Courtesy of Eva Alexandridis
By Katherine FungShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberThey say patience is a virtue. Eva Alexandridis thinks it’s the bedrock of success.
As the founder of 111SKIN, Alexandridis would know. She's been playing the long game since the brand developed its first product in 2008. For half a decade, she kept her luxury beauty line confined to her husband’s plastic surgery clinic. When she finally decided to bring the skincare line to retailers, she picked just one and actively decided not to sell elsewhere until she built enough demand.
Today, 111SKIN has tens of millions in global revenue to show for it.
And yet, when Alexandridis tries to impart her wisdom to the next class of beauty founders, few want to follow her example.
“Founders these days don’t have the patience to learn and take the time to understand the business [or] understand the consumer,” she told Newsweek. “The expectation is that you can create a brand, scale it very quickly and sell it.”
Courtesy of Eva Alexandridis“It’s quite unfortunate because a few years ago, we had fast fashion,” she said. “We have seen this kind of desire to get the latest, the newest, at any price, preferably very cheap.”
Today, it’s fast beauty. Consumers are no longer seeing the value in premium beauty brands. Sixty-three percent of consumers don’t believe those products work better than those from mass brands, according to W Magazine’s most recent By the Numbers column. Skepticism over premium beauty, in combination with price hikes and tariff threats, has fueled the rise of beauty dupes.
More than half of consumers, 53 percent, say they are open to buying lower-cost alternative products, W Magazine’s data shows. The publication also found that more than two-thirds of popular cosmetic brands purchased through retailers like Amazon and TikTok Shop are fake.
Now, Alexandridis is waiting for the tide to turn. She's anticipating that the beauty world will follow in the steps of its fashion counterpart, which has recently seen a shift from fast to sustainable.
“There is now this understanding that quality comes over quantity,” she said. “People are much more into slower brands, [brands] where you can purchase something and pass it off to the next generation.”
Beauty founders, like Aman Essentials CEO Kristina Romanova, are listening. A mentee of the 111SKIN founder, Roma told Newsweek that the best business lesson she learned from Alexandridis was to keep her team small for as long as possible and to not rush into expanding.
“When I started my journey as a businesswoman, I was quite young,” Romanova recalled. “At times, it felt like I [was] by myself in [a] sea of sharks where everyone [knew] the answers.”
...“Eva was one of the first people who would always give me advice on business strategy, would share her knowledge and experience in the beauty industry and would always encourage me to believe in myself,” she said.
As an entrepreneur who struggled to trust her intuition, Alexandridis places immense stock in self-efficacy.
The concept of 111SKIN as a doctor-led beauty brand emerged out of her husband’s frustrations with his patients. A triple board-certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Yannis Alexandrides often complained to his wife that many of his patients were ignoring his post-op instructions. Having lived in San Francisco during Silicon Valley’s rise, Alexandridis suggested that her husband create a startup of his own—a beauty brand that would be both effective, but potent enough that it would streamline the many products that patients often were prescribed after surgery.
Her husband was a natural fit to serve as the brand's de facto spokesperson. But as he stepped into the spotlight, Alexandridis found herself working more behind the scenes.
“For many years, I was very much in the background,” she said. “I felt like I had no right to [participate] in this industry. I didn’t have enough experience.”
She recognized that while her husband’s medical background helped build the brand's doctor-led reputation, she remembered it feeling somewhat strange given that she was the one really leading it.
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"I was running the business,” Alexandridis said. “I [had] kind of forced him to be more forward-facing because I believed that credibility would come from him. I was, a little bit, disregarding my role in the company.”
It took years before she understood her role in the company and how critical her time and effort had been to its success.
“At some point... I realized there is no playbook in the beauty world. And if you use the old playbook, then you’re not really addressing the modern consumer,” Alexandridis said. "You build the brand as you go by having this two-way conversation with your clients, with the people in the clinic, and no one had more access than me."
She began recognizing that she was the one out in the field promoting 111SKIN. She was the one hearing the needs of customers. She was the one visiting spas around the world to build partnerships.
"I kind of decided that I do have expertise,” she said. "It was a big revelation for me."
Looking back, she wishes she had trusted her intuition more. The biggest obstacle for her was the framing of that idea. She forced herself to rethink what intuition was, and rather than telling herself to listen to intuition, she asked herself to listen to the experiences and knowledge that she knew was stirring up gut feelings about certain decisions.
“My knowledge is so, so important because I am probably the only person in the company that has been there from day one,” she said. “No one has the history and the knowledge that I have accumulated over the years.”
"I realize there's a value in speaking of all the hard lessons I've had to learn," she added. "It's quite empowering to share that versus just being a founder that has a beautiful lifestyle and pretending everything is perfect when the reality is not that."
Alexandridis also shares the ups and downs of her entrepreneurial journey as a way to weed out those who may not be a good fit for this type of career path.
"Some people are better suited to be in an environment that is more structured, more organized," she said. "My advice to younger people is to work first in a structured envrionment. Learn. See how you feel. If that's something you love, then you don't—not all of us have to be entrepreneurs."
"[You can] aspire to be an entrepreneur, but understand that it's hard work and often much harder than working for someone else," she said.
She said the brands that are successful almost always have founders who are extremely involved in its operations and who view it as a full-time job, rather than a side hustle that can bring in passive income. She said she's met with many aspiring founders who approach her wanting to start a business with no clear idea on what that looks like.
"That's not a winning proposition," Alexandridis said. "The motivation with entrepreneurs these days is, 'I just want to work for myself' or 'I want to create something.' That's not enough."
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