Leslie Tessler: Founder and CEO of Hanni

22:27And I think that was like the most resonant thing with me for my entire time in Argentina. I love that. It's really hard to try. It's hard to take the leap, But at the end of the day, New York's always going to be there. LA's always going to be there. The worst that happens is you go and it doesn't work and then you come back. But I think you have to scare yourself shitless. You have to be so uncomfortable to the point where like me, you're either crying every night, you have to sit in it. And then something really beautiful happens on the other side. And that's where Hanny came. That's where my first baby was born.

23:00Leslie Tessler:Before we get to that, I also read that you were designing and selling capes on the side. Can you talk to me about this? Oh my gosh. I had always had this kind of obsession with vintage capes. I had a collection of them. My grandmother had given me some. And so I was always looking in flea markets and I had come across at an estate sale, some bolts of fabric, like vintage lace, a French silk, and a couple of wools. And so I thought I could do some kind of vintage inspired something here, not a trained technical designer by any means. I found a girl who helped me make patterns and a seamstress.

23:40And my husband would bring bolts and bolts of fabric up and down our fourth floor walk up. And it started as just a hobby. I made them for me. I love them. People were asking for them. And then my friends in New York would ask for them. And I thought, you know what, this is kind of great because between Buenos Aires and New York, I've got cape season all year round. Yeah. And it was a really interesting study in human behavior and what drives people to purchase. Because what I found was when I was in Buenos Aires, I would say, this is what all of my friends in New York are wearing. That's all you need.

24:15And then I just have to come to New York and say, these are all handmade with artisans in Buenos Aires. And it was like sold. And this funny idea that the grass really is always greener. And so I would do these traveling trunk shows in boutiques and we would sell out every single time. You know, we really leaned into the New York Buenos Aires thing and depending on what market we were in. And honestly, it was great. It was my first real entrepreneurial venture that was mine, had my name on it. And sometimes I still to this day have regret about not continuing with it. It wasn't built with scale in mind.

24:51It was built with pure enjoyment. And it was also a very difficult time in Argentina. We couldn't import fabrics. And could I have made it work? For sure. Could I have figured out a way to do them in Uruguay and get them? For sure, I could have. But I got pregnant with my first daughter. And then it got to the point where I was going to have to either take it to the next level or not. And I didn't.

25:12Leslie Tessler:So like, as all this is going on, while you still have your regular job, and as you've started to create a family, at what point did you start to get the idea for the business that would become Hanny? So as I was doing the capes, I also had a few consulting clients on the side, a couple of Latin American beauty startups, two of which were Brazilian body care brands. And I am someone who has not just dry, but also highly sensitive and highly reactive skin on my body. So I've always had to take really good care of the skin on my body or pay attention to it at least. And I was working with these brands that had the most beautiful formulations.

25:51I mean, like straight from the Amazon, I was lucky to have a bathroom vanity overflowing with gorgeous products. And I found myself for one reason or another still getting dressed in the morning thinking, shit, I forgot to moisturize. I didn't do it again. And those beautiful bottles, you know, like the caps became crusty and, you know, the products only work if you use them. And after a while, I sort of had this aha moment and I started talking to other friends like, what are you using? How are you actually taking care of your dry skin? And most have the same response. We don't. We do when we can.

26:27But very few people that I spoke to were consistently taking care of the skin on their body. And so three things kept popping up. One was time. So it was if I had five minutes out of the shower, maybe my hair, maybe my face, sometimes neither. And body always felt third, fourth, fifth on the list and therefore fell off the list. The other was sensorial. I really didn't like the feeling of sticky goopy lotions. I didn't like having to wait to put pants on, especially if you're like doing any kind of exercise, that timeline wasn't really working for me. And then the third was from an efficacy standpoint, if you're scaly like me, and you put lotion on, and then three or four hours later, you're scaly again, there's not a lot of incentive to do it in the first place.

