Transcript

Rachel Weiss:

The first time I saw Madonna, and what was it, 1983, it blew my mind. I was like, “Who is this woman?” She looked different, she was expressive. In my 12-year old, 11-old mind was enthralled.

Rachel Weiss:

We have a next generation of consumers who are feeling lonely and isolated. And what has happened to the psyche of everyone in the modern day of, what’s happened with social media? What does community look like? Who do you trust? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Rachel Weiss:

I’ve always been interested in the beauty business because, aside from everything I tell you, I was spending so much money of my disposable income on makeup products and hair salons. And that’s my personal jam. I never thought I’d have a career that combined, as my mom also said, “Wow, you’re getting a job that involves the computer and your hair.”

Aleks Krotoski:

Hello. And you’re listening to Standing on the Shoulders, a podcast about giants. Not the sort that stomped around in fairytales, but the more metaphorical kind. Writers, dancers, artists, performers, and philosophers, whose visions and experience help us to see a clear path ahead. Across these episodes you will hear stories of a number of thinkers and innovators. They’ll be telling us about the key moments that shaped their professional journeys. And they’ll talk about the person whose work inspired them the most. It’s hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski, and it’s supported by Pearson.

Aleks Krotoski:

Our guest today is Rachel Weiss. Rachel leads strategy growth and innovation at L’Oreal USA. She looks out for new digital business ventures and partnerships, which involves working closely with VC firms and entrepreneurs. Rachel also created L’Oreal’s Women in Digital initiative, which identifies and boosts female entrepreneurs across the realms of digital marketing and technology. Rachel talked with us about bringing together her two great loves, makeup and technology. And about being an early adopter in the worlds of podcasting, blogging, online dating and beauty-blogging.

Rachel Weiss:

It was really an eyeopening moment, it became a legal battle. I saw within the court system that questions were asked, “Why would she go to college? Why does she need to go where she wants to go to school? She can go to local community college or state college.” And I’m a believer, I grew up, my parents are both highly educated people. And I saw the court system questioning this. And I thought, “That’s ridiculous. I’m being asked this because I’m a girl.”

Rachel Weiss:

And I didn’t see myself having a future as being a wife and mother. I always knew that as a kid. So I learned at a very formative age, how difficult it is to support yourself and how society is not always ready to support young girls with ambition. And that has become my mission in anything and any job that I have.

Aleks Krotoski:

Rachel grew up in York, Pennsylvania, a rural farm-oriented blue collar suburban town on the border of Maryland. And her first stirrings of ambition, as she said, involved fantasizing about how to get the hell out of there in any way possible.

Rachel Weiss:

I really didn’t have a plan.

Aleks Krotoski:

She just wanted to move to New York like her idol, Madonna did, who moved from Detroit. So Rachel did, right after an undergrad degree in comparative literature of all things. And when she got there, she got a bunch of unglamorous temp jobs. Jobs like filing papers with an insurance company, which she hated, but was very good at. She was so fast at demolishing small mountains of paperwork, the mountains multiplied into ranges.

Aleks Krotoski:

She also worked as a receptionist at a production company that made hamburger ads. This was a particularly horrible endeavor for the sexual harassment. Then she decided to chuck all that in and go to grad school.

Rachel Weiss:

I was an academic, I studied film academically. I really didn’t have a plan. I went to Tisch School of the Arts, I have an MA in cinema studies. I didn’t want to move into academia. I got a job as an assistant in the film business, did not like that environment and just moved on. I had a recruiter who called me very early in my career. He said, “You should really try this internet thing, you seem to understand it. And there’s going to be great jobs for women in marketing and the internet.” And I was like, “Oh, wow. Okay. That sounds good.” I knew how to set up a spreadsheet. I had early concepts of how to use Excel. I knew how to get on the internet and turn on a computer at the time, which believe it or not was an important skill to have.

Rachel Weiss:

I remember having a interview and I went to work at Sony. They asked me what my favorite browser was and what I thought of Netscape. And that just seemed such a basic question, you would never have that interview in today’s economy.

Aleks Krotoski:

What’s exciting is that you have such a large platform with which to innovate. Often you find tech evangelists within organizations, whether they’re startups and they’re already shouting, “Innovate, innovate, innovate.” You’re working within an organization that I can imagine, you have to do some convincing, certainly in the early days when he first arrived 13 years ago. You had to do some convincing that this was actually something that … The internet was going to last, it wasn’t going to just be a passing phenomenon. Can you talk a little bit about being situated in something that has such legacy?

Rachel Weiss:

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been on the front lines of quote, as my mom calls it, the computer, since I graduated from college and it was very new. I mean the early nineties, no one ever told you there would be a job in new media. And the first time I got onto a computer and sent my first email in a college computer center, and it was just an email on, I think it was on AOL or EarthLink or something, my mind was blown away. I thought this is going to change everything. How we’re going to speak to each other, how we’re going to communicate when email was really a bright, shiny object at the time, was mind blowing to me. And I saw a future of how, as someone who likes to create and write and record would change everything.

Aleks Krotoski:

Now this is in the nineties and Rachel was already navigating the new and exciting wilds of the internet. She was dabbling in film and she also tried her hand at being a standup comedian.

Rachel Weiss:

The key to being a good standup comic is of course being funny and being on stage, but it’s learning how to bomb. And what happens when things don’t go as planned, and resilience is the key to that.

Aleks Krotoski:

Rachel actually thinks that standup comedy really prepared her well for what she does now in corporate life. It taught her how to tell stories, taught her how to be succinct, how to find a punchline, how to read the crowd, and how to be fueled by adrenaline. Most of all, it taught her how to present an idea to a CEO in under two minutes.

Aleks Krotoski:

All of these elements, confidence, resilience, and super precocious internet literacy soon propelled Rachel into her corporate career. And when she got there, she decided that she wanted to focus on bringing people together.

Rachel Weiss:

For me, it was just very much about exactly what I said, what makes people want to communicate? How can the internet facilitate that? And I really liked working in corporate environments. After the crisis of internet 1.0, surviving that crash, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I got a job at a publishing company that was focusing on building a consumer-based business with brands like frommers.com and Cliff Notes. And they probably had a large team prior to me joining, and I was one of five people there trying to rebuild these consumer businesses online.

Rachel Weiss:

But it was really interesting because in early 2002, it was really the onset of what was happening with early days of mobile search engine marketing. And I was able to just learn skills with not a lot of supervision and not a lot of budget. I started to create a lot of relationships and also leveraging relationships I had from the nineties. And I was there four and a half years, which is way longer than I ever expected.

Rachel Weiss:

And I got recruited by Citigroup, and I was I’m working on emerging businesses and youth marketing and as a product manager for the bank and their credit card division. With a really amazing group of people that were at that team that time, who weren’t traditionally from a financial services background. 2007 came around and I got a call from another recruiter who told me about this job at L’Oreal.

Aleks Krotoski:

Rachel could not believe her luck. She was perfectly suited to this job.

Rachel Weiss:

I never thought I’d have a career that combined, as my mom also said, “Wow, you’re getting a job that involves the computer and your hair.” I didn’t expect that … When I took the job, I was somewhat naive. I didn’t realize the size and the power and the speed of L’Oreal as a corporate entity. And it’s amazing because it is such a fast-moving business, which is why I’ve been there over 12 years, because it’s never, ever boring.

Aleks Krotoski:

It’s also evolving incredibly fast right now. Thinking even back to 2014, things have transformed. That was the time that beauty bloggers were starting to actually be celebrated in their own right. And what that did in a very interesting way that the fashion industry, for example, experienced maybe a few years earlier, is this idea of the trend hunter. The innovation coming from the bottom up rather than from the top down, and L’Oreal always been a top down organization.

Aleks Krotoski:

Now we’re seeing makeup trends, beauty trends coming from non-branded entities, and then being acquired by the larger brands. Things are moving so, so quickly because people seem to be unable to get on top of where the inspiration for a new look is coming from. How do you ride those hills? How do you get on that roller coaster and make sure that the organization that you’re working in, is engaged in that conversation rather than jumping on the bandwagon?

