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INSIDE OUT APPROACH Norwegian born skin specialist and founder of the Scandi inspired HUD reveals her new venture – Profit + Purpose designed for business owners keen to focus on purpose driven business leadership. By Anita Quade. My love for skincare started when… “My life changed overnight during a trip to Daydream Island with my then boyfriend (now Mr HÜD!), around 22 years ago. We spent the day sailing in the Whitsundays and when we arrived back at the hotel, I went to get ready for dinner and saw (in horror) that my face was completely covered in pigment! I had developed intense deep brown blotches covering pretty much most of my face. I had no idea what had happened so I went to the nurse on the island who told me due to my pill (which I was on to control my inflamed acne) I had developed melasma. Ever since this one day in paradise, I became SO obsessed with finding a solution.” I’m entering my 15th year of treating skin and the biggest lesson I have learnt is… “That treating skin is an inside out approach. We used to see the skin as one dimensional, only treating what we saw on the surface, but now as a result, we see that solutions are often worse than the problem! Inflammaging is a word I always come back to, and in the days of getting my own skin treated for acne and melasma, it was the perfect case study in how that comes about. Constant removal of my epidermis with Jessners, TCA’s and Salicylics along with glycolic products at home, meant my skin aged about 10 years in a short year. We now know that reducing cortisol (the reason I opened a clinic that looks and feels relaxed 8 years ago when it wasn’t a thing) is paramount to treatment success. And of course, you can’t treat any inflammatory disorders without treating the gut.”
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One of the things I wish I had have known when starting out was… “Is not to scale too quickly. I was fortunate enough that I was really clear on my “why”, which meant when everyone around me told me to take a different route, I could stay focused and pace my own way and be an innovator. As we became busy quite quickly, I decided to build another four rooms - we initially had three and all of a sudden, we had 7! That meant we had the capacity to more than double our clients and revenue so I expanded the team very quickly. Along with that came toxic culture, unclear expectations, messy systems and what I see now as a huge amount of learning opportunities from growing pains. Then of course it was a huge number of sleepless nights, panic attacks, feelings of failure and actual failures. But reflection is a wonderful thing. And all those challenges led me to where I am today!” The biggest change in the skincare industry over the years has been… “Specialisation. When I started out it was just a given that you’d do a bit of everything. Now, finding your niche is a must. I think it’s an important shift - but I also think a lot of business owners have jumped a bit too quickly. There’s almost a stigma if you specialise in something other than skin. As I see it, it comes down to really defining your “why”. For me it was a
no brainer - my years of suffering with my own skin was a constant driver for me when it came to making decisions to specialise in skin. But purpose comes in all different shapes and sizes, and if your only reason for specialising in skin is to make more money, then it will likely fail.” My biggest achievement to date … “Had you asked me a couple of years ago, when the world was different, I might have said winning one of our many awards…. But life feels different now post COVID, and my focuses have shifted too. I have so many achievements I’m proud of but in this moment, I am the proudest of the way we as a team and business stayed true to our ‘people first’ culture during a full year of lockdowns and challenges that have come during the past two years in Victoria. We kept the entire team on and working throughout and made sure that we had daily huddles via zoom and did fun things together! We also had a full team turnover post the lockdowns as our people had settled into their home towns with their families either overseas or interstate. One year of lockdowns is a looooong time! But with that came an amazing opportunity to find some