27:10And so with all of this happening in the background, and you know, me now, I really had this entrepreneurial fire and all three of my kids had now been born. And I think I was definitely waiting for the right idea. And this was it. It kind of smacked me over the head and I thought I can do something here. And so Hany was born from that. And the idea was really clear. It was, we're not going to do creams and lotions and scrubs and the typical body care products. They have to tick two boxes. And if they don't tick those two boxes, we won't launch them. And so the first one was it had to work better than, you know, what I was currently using on the market.

27:44And the second is that it had to be so easy to incorporate into your routine that people would actually use them and continue to use them.

27:50Leslie Tessler:And so with that, Hanny was born. And the first product that we ever made was the shave pillow, which is a dry stick for shaving. I love it. It's great. Right. And it was born out of me running around my apartment in a sleeveless dress. And so what do you do? You either do soap and water on the pits and like the silk top is ruined, everything's dripping, or you just go out and dry and deal with the razor burn after. And every time I say that, you just see it in every woman's eye because everyone has been there. So yeah, that was kind of, I think what put us on the map. And I had never developed product before.

28:26Really?

28:27Leslie Tessler:Never. Because I feel like obviously you could market it all day long, but product development is its own interesting beast. What was that process like? And how did you think about funding? How did you think about formulation? Like talk to me about those very early days. Yeah. So the idea was bootstrapping. We had raised a small friends and a family around because at the time the business was actually cash intensive. When we launched, we were shaving focused. So we had this very beautiful razor, which is now a very small portion of our business, but it is this beautiful weighted metal tool. It's a whole new way of shaving and you have to be very careful.

29:04It's a very sharp blade. And so for a multitude of reasons, we've kind of moved on from the razor, but we had to raise funds in the beginning. You know, it was expensive for inventory. And so with the first product with Shave Pillow, it was a complete shit show, Hillary. It was me Googling like manufacturers with low MOQs. So not only was I looking for manufacturing partners that would work with me, this random person, but we were also trying to do something that hadn't been done before. And that presents its own set of problems, right? because now we have these trusted chemists that we work with and that help develop products with us.

29:40But at that point, to try to get someone to say, okay, I want to do it like this has to be solid and it has to be portable. It was tricky. And so at that point, I tapped in Anne, my old friend from L 'Oreal, who had left L 'Oreal and she went to work at a contract manufacturer for five years. So she was developing products for other brands. And so she really knew the world and she was just helping. I couldn't afford to pay her. She was just like, look, contact this lab, this lab, or she joined some calls for me. And yeah, I don't think I could have done those early days without her. You have to let people help.

30:10Yeah. And know your network. You have to ask prior to that, you know, was a challenge for me. It's like, I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. No, you can't do it all. You don't know this. And so we learned a lot the hard way and went through many iterations of this project, but it was amazing. And I think when we launched this, it really set the tone for the kinds of products that we were going to develop.

30:31Leslie Tessler:Because there's always that innovative element to what you make. But then it's also interesting because it's familiar. Like it feels very much rooted in reality. And I always felt like long before I knew the backstory of Hanny, it very much felt like it was being created by a real person who'd actually existed in this world and not like a focus group of men. Because what woman has not gotten out of the shower and gotten ready and realized, oh no, I need to shave my armpits, but I'm already dressed and like, can I use conditioner? Sure. It's slimy. It's not going to be great. Can I use soap and water?

31:04Leslie Tessler:Yeah, but it's going to ruin this. I just love the fact that it was so grounded in reality, but yet at the same time, innovative. And there was no product like that on the market. Like I just recognized it immediately. I was like, yeah, they get it. Thank you so much. I think, you know, selfishly I've made all of these products, Anne and I together off of personal pain points. Right. And the other thing is people always come back to the In fact, the products are innovative and it's true. The majority of our products are kind of first to market. But the thing I always like to lean into is this idea that the last thing the beauty industry needs is more products, right?

