YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Constantine

lines on the record: 115
first: 2020-10-05
most recent: 2020-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, because I wanted, yeah, we were trying to keep the same people employed that we'd had before. Got it. But in a mail order business. Mail order companies.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was my solution. I said to them, look, you're going to have to buy the rights. But I said, look, I make £3 million a year from each of these product ranges. So why don't you pay me £9 million over three years? You'll make the money back anyway by making it yourself. And I'll go off and do something else.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I basically drove that because it was very awkward. I own these rights, but they didn't know what to do about that. They weren't taking any new product off me because they were frightened that I dominated so much of their business and they'd just gone public and the city didn't know that I owned all the product rights.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. All over And rightly so. I mean, you know how it is whenever you've had a very close working relationship with someone? You don't want to have to admit how much they taught you. I don't know, maybe that's just a British thing. But she must have taught me so much, didn't she? It's quite obvious.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and obviously I'm not straightforward. You know, I'm very, I just, I'm going for it all the time. I'm not, you can't rely on me to stay still. I don't become replete and sit back even now in my 60s.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He says she turned the tables over, she threw chairs. He said, I'm not frightened of any woman, so I didn't lock my bedroom door. But obviously he wasn't sleeping in the same bed as her that night. And from that moment on, really, our relationship wasn't so good, mine and Anita.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great city. A great city there, great city now. Bear in mind my image of the States I hadn't traveled at all. So I'd been to Seattle a couple of times, but my image of the States was very much formed off of the American comics I read as a little boy. And also the American business books I'd read and the entrepreneurial spirit of the states. So, you know, that's what I felt good about. And so, yeah, so we opened this shop. I mean, when you describe it to someone, you think it's slightly lunatic. It gets worse because it didn't really make money. But then at Gordon decided he would tell Anita. Had a couple of glasses of wine, and then he thought he'd tell Anita. And he told me I've never been more wrong in my life”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I don't know how that happened. I think Gordon said to me, look, why don't we do this and I'll tell Anita later on, right? So, I don't know why I fell for that because that was definitely foolish. And I did all the work. I did all of the product. We got the shop. My brother-in-law said he would run it. Why Seattle?”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I said to Gordon, well, why don't I come up with a new concept in the States? And we looked at that because they couldn't do the body shop. So she would quite like to have a different business that was not nicked from someone in San Francisco with all that complexity. So I did a new product, myself and my team. We did something called Bodkins, which we opened in Seattle.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there was always much talk about, well, we would do something together rather than me be a supplier and then we would do something together.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was about five or six people working with me then. What's very nice when we're talking about, well, how do you have the success later on is one of them was Carl Bygrave, one was Rowena Hoffbauer, as she was then BirdNow, one was Liz Bennett, then all of those people Helen Ambrosen, they are the team now. They're the elite team, the top team.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was always wonderful, very supportive. You know, when you look at Lush and people admire Lush for its values, especially the way women are treated and things like that, that's all Liz Bennett, she married and her name became Bennett, Liz Weir. That's her. She took me to one side. I mean, bear in mind, I had not had much of a social education. And she would take me to one side. And she would say, if we're going to build a business based on women, you can't pat them on the backside when they walk by. And of course, she was fairly austere. So you didn't want to be told twice. I absolutely took her word as that was it. She told me I did it. So those standards, you know, she had the standards all the time, which I probably lacked.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something, something, something. That's how it was all the time. It was chaotically wonderful. She was driven not quite medical but close, you know, there was both of us were frightened of dying, you know, I mean, we were very similar, very streety, not comfy in our lives. Do you know what I mean? There was no, we're not talking about a confident woman in the sense of accomplished and stylish and Svelt. We're talking about a woman who was as driven as I was. I thought she was going to have a breakdown, then I realized no, I was going to have the breakdown.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would have an argument with her on the phone. She would call me unprofessional. I would tell her that she couldn't call me unprofessional. She would then call me a very rude word, beginning with W and N and R. I would then say, yes, you can call me that rude word beginning in W and ending in R, but you can't call me unprofessional. Then about an hour later there would be knock on the door. I'd opened the door. There'd be a florist with a huge smile on his face giving me a bunch of flowers and on the carpet it would have the word W”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They also transformed an element of the cosmetic industry. They were unbelievably influential, charismatic. It felt very much like royalty in the sense that when they blessed you with their presence, you were pleased and when you weren't in their presence, it wasn't so good. We would have a fairly tempestuous relationship, I think would be the right description.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, his dad had said to me, what you do is you buy the raw materials and then you double that to sell it. You have to have enough margin. Because as you add to the costs, do you know what I mean? Obviously, you know, I mean, I was probably making a lot more money per product when I just made it myself up in a room than as things developed. Because obviously, but if you've got enough margin there in your model, it works okay.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Gordon Roddick helped me a lot. I don't know where he learned, but basically I'd been taught already by Mark Young's father.