Hello Dr. Lampa how lovely to meet you............
Were you involved in creating alternative brands on behalf of others before
making the decision the creat your own?
Not really. When I started to work, in late '60s, Italy was still a very conservative country, where female work was relegated only to traditional jobs, such as primary school teachers, nurses, etc. 80% of women were simple house-wifes. Even those few who graduated at the university, like me, had very few opportunities to enter the work universe.
After my graduation, I got married and got three babies. But I was not happy enough, so I started to cooperate in my husband's pharmacy, which is one of the oldest and biggest pharmacy shop in Rome.
As soon as I joined the pharmacy crew, an increasingly number of women started to visit me, asking for suggestions about their children skin affections, advices on how to protect them from sunburn, napkin irritation, etc. After they began to have confidence in me, they also began to ask for preparations to keep their skin soft and wrinkles-free.
In this very moment, I realised that the products available on the shelves were not made for the women real necessities – and I started to think that I could perhaps do something to offer them better solutions.
What was the inspiration behind the brand?
I was born in a sort of pioneering family, in a rural area of central Italy. My father was the estimated village doctor, and my mother was the first female lawyer in that area. Her incredible force has inspired me to look for a profession who could help women to upgrade their life-style. Women were asking an aid to preserve their beauty as an essential part of their welfare. It was a demand coming really from their soul, and was enourmously under-estimated. Women asked to feel better with their bodies in order to feel better towards the world. So, I started to study and create new skin-care products, signing the line simply with my own name, dr. Anna Laura. One day, as a joke, a friend of mine mispelled it as “ Dr. Laur Anne “, and so it was. Now it is a world-wide registered brand name.
Are you surprised by the popularity of the brand?
To be sincere, quite a lot. Everything happened so fast, I could merely understand what was going on around me. In the past 40 years, I used to wake up early in the morning, while the telephone was ringing; usually, clients who asked for an advice for a beauty therapy or just wanted to tell me about an event in their private life: a baby was born, a daughter got married...
Who is involved in the creation of the brand?
Our Company is not a big one, but a medium-size family run identity. My son, dr. Gaetano Galeppi ( chemist ) is cooperating with us since a long time already. He is now managing the company himself.
He is used to attend several exhibitions worldwide, and do also travel a lot, sourcing for any kind of news about the market of dermo-cosmetic applications.
Recently, we have also developed a strict cooperation with some universities, in Italy and abroad, to develop specific studies about the use of certain raw material from natural derivation, such as the snail secretion ( slime ) extract.
When we find a new raw material which sounds interesting, we have a briefing with our laboratory staff ( two chemists ), myself, and our marketing staff.
We look for a product which must respect the following charachteristics:
If only one of these conditions is not respected, the new product is rejected... and we start again with our researches. We usually launch one line per year ( one line is intended to be a full set of dermocosmetics: day cream, night cream, perhaps a cleanser, an eye product, etc. )
How do you choose the people you work with, and the loyal team you have created around you?
We do welcome stagists from various schools, not only from chemist faculty, but also management schools, Italian or foreigners. In these very moment we are hosting two stagists from Spain, in the recent past we have cooperated with a French management school.
Possibly, we like to work with these young people; most of them are really very high-skilled, and very enthusiastic about the work. Youngs can bring new energies and new ideas to the company, and can easily adapt to any situation. What we require them is maximum flexibility – we are a team, and we do work together, for mutual benefits – there's no space for personal egoisms.
With the years, some people have left, some others have remained and are now representing the spinal bone of the company. The person in charge for exports, Mrs. Sabrina Fusar Poli is working with us since 26 years, our accountant young iron-lady, Mrs. Alessia Giannetti, is with us since 12 years now. I had other staff who joined me at the age of 18 and continued so far, till the retirement age. We are a huge, exciting family. Every member brings new perspectives to the whole.
Where do you see the brand going in the future?
Our future is not in Italy, but abroad. We may call it destiny, but, in year 1986, when, for the first time, I packed my things and travelled to introduce our brand in very far countries, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, I didn't imagine the great success our products could gain over there.
The same happened in Middle-East countries, like in Russia, where we regularly export the main part of our yearly production.
We are happy to see that the Made in Italy style is welcome everywhere... except in our own country! If you want to sell in Italy, you must somehow be esotic. A popular Italian saying plays: “ The neighbor's grass is always greener”...
Do you have any new and exciting products in the pipeline that we can look forward to?
The new frontier of dermo-cosmetic products are functional ingredients, which can interact with the skin functionality. Vegetable staminal cells are quite on demand now, as representing an extraordinary mean of skin rejuvenation. But there's still lots to study about them, we are just at the very beginning of this issue.
The world of nature is full of exciting ingredients which can offer us inspiration for the creation of new successfull products.
We are quite satisfied of the cooperation we started a couple of years ago with Prof. Pavlina Dolaskha, a well reputed member of the Academy of Science of Sofia, Bulgaria. This incredible lady has dedicated more than twelve years in studying all features and possible applications of the snail slime extract, and her academic studies are published in several languages in all Europe.
Today, she is personally directing the breeding of an enourmous quantity of snails in the countryside of Bulgaria, near the Rose Valley, where these little animals are grown up in a bacteriological safe environment. Every year, the slime which is collected by the farmers, is first elaborated and purified in the academy's laboratory and after this first process, sent directly to us in Italy. We use it in our Helixir line, and are now studying new interesting applications for new products.
Thank you so much for taking the time to meet and talk with me.
For more information and products please visit www.drlauranne.co.uk