31:37We don't need more of anything. And so all of our innovation is always built around functionality and trying to get me to those two tick boxes, right? Work better, be easier. And so when the innovation is rooted in functionality and purpose, good things can happen. So we're trying to solve real problems. We're trying to like hit pain points. And so I'm just trying to make it easier for myself and hopefully a bunch of other customers to glow and not have to stress about it.

32:06Leslie Tessler:Well, I love it. So let's go back though. Talk to me about what was the product assortment that you had in mind for launch? Like I want to launch with X products. I'm only going to get to Y. That's fine. Talk to me about sort of like that early launch offering. So when we launched, we launched with two products. The razor and the shave pillow. And so we had, you know, a pipeline, we had water balm, splash tab, which is our hero product, the in shower moisturizer and good aura, three more products that were launching within 12 months, but I wanted to get it out and I wanted to start. And so I think we just hit go and knew that we were launching with a very shave specific offering, but still trying to position ourselves as an overall body care brand, but very specific when we launched.

32:53I mean, a razor, a couple of accessories for the razor and a dry shaving stick.

32:58Leslie Tessler:And that was it. So I read that within just a few months, Hanny was featured in Forbes, Vogue and won an Allure Best of Beauty award without you submitting the product for consideration. Well, you know what we did? I went out to LA and I went to a bunch of editors' houses and I was on my hands and knees shaving their legs in their backyards. And it's kind of the same thing that happened with the capes. When you're able to take, whether it's a fashion editor, a beauty editor, these people who are very obviously knowledgeable and have seen everything, and you're able to show them something different, like watch me shave your legs at your pool, people take notice and you're able to get attention on it.

33:41And I think having a clear point of view from the beginning really helped us with that. So we were able to get a lot of buzz. And yeah, the Allure Best of beauty thing was a complete, because we tried to submit, you know, we launched in May and we had missed the submissions. And so that one was a big one for me to win an Allura award after kind of like begging on my hands and knees to submit and being rejected was huge. That whole first, like six months, it was such a blur. I didn't even realize what was happening. You know, we just birthed this baby, like after birth of madness. And then we had Sephora reach out to us the week we launched.

34:18And my COO and I, it was just the two of us at the time, we were like, we're getting pranked. And we had to verify, there's no way. And that whole conversation came about and people say, oh, because you spent so much time in beauty and you had this network. No, that connection, you know how that came about? From the playground in Buenos Aires. I had one American friend, our kids were the same age, we met at the playground. and she, 15 years earlier, had worked as an assistant buyer at Cost Plus World Market with one of the heads of skincare at Sephora. And so when I sent my friends and family, I'm about to launch this thing I've been working on, she sent it and that was it.

34:56So it was like serendipitous.

34:58Leslie Tessler:I mean, but even that, like that's not gonna get you in. It's because the product was excellent and you were doing something category disruptive and high quality and interesting and there's Sephora, they get that. I can only imagine that their early interest in the brand changed the trajectory. I also could imagine there might be cause for being more protective because you have a brand vision and, you know, powerful retailers can have their own needs and desires for things. Talk to me about all of the ways that that early interest changed or shaped the brand. Well, I think the earliest one was on a fundraising front.

35:38So we were planning on bootstrapping. Yeah. Let's go low and slow. And then, you know, obviously when Sephora called, all of that changed and we needed to produce inventory. And so thankfully, I always say thankfully it was 2021. There was a lot of cash being deployed because I had no clue what I was doing. I had never raised funds before. We went out, we raised$3 million. Two and a half of it was taken very quickly from a private equity fund. And, you know, for better or for worse, we got on the institutional capital ride earlier than I would have anticipated. And, you know, then we were kind of off to the races.

