WORDS: OLIVIA MORRIS
A New Vision of Beauty
Hind Sebti, Founder of whind, has created a beauty brand that brings uncompromising potency and performance together 70 emirateswoman.com
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Can you talk us through your career? After a master’s in industrial engineering, I started my career a little bit over 20 years ago at Procter & Gamble in Paris – my top pick company – as a Supply Chain and Logistics Manager. Very quickly, I was in charge of the beauty category. And whilst in that role, I realised that I had a deep passion for consumers and products and against all the odds of the functional silos at the company at the time, I was able to move into a brand marketing role in beauty and the rest is history. I moved to London in 2007 to be in charge of part of the Olay portfolio, a role that has not only provided the best training in the world of skincare but also to work on a global love brand and create a bond with that category that will stay with me. Over the following years, I grew from product to brand to general management first at Procter & Gamble where I was lucky to learn world-class brand and business building to L’Oréal where my beauty passion blossomed to the next level, in the company of like-minded beauty-obsessed talent. So in the span of the last 20 years, I was lucky to lead some of the world iconic brands such as Olay, L’Oreal Paris and Maybelline and cult ones such as Essie or Pureology. In my last role as General Manager of Maybelline and Essie for the UK&I, the entrepreneurial bug finally caught up with me with the overwhelming desire to create a brand with products that myself and consumers like me couldn’t find. A new vision of beauty. What inspired you to go into the beauty space? Growing up in Morocco, Beauty – with a capital B – was everywhere: the landscapes, the architecture, the craftsmanship, the food and of course the beauty rituals. As a born dreamer, I thrived on seeing beauty in everyday details, how to “sublime” the ordinary to make it extraordinary. Starting with personal beauty. Through watching women around me. The Hammam ritual. My mother’s vanity table. And most of all that beauty is as much about how it makes you look than it makes you feel. This was the birth of my fascination with that world that is much deeper than it appears. Through my academic journey, I grew up to also become a maker, a problem solver and an aspiring business builder. So intuitively I decided to find a career that would balance the dreamer and the maker in me. And that was brand building in the beauty industry. How did you come to launch your own brand, whind? The realisation that something was missing when it came to skincare. That the market had become increasingly performance-obsessed at the expense of the overall experience. That all brands started to fuse into a sea of sameness of minimalistic, clinical works. Which is great for the consumer who likes that. But there is another consumer that wants both performance and experience – like me
BEAUTY
10/31/21 3:22 PM
