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44 April 2014 | beautystorebusiness.com Beauty Store Business: Please tell us about your background and how you started in the beauty industry. DE LA GUARDIA: My father, Mario, came to this country from Cuba in 1962. I was born in Cuba, and at about 2 years old I came to this country. My father began working with a company called Carson Products, the maker of Dark & Lovely and Magic Shave. He was the inventor of the Dark & Lovely No-Lye Relaxer in 1978. My father was a chemist; by trade he was a chemical engineer and began working in formulation for Carson Products, which ended up being the leader in relaxers. In the 1980s, I joined Carson Prod- ucts myself, but when they sold Carson in 1995, they sold it to an invest- ment company, which in turn sold it to L'Oréal. So my father and I started Strength of Nature as a family company in 2000. The whole philosophy of the company is to create better products, innovations and formulations to satisfy the consumer. And our target consumer has always been and continues to be women of color in the United States. My father went to Georgia Tech and graduated in 1953 with a degree in chem- ical engineering. I also went to Georgia Tech and graduated in 1982 with a degree in management. When I was a teenager, I worked summers with him and really loved the beauty business. I've always had this in my blood, the idea of creating products to really help the beauty and manageability of hair. Did you always have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur? I think the desire was more about product development and creating new ideas, new solutions for the consumer. That's always been my vision, and entrepreneurship followed. My father and I had decided to start on our own, try a new company based on entrepreneurship and without the restrictions that larger companies sometimes have with development. We began open-minded and developed solu- tions for damage; that's how we began in 2000. We were looking for ways to reduce damage for women who were styling, relaxing and color-treating their hair. We developed formulas and products to try to alleviate that damage, and that's how Strength of Nature started. How has the company grown over the years? We've grown exponentially. In the last six or seven years, we've more than doubled in size. Over the last eight years, we have had three major acquisitions. The first one, in 2008, was ElastaQP, a brand that was owned by Kenra and sold to us. In 2009, we acquired African Pride from Colomer USA, and then this past November we had the fortunate opportu- nity to purchase three brands from Unilever: Soft & Beautiful, TCB and Pro-Line. That has really given us exponential growth in our category, in our segment, which is multicultural hair care, or hair care for women with textured hair, which requires manageability, detangling, frizz control and straightening. All those are the key areas of our product development, and addressing these manageability and hair-versatility issues are what we're focused on. What other products do you have in your portfolio? The products that we developed ourselves, internally, are Profectiv Mega Growth and Beautiful Textures. Within those brands, there are many little sub-brands. We have grown them internally, organically, and they weren't based on acquisition. We started this company with Profectiv; it was the first brand we introduced in 2000. That brand was focused on solutions for damage—from heat, chemical treatments, hair color, severe styling stresses, curling irons, or excessive twisting, braiding and weaving, etc. That brand is what really propelled the company for about five years. There was a very small acquisition, SmartPerm, in 2006. We also introduced Beautiful Textures in 2011. Beautiful Tex- tures is a brand targeted to women with the desire to grow their hair natural and use different formulations to give them more elongated curls or have their hair more moisturized as they work with natural hairstyles instead of relaxing their hair. Today, we have 10 brands, and each brand is targeted and positioned for different consumer needs and different ages, at different price points. So we look at the business in layers: What are the solutions or benefits we're trying to give consumers? How do we package products and develop them to meet specific needs? And what age and economic price points do we target based on how the brand is positioned? Will you continue making acquisitions in the future? I think we'll take one year off, at least! We make everything we acquire, bringing it "Beauty supplies should use bloggers to bring traffic into the store." Mario de la Guardia Sr. and Mario de la Guardia proudly stand in front of the Strength of Nature Global corporate offi ce in Savan- nah, Georgia. Images courtesy of Strength of Nature Global Continued on page 48 T h e M u l t i c u l t u r a l H a i r c a r e M a e s t r o . i n d d 4 4 The Multicultural Haircare Maestro.indd 44 3 / 5 / 1 4 1 : 4 1 P M 3/5/14 1:41 PM