36:12So yes, of course, raising with such keen inches from Sephora made it relatively easy to raise. So we launched in Sephora about a year after we launched the brand. Going in so early has its own very unique sets of challenges. And not, of course, from a customer perspective. We've been very lucky. Sephora has always been incredibly supportive. We've taken all of our launches. is I think they really appreciate the innovation and they see the vision and they've been nothing but supportive there. But launching in a big retailer when you have no brand awareness is rough. I mean, if I had to go back, would I do it all the same?

36:51Probably. But it's really hard because once you're on shelf, you have to stay on shelf. And big retail now, I think, has changed. It's harder to discover, right? Because there's so many brands, especially brick and mortar. and so obviously very lucky to have the opportunity but very difficult to get people to find you to know you're being sold there without essentially putting all of your eggs in the Sephora basket any retailer's basket you know I think Sephora has single-handedly been one of the most important parts of our business and the most important partners in our business but anytime you're putting all your eggs in any basket I would proceed with caution right because you need

37:29Leslie Tessler:to diversify revenue, especially when you're a brand, because you need to be able to stand on your own as well. Right. You need to know who your customer is. And if you're only selling at retail, you don't have a lot of visibility into that. And especially in these early days, it's so crucial to know what they like. You know, we had to find the balance and Sephora was a priority for sure, but it couldn't be the only priority because I've seen a lot of brands get swallowed up and you just have to find the balance. That makes sense. Talk to me about your product launch cadence. Are there some that take a long time to develop, others that have been really easy to develop?

38:06Leslie Tessler:I know that you come from a very personal place when it comes to product development. So I'm curious about who's been a squeaky wheel and who's been an easy one. Honestly, none of our products are easy. We have exceptionally long product dev cycles. I'll just give you an example. So for Splash Sav, which is our hero, It's an in-shower moisturizer. So for everyone who gets out of the shower, gets dressed and forgets to moisturize, this you apply in the shower when your skin is primed and prepped to receive it. It's activated with water. It locks it all in. And by the time you've even had a chance to forget, you've already done it and you're out the shower.

38:40So this started with my dry skin. And this is how they usually start with some suggestions from friends saying, if you have really dry skin, why don't you try coconut oil in the shower? Why don't you try shea butter in the shower? And I would. And then my skin would just be moisturized, but so greasy and like such a film. And so we started before we even talked to chemists, Anne and I in our Vitamixes, you know, putting jojoba and shea and coconut and saying, well, what happens if we whip together all of these super moisturizers for so long that it became light and airy, barely any water? And we get it to a place where we think, okay, this has legs.

39:17Like we can do something with this. It's not there yet. We need, you know, chemists to make it a pro. But so most of our products start like that. We start them out. And then once we pass it off and we're working with pros and chemists on it, it's also usually very challenging because we don't have any products that have benchmarks. We've been in the market for four and a half years and we have seven core products. We, again, are thoughtful about what we launch. Next year, we'll launch three new products, which is a big year for us. Big year. A lot of big things coming. So we're very excited about this.

39:54This year was a little bit slower. We decided to focus on core and just really work on awareness, but we don't launch a lot. You know, again, struggle we always have is like these chemists getting mad at us because we start these projects and then they might not see it to fruition because I would say half of the projects, we start with these ideas, like we want to do this and we want it to be this and it hasn't been done. No one knows if it can be done. And sometimes it can't, or sometimes we say maybe it can, but it's going to be a five-year dev schedule. So this is like on a different long-term path.

40:22Right. And that's okay. I think it's worth it. And you learn a lot coming from L 'Oreal's and those brands that, you know, tend to release a lot of products or even just seeing the body care market in general, where what you see happening often is like a lot of products and then the same products in different fragrances. It's a little bit different and a little bit of a different timeline, but I think it's a lot more fun.

40:42Leslie Tessler:Well, I am very much enjoying it. It does result in the brand feeling more considered. I hope so. Because how good can something be if there's something new every five seconds? Right. You think about, you know, launching in retail and having institutional investors and all of these things. This is a balance, right? Because all of these outside opinions are going to say new, new, new, more, more, more. Growth is going to come from newness. And you have to be, I think, strong in the conviction that more thoughtful launches will result in more successful launches for us. But yeah, it's not always an easy thing to convince people of, you know, the more hands that start to get into the pot, it becomes a little more complicated.

