Dr. Barbara Sturm On The Power Of Being Underestimated
The pioneering doctor and beauty founder decided at a young age to trust her instincts over the reservations of her peers. Propelled to prove her doubters wrong, she has built a powerhouse skincare brand on ravenous curiosity and the strength of her own conviction. By NATASHA BIRD
It takes a lot to build an empire. Of the many necessary components, a good idea is clearly essential. So is hard graft, a sturdy marketing plan, cultural appetite and probably also quite a bit of luck. Dr. Barbara Sturm had all these elements – and one more to boot: a gleeful, rebellious streak that cowed to no naysayer.
Long before anti-inflammatory skincare became beauty’s dominant principal, Sturm (who started her medical career in orthopedics) began borrowing from the methods used in the treatment of musculoskeletal issues to see if they might have a similar effect on the body’s largest organ: the skin. This meant, among other things, injecting certain proteins into her face or the faces of a few willing volunteers. At the time, her pioneering treatments were considered by many to be terribly unusual, or simply too radical. Blithely, she kept doing it anyway.
“I always said, ‘Let’s do it,’” she tells me. “If my gut tells me to go for it, I will go for it.”
This sort of conviction can be hard to find among women. Not at all because we don’t have fantastic ideas or the technical expertise to back them up, but because female trailblazers tend to receive much higher levels of criticism. According to a recent report from management software company Textio, which analyzed performance reviews for more than 23,000 workers across over 250 organizations, around 76% of top-performing women receive negative feedback from their bosses, compared to just 2% of high-achieving men.
So facing a wall of resistance makes backing down understandable – and it takes a certain character to put the blinkers on and press ahead regardless. Maybe it’s her German tenacity, or perhaps she was born with natural gumption, but Sturm has never been interested in waiting for permission.
After studying both medicine and sport, she found herself working among a group of orthopedic scientists and surgeons pioneering anti-inflammatory treatments – predominantly for knee-joints – using the body’s own proteins. “I translated the knowledge from orthopedic into skin,” she explains. “I created a combination of the blood, the anti-inflammatory proteins and the growth factors together with hyaluronic acid to inject into the skin.” In other words, she created her version of the ‘vampire facial’ (platelet-rich plasma therapy), before any of us had even contemplated such a thought. “And this was in 2002,” she adds, “I was the first one to ever do that.”
“I love being challenged… I love opportunities. To me, this is what makes me alive. I don’t want to do what everybody else is doing. I want to do something new, something that excites people, something that I can inspire people with”
Today, with ‘science-backed skincare’ occupying practically every inch of the beauty aisles, it is difficult to remember quite how unusual these ideas once sounded. Once the public caught wind of Sturm’s early experiments – and she started building a name for herself, a growing following and a burgeoning waiting list – she did start to come up against negativity. “Where I worked, it was really male-dominated. It was just guys,” she explains. Which she says was fine while she was just “a young, fun assistant doctor – sporty and playing tennis with everybody.”
“As soon as you get your own profile, then the egos come through,” she continues. “I kind of have a naive optimism though. I always feel like it will work out. I actually love to be underestimated.”
Female ambition is still often accompanied by caveats. By over-preparation and the feeling of needing to prove oneself exhaustively before taking up space. Sturm disrupts this plot a little by operating on the assumption that experimentation itself is valuable and that there is no perfect moment to begin.
This does not mean she is careless. In fact, one of the most interesting things about Sturm is just how much substance underwrites her boldness. She speaks repeatedly about product efficacy, formulation standards and scientific integrity. “Everybody wants to be a CEO now,” she says. “But they don’t have a product. If you don’t have a product, stop right there.”
Sturm didn’t begin with branding, market positioning or a desire to become a founder. She began with obsession, curiosity and with wanting to solve a problem properly. “I wasn’t thinking this could become a new La Mer or La Prairie,” she says. “I just thought, actually, I’ve created something really amazing that works.”
Perhaps this is the single most useful lesson in her story. Not every woman needs to become a beauty mogul, or a mogul at all for that matter, but there is enormous value in recognizing the difference between wanting the appearance of success and being so consumed by an idea that the work itself becomes irresistible. Sturm worked constantly in the early years, balancing the demands of being a single mother while continuing to develop treatments and products she believed in completely. Nothing was handed to her; she had to take out a bank loan to continue building the business, as many of us would.
“I thought, OK, worst case: if it doesn’t work out, I can still treat patients and make enough money to pay off the credit line,” she says. “You have to bite into the sour apple sometimes. You think, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ And then, ‘Are you ready to work your ass off for the worst-case scenario?’”
Even now, after years of extraordinary success, Sturm still speaks keenly and animatedly about her product philosophy, skin barrier health and the opportunity to keep tinkering with new ideas. “I love being challenged,” she says. “I love opportunities. To me, this is what makes me alive. I don’t want to do what everybody else is doing. I want to do something new, something that excites people, something that I can inspire people with.”
There is, of course, a fine line between rebelliousness and delusion, but Sturm’s career is a reminder that some of the most transformative women in business are the ones willing to look slightly unreasonable first. Those willing to persevere even while others are unconvinced.
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