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at the time. I was busy. You were busy. I was getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning making the stuff. If I saw someone, we certainly weren't talking about how well I was doing. We're talking about the English here, bear in mind. We don't do that kind of stuff. We don't admire each other. It's just not part of it.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened was, I like working from my home. It worked for me. So I found a bigger house with a nice garage and plenty of space at the back to make product. And then I managed to make product from there for seven years. Now you're not supposed to do that in Britain because there's planning controls. So I managed to make it without the planners catching me for seven years. And I can remember I went off to see Return of the Jedi. And when I came back, my babysitter said, oh, a man's been round from the planning authority. So I think I'd got my business up to half a million turnover by then out of my garage and out of the back of the house.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you know, and they couldn't even touch the US. So that was outside of the US. They had franchises in Sweden multiplying. They had franchises in Finland, in Germany, in France.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was their biggest supplier. No, but they started a franchise. And before we knew where we were, they had the fastest growing cosmetic company in the world”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we went a year or so to try and make money there, and we couldn't. And so I said to Liz, well, why don't you join me in the making the stuff? You know all about skin. I know all about hair. And between us, we can come up with the products. And then when I had to prepare a product for her, I mean, she was a really hard taskmaster. So I had to work and work and work and study and read up and the cosmetologies and other books until I got it right. I probably made better skin products than I did hair. You know, when I learned the hair stuff, it was just a technical skill I learned with the skin stuff, I had to really study and work hard.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it wasn't to do with making products. What we did was we opened a little clinic for me to treat people's hair and scalp and to do henna colours on. And she would do her beauty therapy. And we'd share the room, you know, the third room, which was a reception storeroom. But the problem was that it was incredibly cold there and we didn't get much business. So we made money still by making product for other people much more than we did from our little clinic.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and with that money, I started a little herbal hair and beauty clinic with Liz Weir. It was called Constantine and Weir's Country Cosmetics, Good for Your Skin and Good For Your Hair. So hippie again. And so I'd been told by another business person, what you do is you buy all your raw materials, you make the product, and you double that when you sell it. And then you don't spend that money on yourself, you then reinvest that back into your business.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They sold really well. I mean, far better than I, you know, I could have imagined. I mean, we are talking about one of the best sales ladies I've ever met. You know, she could sell anything. So obviously she made them popular.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it would be henna cream shampoo, elderberry conditioner, ladies mantle heat filter, aromatherapy scalpeil, herbal hair colours.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back to pool and go back to this little. Then I had to phone up the suppliers and ask for credit because I had no money. So I couldn't buy the materials to make the order. They all kindly gave me credit. I then said to her she would have to pay cash on delivery. She then paid cash on delivery. I whizzed back afterwards and paid them all. I didn't expect to get a second order. I thought that would be it. I don't know why. I obviously didn't have much confidence in my own product, but then when I had a second order and a third and a fourth, it was like, wow, I couldn't believe my luck.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or what? So she orders a thousand pounds or glass glass jars. I wanted glass jars because of the environmental principles. She hated the glass jars. She wanted plastic jars because she wasn't so struck on the environment at that time. So there were quite a lot of arguments. There were lots of arguments like that. She was a very argumentative person.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they were very authentic. I tried them on anyone else. That's what they'd say to me. Yeah, well, we can see these are authentic, Mark, but we really don't think they're going to sell. But she believed they were going to sell.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And call it the body shop But she, you know, you've got to get context on Anita. We have a dynamic, vital woman. Who's living in a fairly open relationship with an unbelievable bloke? I mean, Gordon Roddick, poet, horseman, he'd gone off to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York. He was writing for the observer about his experiences while he did it. Well, he was just a bohemian. So, you know, that we're not talking about everyday people here, which I definitely was. And they'd had a hotel which they sold. And she just wanted to try this idea out that she'd seen in San Francisco. And so when I first went there, of course, Nita knew nothing about hair and skin and I knew everything between Liz and I, we knew everything about hair and skin.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. If I come and live with you now in San Francisco and we go up and down the coast, if we'd have done the same thing at that same time, we would have seen the body shop that inspired her in the first place, and we would have seen a whole series of mum and pop shops exactly like that right up the west coast from Seattle, right the way down through Portland. All of those people were making small amounts of products and packaging them simply. There was the cleansing bar and all sorts of different businesses, but there were none in Britain that just we didn't have that at all. We had nothing. None of that innovation, none of that stuff.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I paid for the train journey, met her. She'd opened her second shop by then. I went in the shop and it was just wonderful. There was this charismatic woman selling low packaged product that was genuine. Young people buying small amounts of stuff for fun and experimentation, everything about the shop really wowed me. I just loved it. Very, you know, very simplistic bottles with very simple labels, no fancy stuff really suited me.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened? What actually happened was that I had seen a little advert in Honey magazine. For a salon in Brighton, not a salon, a shop, and I was making stuff on the side for different people. And so basically I found this woman's address and a phone number. I didn't have a phone at home. So basically I had to go to the phone box and phone her up. and see if she would like any product She'd started this shop called the Body Shop.