41:21Leslie Tessler:So talk to me about the growth of the company itself and like your team, because I read that as of October, 2025, that you were still a team of five. We were, and we are now a team of six, which is very exciting. That still feels like impossibly small considering the scope of the brand. Talk to me about why that is the case. Well, there's a couple of reasons. One, we don't have a lot of people, but the people that we have are, sounds silly to call them superstars, but it's wild how brilliant and talented and how all in they are on this brand. It's like every time we sit in a group, I am by far the least qualified.

42:05It's just like I'm absorbing everything from them. And so that helps, right? Because I think quality over quantity any day of the week. You know, from another standpoint, I think I've worked in a lot of companies that had a lot of people doing very specific jobs that I want this company to not only make great products, but I want it to be profitable and I want it to be set up for long-term success. And so I'd rather hire slow and I'm very much higher with culture in mind. The magic that you have when you're small is obviously very hard to retain as you grow.

42:37Leslie Tessler:And so we're all women. Almost all of us are mothers. We get shit done. No one is more effective or efficient than a mom, right? I mean, we'll grow as the business dictates. I think a lot of times in the past I've thought, okay, we're going, for example, into Sephora. So we need a head of education. No, you don't. You don't at the scale right now, right? When we first launched, you can make things work. And then when the business really dictates a hire, we make a hire. And for right now, we're lucky enough that we're able to keep it small. We obviously rely on some outside partners. We have a few agencies and, you know, that's it.

43:14I think we're always going to operate from a place of being scrappy and hiring is part of that.

43:18Leslie Tessler:So you had alluded to raising money again more recently. You closed another round, a healthy$2 million that is earmarked specifically for continuing to build the Sephora business. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Sephora amongst other things, right? I think we're seeing such a huge halo effect at Sephora right now. The TikTok to Sephora pipeline right now, it's wild. And we know it won't always be. So it's like, get it going while it's going. That's exactly it. Again, don't put all your eggs in the basket. You have to be open. New channels are always opening. But I think we've seen this surge, especially over the last year in brand awareness and people talking about the brand and this momentum that's like, okay, now people know who we are.

44:01And so to really be able to have a great partner like Sephora, I was going to help us capture that traffic and finally have that brand awareness that, you know, we've been working so hard to have. I think it's hard when you're up against big brands with big budgets. And so we raised, you know, in the world of CPG, a relatively small round, we'll probably raise a little bit more, but we want to, again, be thoughtful about it and do it the right way and make sure we have good partners. So it's putting fuel on the things that are already working.

44:31Leslie Tessler:Already crackling. Yeah, exactly. Well, I look forward to seeing what you do with this additional money and with these new launches. It's going to be very exciting. So we like to close out the podcast by asking the same three questions always. So the first one is about mistakes because we all make them throughout the course of our career, but we don't always talk about it. But I think it's important because it shows that we can be resilient and get through it. So can you talk to me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career and what you've learned from it? The list is so long, Hillary.

45:04I'm like, should we do a mistake I've made in the last week? It's so long. When we launched this brand, I was convinced that this was going to be the next big thing in shaving, right? This razor is the future of shaving. And everyone needs to see how amazing it is to shave with a razor like this. and it was a very expensive business from a working capital perspective and I put everything I had into it.

45:29Leslie Tessler:And when I listened to our customers and the obstacles they had with it and also just the products within our portfolio that they were leaning into, I really had to take a good look at the business and say, you know what? I might've gotten this one wrong. This might not be what our hero is and we might not be all in on shaving. I would say within the last years, is that we just got people to stop saying, oh, honey, the shaving brand, oh, the razor brand, you know, and really understand what we're doing on the formulated side. It was expensive to do a pivot like that and not hard on the ego, but it's a switch.

