Maria Hatzistefanis is one of the beauty industry’s best known and most admired entrepreneurs. She began her career in corporate finance and realising quickly that wasn’t for her, founded her ground-breaking beauty brand Rodial in 1999, having identified the need for products that focused on results and which tackled specific skin concerns.
Maria started the brand from scratch, visiting trade shows to find formulators and packaging suppliers and even manning her own department, or rather shelf, in the first store to take her brand on in the early days, Fenwick of Bond Street.
Unusually, Rodial is still an independent brand giving Maria the freedom to operate and expand the business in a manner that feels authentic to her as an entrepreneur.
Maria talks to Lauretta Roberts, Editor in Chief, of TheIndustry.fashion about those early days, how the beauty market has evolved in the past 20 years, how she and Rodial fared during the pandemic and what her ambitions are for the future.
