Who goes to the U.S. to conquer the American market without speaking English?
Probably only someone crazy enough.
It was me.
Anyone who still has a recording of our first Synergy Call knows what I’m talking about.
My English wasn’t bad.
It was practically non-existent.
I think it was 2016 when I placed an ad in Los Angeles:
Assistant wanted.
But only if she also speaks German.
In response to this ad, Seta got in touch.
More than ten years later, she’s still with us.
We held our first job interviews at one of my favorite hotels in Los Angeles, the Casa del Mar.
I spoke German.
Seta translated everything into English.
That’s how our American adventure began.
Not with a big US team.
Not with an American agency.
Not with a perfect presentation.
But with a German who wanted to conquer America without speaking English – and with Seta, who made sure anyone could understand him at all.

Then came Venice Beach

In 2019, I moved into my house in Venice Beach.
In November, we held our first influencer event there.
Our plan was clear: we wanted to build the American market the way we had previously built Europe.
With retail.
With influencers.
With selected spas and beauticians.
It was a sensible plan.
Then Covid hit.
Suddenly, nothing was reasonable anymore.
The world shut its doors. Spas closed. Beauty salons were fighting for survival. No one knew what would happen in a few weeks or months.
We still tried to build Oliveda through spas and estheticians.
But it was completely the wrong time.
No beautician invests in a new brand that hardly anyone knows about during an existential crisis.
We could believe in our products as much as we wanted.
The market wasn’t ready.
So we had to question everything all over again.
Not the products.
Not the olive trees.
The path to people.

Then I discovered direct-to-consumer.

I discovered direct-to-consumer.
For the first time, we understood that we didn’t have to wait for a retailer, a spa, or a beautician to open the door to the American market for us.
We could walk through that door ourselves.
Directly to the people.
In 2022, we made the decision.
We would build America in a completely different way.
Not through the structures that already existed.
But through a new movement of Waterless Beauty Consultants.
Or rather:
By pioneers.
At the beginning of 2023, we released a press statement that many probably thought was completely delusional.
We wrote that within the first 18 months we would build more than 30,000 Waterless Beauty Consultants.
Back then, we didn’t even have 30,000.
We had a garage.

The Venice Beach garage

Then it started.
Seta.
Beatrice.
Jaqueline.
Maria.
And I.
In a garage in Venice Beach.
At the beginning, 40 orders came in per day.
We packed them ourselves.
Then it became 100.
Then 200.
Then 500.
The garage became the office.
To the warehouse.
To the parcel locker.
To the command center.
There were products, boxes, packing materials, and orders everywhere.
We worked out of the garage.
We packed orders in the garage.
We grew in the garage.
Then came 1,000 orders a day.
The garage had reached its limit.
So we moved into our first warehouse.
But that was only the beginning as well.
1,000 orders turned into thousands.
And eventually the volume exploded to as many as 10,000 orders a day.
Not in ten years.
Not with hundreds of millions of dollars in start-up capital.
Not with a huge American organization.
It started with five people in a garage.
With a press release that was bigger than anything we had to show at that point.
With a vision that sounded completely unrealistic to reasonable people.
And with a German who had gone to America to conquer the American market without speaking English.

We had no language. But we had a voice.

The experts would probably have said:
First, learn English.
First, build an experienced US team.
Secure retail first.
Wait for the right moment.
Start smaller.
Don’t promise 30,000 consultants when you’re still working out of a garage.
But if we had always waited until we were ready, we would never have started.
We weren’t ready.
We were convinced.
That was stronger.
Covid had destroyed our first plan.
So we built a new one.
The retail trade hadn’t opened its doors to us.
So we built our own.
We didn’t have a huge warehouse.
So we started in a garage.
I didn’t speak any English.
But the story of the olive trees didn’t need perfect pronunciation.
It also needed people crazy enough to believe in it.

40 orders.
100.
200.
500.
1,000.
10,000 a day.

From a garage in Venice Beach, a movement was born.
Consultants became pioneers.
And from a crazy German olive farmer, I became someone who actually began to conquer America.

Happy Birthday, OLIVEDA.