Dr Tiina Meder of Meder Beauty: Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Modern Beauty Industry
Healthy skin looks beautiful and happy people look beautiful. Everything that makes you happy and helps your skin stay healthy makes you feel truly beautiful. Healthy lifestyle, practice of mindfulness, various and healthy diets, loving friends and family and a good skincare all are part of it.
As a part of our series about “Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Modern Beauty Industry”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Tiina Meder.
Meder Beauty is a professional skincare brand founded by dermatologist Dr. Tiina Meder. It started from a passion to use new and innovative ingredients to create products that would be truly inclusive and support microbiome health. Created in the Swiss laboratory and loved by skin clinics all over the world, Meder Beauty products are suitable for all ages, all skin types and at any stage of life, including during pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause. Meder Beauty microbiome-friendly skincare is always science-based, cruelty-free and sustainable.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
In my childhood I dreamed of being a chemist, like my mother. I was reading chemistry books, kept an experiment journal, constantly looked for new substances and ingredients for my experimental reactions. But my mother was adamant. “Over my dead body you’ll be a chemist”, she told me. “Chemistry is too dangerous for female health”. She wasn’t so wrong, we lived in a small industrial town with an extremely high level of breast cancer amongst women working in chemical factories. So I became a doctor and started an internship in the cardiology department. I was very focused on female health and joined a team investigating young mothers with congenital heart conditions. We were looking for a change in their health after giving birth. These women expressed such a vivid interest in beauty and their skin health and that surprised me a lot. Young women like me, suffering from life threatening conditions, who had recently been through a difficult pregnancy and now care for their little babies, were asking me about acne, cellulite or skin sensitivity. That was a tipping point when I understood that skin health is playing a key role in the quality of life. Soon I became a young mother myself and changed specialisation — switching to dermatology from cardiology. In a few years I was invited to take part in the research and development of skincare and my childhood dream came true — despite all I was in the laboratory!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
As I worked as a safety expert and head of international training for global brands, I have a lot of stories from my travels, so it’s hard to pick one. I was doing lectures during the earthquake in Taipei, training skin therapists at the Bangkok night market because they couldn’t come to my training earlier and I had a night flight. Once, I stayed alone in the Kuala-Lumpur Ritz hotel a few days before the seasonal closure. It was such a surrealistic experience to walk through dark hallways to my room. Since I launched my brand in 2009 I’ve met a lot of amazing dedicated professionals. I did my first brand presentation on 27th of July to a group of skin therapists and dermatologists. I wanted to test the whole concept, but one of the participants asked me if she could get all the professional kits after the event and successfully performed the first Meder facial in her clinic the very same evening. Her name is Kristina and she is still one of the best Meder therapists in Estonia, the first in the world named Meder National Expert in 2019. That’s probably my favourite story.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
To be honest, I’ve never seen a tipping point at the time it happened. Maybe we are going through a tipping point right now? The lesson I learned is to take everything as a potential tipping point and try to do my best even if it seems to be insignificant now. The most important thing is to stay loyal to your values and keep going. Success is a journey and not a destination.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
A lot of people helped me — every skin therapist, beautician, dermatologist I met helped me to understand something new about skincare and our profession. A lot of colleagues and friends supported me through all these years. Our amazing Meder Beauty international team is incredibly supportive and I am very proud to work with each of the team members. But the most supportive person is my husband with whom we built a company and brand together. Years ago I came home so disappointed because my idea to create an anti-wrinkle solution based on peptides and probiotics was denied by brands I was working with. My husband listened to me and said: “You can do it yourself, I trust in you”. We sold our apartments and invested everything in research and development and launched Meder Beauty in a few years.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. The global beauty industry today has grown to more than a half a trillion dollar business. Can you tell us about the innovations that you are bringing to the industry? How do you think that will help people?
I am very passionate about the skin microbiome science and the vision of the skin as an ecosystem. Also, inclusivity and safety are very important to me and if the product is not safe enough to be used by pregnant women or people of all ethnicities and skin types I don’t think it should be on the market. So I am developing efficient and microbiome-friendly solutions that can be safely used at any period in life by everyone looking to improve their skin health.
Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the modern beauty industry?
We are living in an incredible time of scientific breakthroughs. In the last twenty years we’ve started to understand our skin so much better and now we can create potent and safe skincare products with all new generations of ingredients, such as peptides, probiotics, prebiotics, stem cells, growth factors, new plant derived and bio fermented extracts. I hope that the beauty industry is becoming cleaner, microbiome friendly and more inclusive.
Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to improve the industry, what would you suggest?
I am concerned about greenwashing and eco washing in our industry. Unfortunately, a lot of promises are still empty and we are moving to sustainability too slowly. Another thing is a lack of proper scientific research and tests proving marketing claims. A lot of claims like “83% less of wrinkles” are based on self assessments of volunteers being manipulated by experts. We need a transparent system of clinical tests but it should be affordable for independent brands too. Also, I am very concerned about the use of fear mongering marketing in our industry. People should buy skincare not because they are afraid of ageing but because they want to be healthier and look great. They are two opposite motivations and I hope “fear messages” will be banned one day.
You are an expert about beauty. Can you share a few ideas that anyone can use “to feel beautiful”?
Healthy skin looks beautiful and happy people look beautiful. Everything that makes you happy and helps your skin stay healthy makes you feel truly beautiful. Healthy lifestyle, practice of mindfulness, various and healthy diets, loving friends and family and a good skincare all are part of it.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, Can you please share “Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Modern Beauty Industry”. Please share a story or an example, for each.
● Be genuine and follow your dream.
● Don’t be afraid to be out of your comfort zone — the most interesting ideas are outside of it.
● Practice a systemic view of the world and see things in their complexity and interconnectedness, without simplification. Skincare is not a sum of ingredients, skin is an ecosystem and animals or marine life have the same importance that humans.
● Simplify the message! To be understood is so important — to speak clearly and simply, especially in the era of social media.
● Respect everyone working with you and listen to customers but keep loyal to your core values.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Now I want most of all to stop the war in Ukraine and stop all wars around the world. We should learn how to respect life and respect our planet. The microbiome is amazingly similar to human society and I am afraid we have become such an aggressive microbiome of our planet Earth. We should learn how to live symbiotically with the planet and each other.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I read in my childhood one of my favourite books: “Some people love horses and some people love how they look on the horse”. I am trying to love horses in everything I am doing.
How can our readers follow you online?
I am not very active on social media but there are few links:
https://www.instagram.com/drtiinameder/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiina-orasmae-meder
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
