Owner and creator of MERUMAYA, Maleka Dattu played a major role in growing many businesses. Her entrepreneurial flare and fearlessness paved a way to earn her senior roles in admired brands such as Lancome UK and Estee Lauder. At the age of 48, after the birth of her first child she founded MERUMAYA.

I'm pretty much like a lot of young girls who have older sisters. My dad's younger sister came to live with us and she was studying hairdressing and she was really into beauty. I got interested in that and from watching my mum painting her nails - but that's not really any different from any other girl. It was just something that stuck and when my mum went to hairdressing college, she took me with her one day. They used to have a half day that was called recreation day and she took me in, in the morning. I was only young, only about 8 or 9 and they set my hair in rollers and they made a big fuss about me. I just had the most incredible experience. It’s possible that had an effect on me. When you are the child of parents who have come here to make a better life, they have high expectations of you in terms of the education that is made available to you. So when I announced to my dad that I wanted to be a hairdresser, I literally had to scrape him off the ceiling. I was meant to be a doctor, pharmacist, dentist - all of the kind of stuff that your parents want you to be. So, he made a deal with me, and he said ‘stay on and do your A-levels at school, and if after you have done your A-levels, you don't want to go to university then fine, go and do your hairdressing’ but I messed around for a year. A year into my A-levels, he said ‘I think I have wasted a year of your life. Just do what you want to do’. I did hairdressing and beauty therapy and I also went to the hairdressing salon on the weekends but I knew I didn't want a hairdressing salon or a beauty salon for my life - I knew that's what I did not want to do.

There was a company called Original Additions that used to supply salons with hairdressing wholesalers and they used to be the agent for a lot of beauty enthusiasts. One of them came along and did a demonstration at my college for skin care and when she gave the demonstration I was like ‘yeah that's what I want to do’. I took her card and went to the phone box because there were not any mobiles then, and called her the next day. I told her I wanted to be her assistant and she told me that I needed to write to the owner of the company which was Anthea. So, I wrote to her and said ‘look, I would like to be Denise’s assistant and I want a company car’. I started working for her, in the showroom, doing things like ordering supplies, putting it on the shelf, keeping it all clean, selling the product and that's how it started. I think from then, I had an entrepreneurial flair. I created this plan - I wanted to try and get us into magazines and she indulged me a little bit and let me get on with it, so I tried that. I was also that kind of person that wanted to know what made the company work, so I wanted to get into everyone's roles for half a day - so I did. They were people placing orders and someone pulling them in, I went into credit control where they were chasing payments, I went into the warehouse and picked and packed orders. I did half a day in everyone's department. I’m still in contact with her. She’s like my second mum and is very involved with my daughter. She had established a training centre by then in Chelsea, and I was just a couple of streets away so I took over the showroom and started growing it and cultivating it. A lot of clients were actually from Nigeria and they would come over here and buy things in bulk, creams, wax, sun glasses and those kinds of things. So I grew that business. I then said to Anthea that I wanted to be trained at the training school, so they taught me. It then occurred to me that these training courses were a big investment to people and at that time they were probably £250 to £500 a day, people had to travel down - it's the cost of staying overnight, the hotels, the training course and then they have to buy or rent the kit. I thought, ‘well you are supplying all these products to hairdressing wholesalers, how about we do a deal with them’?

When I left, I was doing a bit of freelance work and then I went to work for Clinique and I was there as a Regional Training Manager and I was their Account Executive. In all these roles, I was the youngest actually. I used to go out and buy clothes to make myself look a bit older than I was. I had the stature as I'm quite tall, but I thought it made me look a lot more serious and they would respect me more. I was an Account Executive and then I was promoted to Regional Marketing Manager for the South and the Channel Islands, and then I was promoted to run the whole of the London region, which was a big part of the business. Then I was promoted to run Origins in the UK and I was there 9 years or so. I took it from a small brand to a brand that was really doing well. It was really doing the best out of all the international markets and then I was asked to go and work in the states to help them revive the Origins business over there as Senior Vice President and General Manager. I came back to the UK in July 2008 and I decided that because I had worked for 25 years and I wanted a bit of a sabbatical. I was going to take 6 months off for the summer in London and decide what I was going to do. Word got around that I was back in London and at one time there were 11 things on the plate between jobs, people wanting me to do consultancy, someone wanting me to take part in their business, me starting my own business and various other ventures. It was a nice feeling, it gives you some validation.

Lancôme were pursuing me in a big way and I'm very retail and people orientated - so they wanted me to come on board so that they could learn about that. I did it for a year and I gave them their best ever skin care launch in the UK but it wasn't really where my heart was. I knew I could do it but, growing my career in another corporate setting really wasn’t where my heart was anymore. I had a brilliant time in the corporate world - I had worked in Estee Lauder for 21 years. I had learnt a lot including what I didn't want to do. I learnt that I really wanted to prioritise the end consumer and that I didn’t want to dupe them and be clever with words or position those words to make women believe things that they shouldn't believe. I left Lancome and I started doing some consultancy work and when I started doing that, I started researching creating my own brand and that process took over two and a half years.