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was the beauty therapist in the salon, and I was the trichologist. We were both freelancers, so we would spend our spare time chit-chatting about, well, hair and skin, basically. I always used to feel sorry if we were on the train, the two of us, and someone fell asleep in front of us, we would just take them apart bit by bit.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know, but I always did. I think it came in when I was about seven or eight. I went with my mum to the movies and I saw a movie where rat poison got in some bread. And it was a frightening black and white movie. And I think it really made me frightened of chemicals. So I always had this leaning towards nature anyway. So I much prefer to be involved in herbs or alternatives and was always very, very conscious of what was a safe chemical and what was not a safe chemical. That again informed what I did because now I make products with mainly natural materials and what I consider to be safe synthetics having studied that repeatedly all through my career.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't doing the kitchen. I've made a tiny room, changed my little tiny box room up in my bedroom into a little lab. Yeah It was above the kitchen. I'd got a basin in there. I got taps in there. I'd got some vessels. I got a big paddle. You know, I could heat water and I could heat oil and I could make products. And I was making stuff on the side for different people because I couldn't earn enough money in the salon I was working in.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I persuaded a large salon in Paul that they needed a trichologist. And then I went and did the same thing for them that I had been doing in these West End salons. So there was a guy there called Mark Young who was very ambitious. He had 100 staff. So for a salon outside of London to be that size. That was good. And so lots of people would go there, he'd train a lot of people. Moe worked in the courts as an assistant to the clerk of the courts and so she was working there and that was good money and then I was earning you know just a pittance and you”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's the human condition. I think if you understand mortality and you're not anxious, what's wrong with you? Know, I mean, once you understand, once you have a death like that of someone so dear and you don't understand, then you've not got the hang of it. It's the human condition, isn't it? That's the point. If we didn't have that, we wouldn't be driven. We wouldn't do the things we do. You know, you have to have a clear understanding of a finite period of time. You have to have it”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's exactly it. But it was all connected with the death of my grandmother, I think, because it entered me then in that very young age. And I was hyperventilating even at sort of 11 due to the circumstances. So I think, yeah, it entered me then. It didn't really leave until I was in my late 50s.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, yeah. At that time, I went to the doctors and I tried to describe how I felt. And he said, I said, I just don't feel normal. He said, well, to find normal. I didn't think I had heart palpitations. I thought I was dying of a heart attack every time. So the joke was I never had indigestion. I only had heart attacks. A very kind doctor that I still use said to me, Mark, you'd have been better off having heart attacks. They're less disconcerting. You were having...”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. Well, actually, I realized she made the choice. And I'm very grateful. So I think that probably gave me some stability. I was still relatively optimistic as far as I was concerned. But anxiety I had in spades and panic attacks, especially about heart attacks, which is how my grandmother had died, that went into me at that moment and it stayed with me for an awfully long time.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He'll all caught up with me, I suppose. The leaving home, the homeless period. I think I'd sort of got to a point where I was earning enough money to live. And so the striving fell away for a while. So I think that I got to that point where the other thing that had happened to me, I'd got married. And as you know, as your listeners will certainly know, getting married is quite a big thing. And Mo, we have to bring Mo in at this point, who is much more stable than me.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And most of us that did it, most of the trichologists went on then to make products for other people. So we very much went into products, we made products for the salons anyway, and we developed our skills more and more in that area”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's also the science of hair and scalp. So that whole thing of starting off doing my hairdressing apprentice, taking the qualifications with that, then going on and studying trichology, another three years of nerdy study, all about hair and scalp and the skin.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, what happened was that I was working, that the owner, because I was so nerdy, I think, he thought I would make a good trichologist. And in those days in London salons, they had two or three qualified trichologists who checked the scalps for disease. They dealt with the hair condition, and they made the products for the salon and things like that.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. Because I couldn't afford them. I had no money. I sit next, I could sit between two people. I mean, I would say, although there was a lot of generosity, there wasn't a lot of generosity with drugs. My education was purely observational.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Um... Well, from my point of view, I was on that sort of below stairs angle. So I was in service really to the various people and saw that other side. Quite a lot of the people I was working with were drug addicts because nobody really understood the severity of the drugs. So they experimented and then they got the wrong side of it all. And drug taking, it's what I remember predominantly and not the fun side of it. I just remember a lot of sad stuff going on, really.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Washing hair wasn't doing much else. I was learning stuff. What they call an improver. That was the term used at the time, an improver. So you weren't an apprentice, but you weren't a hairdresser either. So basically, I would accompany hairdressers when they had to go out to do the theatre, or I would go on a vogue shoot, but I would be the runner.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Well, that was Elizabeth Arden. I worked for Elizabeth Arden. So it was called the Red Door, and it was a big salon with over 100 staff. It had 200 staff in it.”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the kindness and the care and the thoughtfulness and the charity, they were all great lessons for me. And they stayed with me all my life”
2020-10-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Lush Cosmetics: Mark Constantine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT