I Have Never Given Birth

I have never given birth. The fates have decided that I am not to be a mother in the traditional sense. Please know that I think that mothers are amazing. I think that being a mother is one of the most difficult endeavors one can take on, and I have the utmost respect for women who sacrifice themselves for their families. I am frequently in awe of Nancy, my right hand here at the Screen offices in Tampa. She is a single mom who is raising two amazing people yet still manages to mother me and illustrate her un-ending competence at work, and then she still makes time to travel and date and have her own life.

We have birthed a business in the last two months, the gestation period started in November of 2009. Since then, my partners and I have set up the infrastructure to bring the most brilliantly engineered professional beauty line to the United States. The distributors have started, the product is selling and the education team is in place, but it did not all gel until America’s Beauty Show in Chicago this past weekend. We had a perfect space right in the front- thank you Yves and Paul Dykstra. Our booth was beautiful, thanks to the expertise of John Bogdan and imagery from our partners in Italy. And we rocked the house, thanks to Jason Schwind, FM Shortino and our Italian partners who constantly filled the seats with their amazing talents.

This weekend John, Yves and I gave birth to Screen Professional Hair Care in the USA. Our booth in the show marked our first real introduction to the beautiful and creative community of Chicago.

We have brought Screen USA to life, with the best intentions and with a commitment to honor this community of beauty warriors.

I pledge to nurture this business like my child, giving tenderness, education, my attention and my unconditional love.

Andrea

Are you an early adopter?

I have always been an early adopter. I own an iPhone and an iPad. I was quick to get on the web, and absorb all emerging technologies, but it does not stop there, I buy the newest make up, books and toys (for my nieces). Anything that is the latest and has that cool factor, I have to own it.

Early adopters have endless hope, always believing something might be better. Well, sometimes it works for me and other times it misses the mark completely:  I hated the vibrating mascara but I loved the iPad.

In general, I like anything that CHALLENGES THE STATUS QUO! So when we started our company, we wanted Screen USA to CHALLENGE the salon industry.

Screen is challenging the status quo in the way we do business, starting with Micro-Distributors and our technology. But it carries through to everything we do including our education and our approach.

We had an unbelievable month of February; we blew away our sales projections by 3 times. But I had the uncomfortable task of sharing with our Micro-Distributors that we were running out of stock on some popular items. It killed me.  I strive to be a person of my word.  Our company strives to be a company worthy of trust.  These situations make this challenging. All I could do was hurry to fix the problem. We have placed three separate air orders in process from Italy, incurring the additional cost of air freight, but I still feel like I should have preempted any issues.

Do you think that other companies out there feel this way when they inform their clients they are outta stock?  Do you think that there is someone losing sleep over it? Well, we are the type of company where there are plenty of people losing sleep.

We are starting to get an idea of what you stylists like which allows us to stock accordingly. When you buy Screen, please know:  we are different, we really care, and we challenge the status quo.

We are like you!

Andrea