46:03It's a pivot. And I think listening to the customers, that's what it taught me is you can never be so in love with an idea that you can't hear what's happening around you, right? It's like, you can't have your blinders on. You know, it was me sitting in my bathroom floor for a long time teaching customers how to shave with this razor. And we had to hear the things they liked about it, the things they didn't like about it and what they liked more. And so that, I think, taught me a lot about just, yes, I have the vision. I'm steering the boat. But at the end of the day, your customers are always going to tell you what they want.

46:33It's a conversation.

46:34Leslie Tessler:That was a pretty big learning. Fair. It's pretty humble to say, I thought this was going to be the number one thing. It did get us in the door in all these ways. We are glad that we have it, but we can also evolve. Absolutely. I think there's something really lovely about that. Okay. So a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first lives and they want to do something different, whether that's a different industry or even just a different job within the same industry, but they're scared of pivoting. They're nervous about making that leap. As someone who has made a bunch of changes over the course of her career, what advice would you give someone who's standing there sort of on the precipice thinking about making a leap, but just hasn't done it quite yet.

47:20Leslie Tessler:Besides set up a savings account. I think it's listen to your gut. Your gut tells you and your intuition guides you to what you should be doing. I really believe that. And then what happens is there's all this outside noise that gets in the way and tells you all the reasons why you shouldn't. I like to play this game with my kids a lot, which is like, what's the worst that can happen? And they're scared to go to school. What's the worst that can happen? You fail the math test, your grade goes down, you come home upset, and then we work through it. And a lot of times they're a lot more intense than that.

47:52But I try to work through that scenario in my head at all times. This is very niche, but I read this book called The Other Side by Hadley Vlahos. She's like a end of life hospice nurse. And it really opened my eyes to what happens at the end of your life. my kids think it's dark but I do it all the time I imagine myself on my deathbed looking back at my life and what are the things I'm proud of and what nurse Hadley says is like as a surprise to no one not one person says they wish they had worked harder yeah not one so I try to just put it in perspective and frame it and think am I going to be proud of myself for taking the leap and the answer's always yes leaping is so hard what's the worst that can happen and maybe the answer from a timing perspective is, look, there's a lot that could happen.

48:41And, you know, maybe it makes more sense to do this six months from now or a year from now. But I think, you know, in your gut that you want to try it, that you want to do something more, that you think there's more out there for you, make a plan. You know, it took me two years to save up and a lot of false alarms and I'm going to go, no, I'm not, but don't let people burn it out. You know, you got to stay true to it and keep it in your North star. But I think a lot about what I'll look back on in my life. And it helps me make the things that feel really big, feel less big.

49:10Leslie Tessler:So my last question, it's also my favorite, which is if you could climb into a time machine and go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would you say? This is related because I am such a type A personality and I'm such a perfectionist. And I think the advice I would say is it's all not that important. You know, nothing's so big of a deal that it's worth your health, your happiness. So relax a little bit. It's all going to be okay. I love that. Well, Leslie, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. And as someone who is a big personal fan of your brand and uses it and evangelizes about it all the time, it has been such a pleasure to get a chance to sit here and hear the whole backstory.

49:57Leslie Tessler:So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I had so much fun. Thanks for having me.

50:10Leslie Tessler:That was the founder and CEO of Hanny, Leslie Tesler. For more inspiring interviews with women like Leslie, head on over to secondlifepod.com, where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. We love seeing you spread the word on social. And now you can tag us in your posts. We are at second life pod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show. So send in your requests to hello at second life pod.com, or you can DM us on Instagram.

50:51Leslie Tessler:I'm at Hillary Kerr. The show is at second life pod. Our DMS are always open. I'm Hilary Kerr and you've been listening to Second Life This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hamaris, and Natalie Thurman Our production assistant is Raven Yamamoto Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California And our music is by Jonathan Leahy