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Beauty Store Business: Please tell us about your background in the beauty industry. GILLETTE PARODI: I've been in the beauty industry forever. It's the only industry I've ever worked in. I was born and raised in North Dakota. I saved my allowance to buy Vogue magazines when I was five, living in a farming community. I loved looking at the hair and makeup. I got into the beauty industry when I was 15 years old by chance. One of my friends at school had a family that owned a distributorship, and they had a hair show happening in Bismarck. I got to be a hair model for that. My mom said before I left the house, "Don't you dare let them color your hair!" and I came back with plum-colored hair—it was the '80s. My mom said, "That better not be permanent!" And, of course, it was. That's really where I got the bug for the professional-salon industry. I started out as a hairdresser and went to beauty school, paying for my 54 January 2014 | beautystorebusiness.com college studies by working in a salon. From there, I started in education. I worked with Aveda when it was very small; it had about five products. I was doing part-time education and working in the salon, and then I moved to Seattle and worked for a distributor, helping with education. I did that for a few years and then ended up in sales for a long time. I've been in this business 30 years. Really, half of my career was with Aveda, and I was with Wella Professionals/P&G; for about 17 years. I've called on salons as a salesperson, worked in a salon as a hairdresser, educated in salons and in larger seminars, and even did platform work a long time ago. During the last eight years, I worked in Geneva, Switzerland, doing education curriculum development on a global scale, helping to define salon programs that work in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America. FRANTZIS: I come from a totally different background. My experience with beauty overall was part of my life growing up. My mother had a fashion degree and my dad was an engineer, so I was torn between the very creative, fun atmosphere of my mother and the mathematical, analytical thinking my dad represented. As I tried to find out where I wanted to end up professionally, I studied engineering at a school in Greece. But at the end of my studies, I came to the realization that I would not be very happy working as an engineer for my future. I looked for other options and discovered marketing. It required both creativity and a pragmatic, analytical approach that I could bring from my engineering studies. I got a master's degree in business administration, and I knew that marketing was a career and passion I wanted to pursue. My first exposure was with Coca-Cola in Greece; I was a sales rep, which was fun but tough work. This was when I realized the power of brands, how brands influence life, and how people believe in and use brands. Of course, Coca-Cola was a great brand to start with. I then worked with Toyota— a new category—cars, [where] I saw how marketing could help build a brand and make people passionate about buying. My next role was with Nestlé, another big multinational. Then, at P&G;, I worked with big brands such as Olay, Oral-B and NIOXIN. It was very new and different to me, but I became passionate about the salon professional world. And the two of you met while working at P&G;? Frantzis: Exactly. I was responsible for the global marketing of NIOXIN. I was on the same team with Linda. That was where I changed my perspective and broke all the stereotypes I had about the salon- professional world. Coming in, I expected one thing, but it was so totally different. While getting to know people such as Linda and other hairdressers and education people I was working with, I realized that the salon-professional world was a strong business with beauty in the center, and trends were central to what they were doing. People in the industry had passion and motivation for what they did, and I felt very close to that because I have passion for marketing, business and creating brands with great equity that resonate with people. I saw the same type of drive and passion among the salon-professional crowd. How did you two come together to create KALLISTA? Gillette Parodi: George and I were part of the NIOXIN team, and we were a very small team, with four or five people, so we spent a lot of hours together. You work late and talk about different things. I'd always talk from the hairdresser point of view: "Here's how the hairdresser sees it." George and I would have a lot of philosophical conversations throughout the day. For me, I always wondered why we started in the middle with marketing for the hairdresser. I was struggling with the fact that we create these great products for the consumer and hairdresser, but it was always, "We make this for you as a hairdresser, and now you push it to your clients and use it in the salon," which is good. But it wasn't sitting well with me that hairdressers are the people who always take care of their clients and take care of others. We are caretakers. I was always thinking, "Who's taking care of the hairdresser?" This became apparent through focus groups and my All images courtesy of KALLISTA Beauty Store Business recently sat down with the entrepreneurial duo to find out more about the new line, why it's needed and what the future holds for their company.