Interview with Margreet van Roemburg

The recipe for “Miss Herôme”

A little bit of luck and a lot of effort!

Almost 25 years ago, while her vacation in England, Margreet van Roemburg discovered a nail hardener. She saw a gap in the Dutch market and she decided to get started. She had filled up thousands of bottles herself, helped by her mother and her friends. The product boxes had also been folded by this same crew. And today she is the owner of Herôme Cosmetics, a company with turnover of millions of Euros, a name that she invented herself. The speech of a self-made woman.

“I was 23 years old, I had problems with splitting nails and I was looking for a product that will solve this problem. In England, I came across a bottle with nail hardener. I found where it was produced and I got a permission to start working with it in the Netherlands. The adrenaline rushed, as I knew that I had a success in my hands. The only thing I didn’t yet know was how to realize the success.”

“I thought the best I can do is to get married and take care of children”

“Perhaps the persistence to become independent comes from my childhood. I grown up in a family of twelve, four boys and eight girls. We had three bedrooms at home: one for my parents, one was a boy’s room and one a girl’s room. So literally I had to fight for my place. Our family was very traditional. My mother took care of the house and the children. My father was making money as a porter in a Guest House in Amsterdam.”

“At that time, when I thought of my future, I though the most I can do is to get married and I take care for the children. I started going out in Amsterdam when I was in a secondary school. I needed more money than what I was earning from dealing newspaper in my neighbourhood, so I started working in a bookshop. I was a hard worker, but saw my job only as something to do before getting married and having children. I didn’t even finish secondary school. “

“We filled up the first bottles ourselves - 25.000 pieces of them!”

“When everything started, I was still working in the bookshop. Four days in a week. The other three days were for Herôme. The name “Herôme” actually derives from my own name - Roem from Roemburg became “-rome”, and on the front I added the “Her-”. It sounded very international, and I decided to keep it. That is how the name Herôme was made.

At that time I use to live in a four-room apartment which for long time served as operating base for Herôme.

The first two years, I was importing the bottles of nail hardener from England. In the mean while I found a bottle producer and somebody who took care of production of the caps with brush.”

“We filled up the first bottles ourselves - 25.000 pieces. We were also gluing the labels and folding the boxes. My friends and my mother were helping me. The man who was printing the boxes was also helping: he was doing that for very low price. I always invested my own money, without any help from a bank. That’s why Herôme Cosmetics is still solely owned by me.”

“I knew I didn’t have any chance with the big retailers”

“When everything was ready, the games were to start. I knew that I didn’t have any chances with the big retailers, they weren’t waiting for me. I had some customers at the beauty salons, but they weren’t enough. I got the addresses of all beauty and hair salons from the Dutch Yellow Pages and I sent each of them a bottle. I was on the phone for days. Did they receive the product? What did they think of it? How much did they want to order? Quite often it happened that they didn’t even see the bottle or threw it away.

We called some of the customers even forty times in one week. We made them crazy! But I knew that I didn’t have any chances with the big retailers. Their shelves were already overcrowded and nobody was ready for a new product. I thought that if the product will be accepted in the salons, the retailers will latter follow. And that is exactly what happened. “

“I could rent an old ballet school, in the beginning I was alone”

“Quickly I managed not to be depend any longer on the producer from England: I hired a famous pharmacist and chemist, and we came up with even a better version of the nail hardener. We also developed a cuticle crème. You can say I grew together with my company. If I’d had an investor, everything would probably go wrong. After few years I could rent an old ballet school for 1200,- Dutch Guilders (approx. 550,- EUR) a month, at that time a huge amount for me. In the beginning I was alone in that big building, together with my mother who was helping me by answering the phone and packing the bottles. Sometimes, when I’d see the huge pile of bottles that on one way or another had to be sold, I’d think to myself: “Margreet, what did you get yourself into?”

 “I immediately invested all the money I earned. In new products, staff, marketing. We added a hand cream, a face line, varieties of nail hardeners, nail masks to the line. In the beginning I let the products be developed by befriended pharmacists and afterwards by a French laboratory. Later on I invested in own laboratory technicians and organized customers’ panels and workshops. But you should understand that everything was going slowly. I knew how to lead a company of 4-5, but not a company of 25 employees. I wasn’t yet ready for that yet. Actually, I did everything according my intuition. And that sometimes went well, and sometimes completely wrong.”

“How do I conquer the international market? I didn’t have any idea!”

“After Herôme was successfully introduced to the big retailers in the Netherlands, I decided to direct my efforts onto the international market. After all, I knew I had a product with international potential in my hands. But how can I conquer this market? I didn’t have any idea! I was lucky that a gentleman from Australia, born in the Netherlands, who was actually a cosmetic distributor, was visiting his mother. The neighbour of his mother was using Herôme and she said to this gentleman: “you should introduce this in Australia.” He called me and said he wants to order 35.000 bottles for the Australian market. I thought: I didn’t even sale that many in the Netherlands. “Ship them,” he said. “When I receive them, I will transfer you the money.” No way, I thought, but I didn’t even do anything!”

“On month later, I found out that this Australian businessman transferred a big amount on my account. The orders that followed (with thousands of bottles) I wanted to ship them by plane on the other side of the World. But a nail hardener can get easily inflammable so it couldn’t be transported by plane. I had been with customs officers on the phone for days. I’d beg them on my knees to send my bottles, and at the end I seceded. The Australian businessman – he is still my distributor – had a lot of success with Herôme, and soon after he was making one order after the other. Whit the money, I looked for further possibilities.”

“Herôme is now one of the players on the international cosmetics market. The company grew to an annual turnover of 15 million Euros. We are the market leader in the Hand and Nail Care segment. But I am not done yet. There are other domains yet to be conquered. The feet care for example. Or cosmetics for men, that is a huge growing market. Besides, I want to further conquer Europe and if it’s possible to cross ever in America.”

“Working is nice, but making your dreams come true is special”

“I hope that as a single mother, I can raise my daughter Djanu well, and that I can teach her about the beautiful and less beautiful aspects of our life. Now I have of course money and a beautiful house, but actually that’s not so important. I am happy I am independent both materially and spiritually. Life doesn’t consist only of working, even if your work brings you a lot of satisfaction. I learned that nobody can live without love, happiness and friendship. That’s why sometimes I have groups of children at my place that stay with us. Over the weekend, in the summer months and for the Christmas holidays, sometimes even for a few weeks. The children take their minds off of their daily routine by staying at the children’s vacation house, a sort of a youth centre I have developed. I am doing this together with a friend of mine, Alex. We real have great parties together: all the children camp in my garden, we play games, eat together, and go to restaurants and to the theatre. In short: we do things that these children have never done before, but they disserved to. It’s very nice to be able to provide that! Working is nice. Making your dreams come true is special.”

(This article is the short version of the interview with Margreet van Roemburg which appeared in AM-Magazine in the Netherlands)