I really appreciate being here. |
| Jodi Katz | And for listeners, please subscribe to our series on iTunes, and for updates about the show, please follow us on Instagram @WhereBrainsMeetBeautyPodcast. |
| Announcer | Thanks for listening to Where Brains Meet Beauty with Jodi Katz. Tune in again for more authentic conversations with beauty leaders. |
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