Who is élan unlimited?

Maria brings more than thirty years of product development experience to élan unlimited. After starting her career at Estée Lauder, Lancaster and Christian Dior in the 1990s, she moved into more entrepreneurial ventures where she developed unique hair and skin care products for Crunch Gym, Mana Products and Profound Beauty. In 2004 she developed and patented a ‘METHOD FOR DIAGNOSING AND APPROPRIATELY CLEANSING, CONDITIONING AND STYLING THE HAIR’, a system for customized hair care that foreshadowed the new approach she has developed for élan’s revolutionary hair care system. Maria believes that the most effective way to customize hair care products is to leverage the expertise of a professional stylist. “Only stylists have the skill and knowledge needed to assess the physiology of a client’s hair and scalp, and balance that with the styling goals for that particular client. When they are empowered to employ those abilities to tailor the products they use, they deepen the client relationship and maximize the client experience”

Dave Robertson came to élan from a very different perspective. Dave is an MIT faculty member, the author of two books on innovation, and a frequent speaker at conferences and company events on innovation-related topics. Before MIT, Dave was a Professor at both IMD (a Swiss business school) and Wharton, as well as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Where Maria saw the need for better products so that stylists could express their artistic capabilities, Dave saw the need for a better business model so that stylists could increase their incomes. Although the big beauty companies and online retailers depend on salons and stylists to sell their products, they treat stylists like disposable parts of a larger machine, and capture the bulk of the profits from the sale of those products for themselves. Dave says “it was surprising to me how much revenue the online retailers have taken away from stylists and salons. By creating a line of products that are customized by stylists for their clients, we’ve created an income stream that can never be diverted to an online retailer.”