Rachel Weiss:

I’m relentlessly academic. I think about my graduate school training, I’m thinking about film and media studies and studying psychoanalysis and trends and history. I always tell people that my job is looking … At work they’re like, “Oh, Rachel’s Nostradamus.” But the truth is I’m actually a really good historian, because things move in patterns and things move in cycles. And I also think you have to understand the deep knowledge of how the technology is going to work.

Rachel Weiss:

So I am studying and looking at patterns and behavior that is emerging. And part of my job is understanding when the time is right. And it’s very much looking at it from an early venture investment standpoint. So a lot of times I think that a lot of marketers and a lot of people that I see that come in from the outside go to bright, shiny objects and speak in a way, they’re like, “Well, we’re going to work with startups and open innovation.” But I think you have to be very tactical and specific about what is it you want to accomplish and why you want to accomplish it.

Aleks Krotoski:

Are there any indicators though? I mean, how do you identify the signal from the noise? Because there is always new stuff coming out.

Rachel Weiss:

Well, I don’t think about tech first. I really think about how people are feeling in the world around them. And that is so important for the beauty business, because beauty is about how you’re feeling and how you want to put yourself present in the world, and what confidence looks like and what clear skin looks like.

Rachel Weiss:

I think the area that I really study and think about the most now is not what machine learning can do. I mean, I study all of this and quantum computing, but people feel really lonely. And we have a next generation of consumers who are feeling lonely and isolated. And what has happened to the psyche of everyone in a modern day of, what’s happened with social media? What does community look like? Who do you trust? These are the questions that keep me up at night. And they seems to keep everyone up at night. But these are questions that I think about, “What does that mean for our business?”

Aleks Krotoski:

Do you have any examples from within your work at L’Oreal that you feel have been these moments that have galvanized community, that you have helped to create?

Rachel Weiss:

I really think about the early days of how-to tutorials on YouTube. I mean, I worked on a brand that was the first … We had this idea about putting on online videos for how to do your hair. And I remember getting feedback, “Rachel, no one’s ever going to watch that.” And I again saw it as YouTube and online video as a way to really create different ways to share beauty.

Rachel Weiss:

And when I look back over the past decade and of what’s happened on YouTube, what I’m really proud of in the work that we’ve done and how we advocated for this economy, is that it’s really changed representation and codes of beauty. That beauty is much more inclusive, and it’s not about having a perfect model and a specific look, as you said earlier. I think that that is something I’m very proud of, how beauty can show all sizes and different models of expression. And asking difficult questions about your skin or acne, and the size and concepts of gender conversations. And that’s something I’m very proud of.

Aleks Krotoski:

When Rachel looks back at her childhood and her youth, there was one person that helped her throughout, Madonna. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways that Madonna has served as a model for you through each phase of your life? From when you were growing up to as you were moving into your professional career. And then now as you are trying to gain the new directions for this established company.

Rachel Weiss:

And it’s funny that I always talk about Madonna as being my secret mentor. The first time I saw Madonna in, what was it, 1983, it blew my mind. I was like, “Who is this woman?” She looked different. She was expressive. She moved to New York City. I was a Sesame Street fanatic, she got to Sesame Street. She was dancing, she was dressed differently. And my 12-year old, 11-old mind was enthralled with Madonna.

Aleks Krotoski:

But Rachel didn’t just admire Madonna for her bold fashion choices or her exciting dance moves, she saw more than that. She really identified with her as a self-made woman.

Rachel Weiss:

And I look at people like Madonna, and I think, wow, her mother died. She didn’t have everything on a silver platter for her. She moved to New York City off a bus. I look at women who are like that and have, despite the odds and despite the financial support to get things started, have just gone for it. And those are women I really relate to.

Aleks Krotoski:

Rachel tried to model herself after everything that she saw in Madonna. She was a creative powerhouse. She was a queen of reinvention. She was a badass businesswoman.

Rachel Weiss:

I specifically remember reading an article, an interview with Madonna, and I don’t know what year and I don’t know when, sometime in the late eighties, early nineties. Talking about how Madonna made a point to study the masthead of every magazine. To know every editor, to know who she needed to know as a networking opportunity for her to build her career.