Sometimes, there are events that lead you to a place and you even realise that you are being led. Sometimes that can be what makes you take the leap from employment to entrepreneur. It doesn't mean it's any less scary, it is scary and one of the things that you learn when you do research is how much you don't know. You can get into these senior positions and be really good but then you come out of that and get into the nitty gritty of how to make a product. When we were making decisions on the packaging for a new product, I didn't realise that maybe the cap was coming from one supplier and the bottle from another supplier. The pump may have been coming from another supplier and that they were all available to use in different minimum order quantities and those are the kind of things you learn. You have to learn how to be more self sufficient - for the last 15 years, I had a PA.

During this time, there may be many people re-assessing their life. We are all doing things that we have never done, or reconnecting with those who are absolutely closest to us, that we don't normally. We have been forced as a human race to slow down and that gives us some time to evaluate and think what is important to us and if you are really good at what you do.

If you want to be an entrepreneur you want to start when you have the energy. It takes a lot and you will need resilience for all the doors that are going to be slammed in your face. I was 48 and that can be considered late, but surprisingly there is a high very high proportion of women who start over from the age of 50, which is really good news. I tell many women it's not over until you can’t walk anymore, so keep going, keep dreaming, keep pursuing those dreams.

Use this time now if you are furloughed or if you are working from home to try and formulate how you would start your business - this is a great time.

I'll tell you why I called my business MeruMaya - it’s linked to my father. MeruMaya is a platform for me to help women to be more confident about themselves. When women feel confident, they make better life decisions. Everything in my products and everything I do with communicating about my products is about confidence and my formula is about integrity. It's about truth, it's about honesty. If the ingredient was clinically tested at 5%, I use it at 5%, I don't use it at 1% because it will be high on the ingredients list and not caring about if my customer gets results. I do care. My skincare brand is my platform to have a voice but the two are so interlinked. In my skincare brand, it translates as ‘I will not lie to you and say we are going to get rid of your high pigmentation because no cream will but I will make it better’. I want to underpromise and over deliver - that is what excites me. When someone buys my products, truly, I am so grateful that they have trusted me with their skin and I don't want to let any one of them down. I just want women to have great skin, not perfect skin, not flawless skin. There's no such thing as perfect, great skin yes and the confidence to be yourself. We are all perfectly imperfect and that is what makes us unique.

For those who want to start their business, when you plan your numbers and you are doing a forecast, imagine that you are going to lose money. My plan was that I would lose money in the first year, break even in the second year and make more money in the third year. Always underestimate sales and overestimate expenses and understand cash flow. You can be growing, growing, growing and many other businesses are not getting good growth and getting good sales because they run out of cash so they need to understand the difference between sales and cash flow. Profit and cash flow. You need a good network of support and will also need to be able to survive for a while without any support. For me, I was truly passionate and even if I felt flat on my face that would be less painful to me than not trying. You also have to know your point of difference. So you don't have to have a product that is brand new, you can do something that someone is doing but just make it better. Ask yourself, is this functionality going to be better? Is it going to be packaged better? Is it going to be easier to use? Is it going to be quicker and save people time and money? Is it going to be a better design? I will give you an example, Dyson versus Hoover. Find out what your point of difference is and find out how you are going to communicate that. One other thing that comes up time and time again, is that people who start businesses, are not usually the best salesperson. You need to think about that really carefully. As the Brand Manager you need to be able to sell the business, your concept and your point of difference. It has to be in your soul. No one will or should ever sell a product as much as you can. Another thing is - put all your pride away. Your pride is going to take a battering so there is no room for pride.

You have to be prepared for the intensity. I always used to work harder at the Estee Lauder. I would be at breakfast meetings for 8am and I would very rarely leave before 8pm. I wouldn’t sometimes leave until 10pm and I was travelling.

Maleka’s favourite product that she would encourage us all to buy is the Iconic Youth Serum. “It really will make a difference to your skin from the first time you use it and it will just get better and better and better. That's our number one. Our number one unit seller is the Melting Cleansing Balm and that is a really good example of a product that takes on what is already there in the marketplace. I took it on in packaging, in formula, in speed, in price and I made it better in every single way. It wasn't a new invention but it was better than anything else. The other one that everyone should start with is the Intensely Youthful Eye Cream. It is particularly good now for those who have hay fever”.

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Conversations With Her: MALEKA DATTU

WOTC Magazine

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Conversations With Her: MALEKA DATTU

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WOTC Magazine