Ep. 188 - Lori Bush, Former Rodan + Fields CEO and Solvasa co-founder on the Beauty of Marketing Disruption

Lori Bush is the co-founder and executive chairman of Solvasa. Prior to that, she was the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields, where she grew the company to over $1 billion in sales. She's had experience with Nu Skin, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena and Avon. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Lori about her 30 years of experience in the beauty and skincare space, entrepreneurship and her move towards integrated beauty.

Interview Transcript. To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io 

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lori Bush. Lori is the co-founder and executive chairman at Solvasa. Prior to that, she was the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields, where she grew the company to over $1 billion in sales. She's had experience with Nu Skin, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena and Avon, and we talk about her 30 years of experience in the beauty and skincare space, entrepreneurship and the move towards integrated beauty, pulling together beauty, mindfulness, and wellness. Let's get started.  Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is Lori Bush. Lori is the co-founder and executive chairman of Solvasa, an integrative beauty line, which really pulls together beauty, mind, and wellness. Lori, welcome to the show. 

Lori Bush: Thank you, Brian. Humbled, honored to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because while I gave your current title, I'm very impressed with your background. Thirty plus years in the beauty space, and you have quite an impressive resume. Folks who are not as familiar with you. You were the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields. You grew that company to over $1 billion in sales. You were the President of Nu Skin. You have worked at Johnson & Johnson and Neutrogena, and you're chair of the board at Avon.  You pretty much got it all covered. Startups, corporates, innovators. So I thought I'd start with the fact that you've had a career spanning a number of different years in an industry that's changed. What has happened over the last decade or so that's really changed the beauty industry and what are the things that are most impressive.

Lori Bush: A great question because when we were launching Rodan + Fields March 1, 2008, I was standing on a stage in front of about a hundred people, which reflecting on that is funny, because today Rodan + Fields fills stadiums basically with people for meetings and events. So at this point, I stood in front of the stage and I boldly proclaimed that five years from now, both beauty skincare and direct selling, we're going to look different than they look today, and the people in this room have an opportunity to watch it happen, wonder what happened, or be part of it.  And as I was standing there saying it, what was going through my head is we had lofty goals, but we were a brand new startup effectively, doing a complete pivot from pulling out of department stores where the brand had actually been owned by Estee Lauder for a period of time and relaunching. And as I was standing on stage saying that my website was melting down, we were one of the first companies, in direct selling to really launch as a purely digital eCommerce transaction model, which we did for a number of reasons.  And what was really an unexpected outcome of the Rodan + Fields experience was it wasn't even just about taking significant market share, which we were able to do to become the leading. Independent skincare brand, and then ultimately the company became the number one skincare brand in North America. We actually, and significantly grew the skincare market in the United States. Materially grew the skincare market. And a lot of that had to do with bringing the right channel strategy and being innovative in that channel strategy to the product value proposition and marrying the two and aligning them appropriately, in ways that were leveraging a lot of other things that were happening in the ecosystem around us at the time. Not the least of which, of course was social media. 

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io