25 Years Into Running Her Business, Renée Rouleau Has No Plans to Retire

All products featured on Allure are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

"What was your big break?" It's a question people often ask of celebrities, but at Allure, the beauty professionals and brand founders are the celebrities. In My Beauty Break, we'll dig into the behind-the-scenes details — the money, the aha! moments, and the mistakes — of the biggest brands in the industry. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Aesthetician and entrepreneur Renée Rouleau's eponymous skin-care company has a slogan: "Skin Care Personalized." (It's in fine print under her logo.)  If you go to the homepage of her company's website, you'll see this, along with the tagline "One size does not fit all" in bold letters. It's the philosophy she has built her line of 50 skin-care products around — and it's also how she might describe her journey to the upper echelons of success as a beauty founder. 

There is no one-size-fits-all secret to success in business, nor a handbook on how to get there or — sometimes even more challenging — how to stay there. But if there were, it would likely be what Rouleau calls the "hustler mentality": "I'm constantly moving and trying everything," she tells Allure. "It's work. It's the ones who actually roll up their sleeves and do the work, that's the hustler mentality; those are the ones that are going to be the most successful."

"One size does not fit all."

This August, Rouleau celebrates 25 years in business, still owning 100 percent of her Austin, Texas-based company. Along the way, she revolutionized the industry by discarding the tired "dry, normal, and oily" boxes in which we often label skin and created her nine types of skin in an effort to personalize skin care so treatments would be more effective.

She has also created a robust blog full of free advice, which she says is "probably the biggest key to my success," and stayed passionately true to her purpose. Rouleau tells Allure she says no to about 94 percent of opportunities thrown her way and famously asks herself 13 questions before saying yes to anything – all of which she can recite from rote memorization. 

"I'm super strategic," she says. "I really want to make sure it serves me and my happiness, and I never want to sell my soul for the almighty dollar. I'm very clear about my path and where I'm headed and what's important to me. I'm always aligning with my core values."

A quarter-century in, "I really love what I do and I think I love what I do now more than ever," she says. Read on for Rouleau's masterclass in business and beauty and learn how servant leadership – and Madonna? – inspire her toward success.

Source: Read Full Article