Source: Wealth Creator Magazine March/April 2006

Even when he was driving a fork lift and studying business law, Napoleon Perdis dreamed of influencing the way leaders in fashion and media appeared. He was one of a rare breed who, as a child, knew exactly what he wanted to do.

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Napolean Perdis: Laying the Foundations

Source: Wealth Creator Magazine March/April 2006

Emmanuel's keys to success:

  1. Have a goal. Have a vision and dare to dream the dream.
  2. Spend all your time figuring out how you might achieve the goal.
  3. Be honest with yourself. Feel the fear and go beyond the fear, go through the fear and don't deny yourself. Rise above and don't pretend things aren't there. Achieve what you need to achieve.
  4. The golden rule of human existence is 'do unto others that which you would have them do to you'.
  5. People skills. Communication, leadership, relationship, communication, negotiation.

Napolean Perdis: Laying the Foundations

They count Terri Hatcher, Jane Seymour, Debra Messing and Paula Abdul as their clients. They turn over $25 million and employ 328 make-up movers and shakers. Napoleon Perdis Cosmetics celebrated its 10 anniversary last year and will spend the next decade expanding globally.

Even when he was driving a fork lift and studying business law, Napoleon Perdis dreamed of influencing the way leaders in fashion and media appeared. He was one of a rare breed who, as a child, knew exactly what he wanted to do. His mother can vouch for this as hers was the first face on which Napoleon plied his trade - at primary school age.

His father, who owned several fish and chip shops in which Napoleon and brother Emmanuel worked, wanted his sons in the traditional parent/child manner to be lawyers and businessmen. To appease their father's wishes, Napoleon took on a Political Science degree majoring in business law and marketing management. Emmanuel studied a Bachelor of Commerce majoring in marketing. When they finished their degrees at ages 24 and 22 respectively, Napoleon was ready to reignite his dream and Emmanuel was happy to start a new family business.

The make-up artist

While Emmanuel was finishing his studies, Napoleon traveled to LA where he met the chairman of the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences. This meeting led to another with make-up artist Leonard Engelman, the artist for actors Cher and Val Kilmer who had his own cosmetics range. Napoleon began his Hollywood work on Batman Forever and Mocking the Cosmos, but quickly tired of the movie scene and set off to New York where he hooked up with a cosmetics manufacturer. Inspired he flew home and convinced his brother to start a cosmetics company.

"It wasn't the thing I always wanted to do," says Emmanuel of his involvement. "I was pretty much given the opportunity by being invited into partnership with Napoleon and I attained my training overseas. He sent me to California to be trained by some make-up artists in the movie and fashion industries so I could get credible and independent training."

Together they borrowed $15,000 each from their parents ­ - enough to open their first store in Oxford St in Paddington. Napoleon's wife Soula-Marie also backed the business. However there were tough challenges ahead.

"Finance was a large challenge," says Napoleon. "Also, it was hard to be taken seriously in the industry. It was a challenge to manage employees that were older than I was."

Emmanuel has a different take on age as a barrier believing it allowed him to write his own future. "It was more of a blank slate that allowed me to write my own story. I didn't have negative experiences from past jobs and I didn't really have expectations about what it meant to run a business. I was consistently in the moment and it allowed me to write my own experiences and create my beliefs from scratch."

Putting on a business face

That's not to say there weren't challenges. While Napoleon was coming to terms with learning and understanding negotiation techniques and learning how to deal with several people at once, Emmanuel was coming to terms with the things business schools don't teach. "They don't teach you people skills, they don't teach you negotiation skills, they don't teach you communication, they teach you a bunch of relatively useless and irrelevant theory that will only become practical once you go to the helm of the company. By that time you would have re-written all the rules yourself, so all my challenges stem from the fact that I was never properly trained or educated or shown how to effectively deal with people in all their states."

Napoleon was battling his own fears. "Acceptance by my peers and the industry was one of my biggest fears, but I overcame this by understanding and believing in myself and always relating to the customer."

His relationship with the customer led to a growing reputation among industry heavyweights. He worked with Harpers Bazaar Australia and Vogue Australia. He also pulled together a close-knit circle of advisors to help him grow and develop his skills as a retailer and distributor. He spent early years on the shop floor working 15 hour days and from that developed a 'Napoleon' method for each facet of the business. He embarked on a guerilla marketing campaign, creating a Napoleon Perdis environment with strong brand beliefs "that came to life with everything we did."

Emmanuel puts the company's growth down to the complementary skills the three partners share. "We have a very successful partnership between Napoleon's entrepreneurialism, my management/administrative skills and Soula-Marie's financial operations acumen. We were able to maintain balance and leverage our resources very cleverly and efficiently. It would also have to be our commitment to quality."

Another key was their marketing campaigns. "Our strategies have been below the line promotion," explains Emmanuel. "We were very thrifty, very cost effective and cost conscious of how we chose to promote ourselves. That has always been a guiding principle where we haven't been wasteful with our marketing dollars, but in fact always focusing on how to make more to plough it back into the business to build the brand into an amazing experience for the customer."

Through those strategies Napoleon Cosmetics has maintained an annual growth rate of 40% over the past four years and is sold through nearly 300 outlets throughout Australia and New Zealand. He has also set up in New York's prominent Sacks Fifth Avenue Department stores in the US and is now looking to break into Canada. "It's not a state, it's not a place, it's not a destination - it's a journey," says Emmanuel.

True Blue

Napoleon Cosmetics has stayed true to itself and the brothers' business ideals. Says Emmanuel, "the most important aspect of business success is not to lose yourself, to stay true to who you are, what you are, what you offer and what you love most in life." Napoleon believes business success is about "waking up everyday and being happy."

There is no doubt these complementary ideologies have formed the foundations for the company's success and now they look forward to another decade of growth and building on a reputation that has superceded many of their peers.