Beauty and entrepreneurship with Juliette Levy Cohen, Founder & CEO of the french clean concept-store: Oh My Cream

Hello Juliette, we are delighted to meet you! First of all, how did you come up with the idea of founding Oh My Cream?

I have always been passionate about beauty as far back as I can remember. I was doing baby-sittings from the age of 13 to be able to afford Sisley creams! At the age of 25, when I was finishing my studies in business school at ESSEC, I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, I was a bit lost and stressed; that’s when my mum said to me “But you’re crazy about beauty, why don’t you go into this sector? “I then did an internship at Le Bon Marché in the beauty department and I realised that despite the fact that there were some great brands, I didn’t necessarily feel at home there as a consumer; I found that in the big beauty supermarkets there wasn’t enough advice and no transparency on the composition and ingredients of the products. We didn’t talk about “clean beauty” at the time, but we were starting to pay attention to our consumption. And that’s when I said to myself that there had to be room for an alternative, a beauty destination such as I dreamed of, so I was going to create it! The Oh My Cream concept was born from a sum of many simple details: a place that selects the best in clean beauty with a real focus on advice. The idea was to make this new generation of beauty brands accessible, which, for me, are more expert, more inspiring, more effective and more desirable, in a human-sized setting – we have very intimate boutiques – with more modern codes than the selective distribution that we know. So that’s how the idea was born in 2013!

What beauty gesture do you consider essential? 

Double cleansing without hesitation! If you don’t cleanse your skin properly, all the care you apply will be useless in the end. This is extremely important. It’s the first step to beautiful skin and this notion of double cleansing is essential because it allows you to really rid your skin of all the impurities that have accumulated throughout the day, even if you haven’t applied make-up in the morning.

The product that accompanies you from year to year?

So apart from the Oh My Cream Skincare products which I use all the time, one of my first clean beauty products which has been with me for 10 years and which is actually my first crush in terms of clean beauty, is the Daily Microfoliant from Dermalogica – it’s a little exfoliating powder which will remove all the dead cells, brighten the skin texture, reduce imperfections and is suitable for everyone. I remember when I was in our little shop on Rue de Tournon, when I was on sales at the weekend, it was our best seller. It’s a very, very good product! And it was one of the first brands to bring out exfoliating powders and to innovate in that respect.

You have just launched the brand new makeup range by Oh My Cream Skincare, any other new products planned? 

So yes! In a few days, on November 21st to be exact, we will be releasing our first anti-ageing product, the Crème Repulpante, which is a bit like the big sister of the Huile Repulpante, which is one of our cult products. You will find in this new product, bakuchiol which is a natural active ingredient that will help fight against the signs of ageing and other ingredients that will help moisturise the skin and boost its radiance. It is really the easy product to adopt for all the thirty-somethings who want to start taking an interest in better aging and who don’t really know where to start.

And apart from that, our big news at the moment is that we’ve just opened a shop in London, in Notting Hill on Westbourne Grove, next to all the little Frenchie brands; it’s our first step internationally after 9 years in France so it was both very exciting and very stressful! And from the first day we had a big response from the London women – who found the concept really different and desirable – so it was a very nice surprise! We’ll be opening a second shop on King’s Road soon and we hope to open many more as this is clearly a very promising market for Oh My Cream!

And finally, what advice would you give to Standards readers who want to start their own business?

Knowing how to trust yourself and listen to your intuition is very important. I personally find it very difficult to follow someone else’s decision and I think again that when you trust yourself and do what you love with authenticity, you feel it – the passion is usually communicative and it ends up working! We women in particular forget to trust ourselves and it’s so key in life to listen to ourselves.

At the time, everyone told me “If it doesn’t exist, there must be a good reason” and this sentence is really a total nonsense for me! You have to listen to yourself and when you listen to yourself and you feel good about yourself, one way or another it ends up working. So you shouldn’t be afraid to go for it.