Rachel Weiss:

I still remember reading them, I thought, “This woman does not only has an artistic vision. She has a vision of how she wants to establish herself as a independent business.” And I always remember reading that and thinking, it’s not just about talent. It’s also about being very specific in the choices and the people and the community that you have around you to get to that point of where you want to be.

Rachel Weiss:

And then also Madonna is a woman of reinvention. I mean, the thing I like about Madonna and has always inspired me, she makes some major mistakes. And she just keeps going. And I always admire women who make a mistake, admit it, and just go. And she has done that her entire life. I mean, I remember when I was in college and that crazy sex book came out, and she got a lot of backlash for that, but she came back.

Aleks Krotoski:

What do you think we can take from her example of trying to control our own narrative? She has done. She has been strategic, she has identified who she wants to speak with. She’s identified what it is that she wants to say, even in the current moment where things are very tumultuous. People, groups who have been far more marginalized than her are finally being heard. So what can we take from her example of owning our own power?

Rachel Weiss:

I think that you got to surround yourself with people that you feel good about. And relationships change, and being very self-aware and aware who’s around you, I think is important as a lifelong message. I never talked about Madonna this much.

Aleks Krotoski:

What would you do if you actually met her? Would you ever want to meet her? There’s a whole thing about not meeting your heroes.

Rachel Weiss:

I met her once at a party briefly. It was a artist, David LaChapelle, and my friend was there and she was there and it was crazy. And I turned around and then he goes, “Oh, do you know Madonna?” And we were eye to eye. And the thing about myself and Madonna, we’re the exact same height. So we were eye to eye and I was like, “Nice to meet you.” And then I blacked out, I froze. I don’t remember anything after that. It was so exciting. It was the one moment I had really nothing to say.

Aleks Krotoski:

That’s pretty extraordinary. Did she meet your expectations?

Rachel Weiss:

I thought she’d always seem taller, but she was exact height, eye to eye. It was kind of amazing.

Aleks Krotoski:

I can hear the smile in your voice, that was obviously a moment.

Rachel Weiss:

That was a great moment of excitement meeting Madonna. And also just a great time when you’re young and optimistic in New York City.

Aleks Krotoski:

Yeah, exactly. That sounded like a good party. Rachel, is there anything else that you want to say about Madonna, or any other aspect that we’ve talked about that you don’t feel that we’ve delved into?

Rachel Weiss:

I want to talk about a piece of advice that my grandmother gave me that I always think about at least once or twice a week. And her motto was, wherever you go, you take yourself. And I think about that. Wherever you are in your life or whatever your job is or whatever it is you want to do or try, you are at the heart of that. And it doesn’t matter where you live. It doesn’t matter what your job is, you are the center of your future. And that’s something you cannot change. That’s the one thing you cannot change is that you are you. And I just often think about that very philosophically.

Aleks Krotoski:

Rachel, thank you very much.

Rachel Weiss:

Thank you.

Aleks Krotoski:

To find out more about Rachel Weiss, you can look her up on Twitter at nycabylon. And if you want to find out more about Madonna, well, a simple search for her online will point you in the right direction. For show notes and links to stories mentioned in this episode, go to standingontheshoulders.net.

Aleks Krotoski:

Standing on the Shoulders is a Storythings production. This episode was written and produced by Shruti Ravindran. Our audio engineer and sound design by Kenya Scarlett. Additional interviews were by Eloise Stevens. Social media by Kate Norton, artwork by Darren Garrett and Eden Brackenbury. Our executive producers are Hugh Garry and Caroline Leary. It’s supported by Pearson and it’s hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski.

Aleks Krotoski:

It takes a lot of time and a big team of people to make this podcast, more than most people would imagine. So if you like this show, then please go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you go to get your podcast picks, and rate it. It really helps people to discover us. On our next episode.

Jude Kelly:

I think once you recognize that some people have got barriers and some people have got fewer, if any, you can either think, “Well, great. I’m glad I’m on the side of the ones that have got fewer barriers. Hooray.” Or you can feel a sense of injustice on behalf of everybody else. And I felt the latter.

Aleks Krotoski:

Thanks for listening.