Beauty standards: Filip Sedic

Many words could be used to describe Filip Sedic, the charismatic Founder of Swedish beauty and wellness business, FOREO.

Conventional is not one of them because Sedic is not your typical chief executive.

He’s not one to hold back his opinions, nor does he trot out carefully-crafted, PR-polished statements that offer next-to-nothing by way of insights.

During a conversation with The CEO Magazine, he talks candidly about the inertia of the corporate world, the lack of structural innovation at companies and the often negative attitudes of the western world. China is where it’s at if you want a can-do mindset, he says.

Perhaps most refreshing of all, however – in a world where monetary wealth and professional conquest are so closely associated with success – is his definition of what success truly means.

The measure of success

That should not be measured in bloated salaries or rampant profitability, he says. Success is something far more fundamental; an individual legacy that will resonate not with the boardroom, but with your grandchildren.

"You don’t need to get credit for a legacy, it doesn’t need to be written down, it is something you know and your family knows," he insists.

"Sure, money is one measure of success, but it’s very limited. In our minds we simplify measurements, as ridiculous as that is. Life is not like that. Success has to be measured on multiple things."

Notwithstanding these observations, if success was based purely on business accomplishments alone, then Sedic, and the company he created, has been a roaring one since bursting onto the beauty and self-care wellness scene in 2013.

From a standing start it now has 20 million customers in 80 markets. Over the past decade, FOREO has launched a stream of increasingly creative products, from facial cleansing massagers to serums and masks; silicon sonic toothbrushes to eye rejuvenation devices; and acne treatments to hair regrowth therapies.

Such high-tech products, all with beautifully sleek designs, have shaken up the sector. Its first creation, the LUNA Cleansing Device, supplanted a mechanism which, according to Sedic, resembled a "shoe brush with a big dirty handle".

"I couldn’t believe it. It looked like something from the 1940s. But I don’t think anyone but me believed we could replace this shoe brush with what LUNA is today," he recalls.

Inherently innovative

At the heart of the business is innovation. But it’s innovation with meaningful results, Sedic stresses.

Where FOREO’s devices have been rigorously tested and approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration, products in the traditional beauty sector have not, yet "their marketing says it will work miracles for you", he says.

"Customers have been brainwashed for years on these placebos," Sedic claims.

Indeed, he is adamant that his pharmaceutically inspired enterprise and the traditional beauty sector should be viewed as entirely separate industries.

"They have nothing in common. Our medical devices do something about your health and look under the skin, they don’t paint your skin," he says.

Innovation is a theme the Bosnian-born Swedish inventor returns to frequently during our conversation. And innovation does not stop at the products, but extends to FOREO’s structure and business philosophy.

Unique management

Sedic designed a style of management that, he later learned, was startlingly similar to the Amoeba system implemented by former Japan Airlines chairman Kazuo Inamori in the mid-20th Century.

That involves the company being divided into autonomous offices around the world and the creation of a central ideology that individual locations are free to interpret as they see fit.

He is proud of his creation, and revels in the external view that FOREO is something of an outlier.

"We want to be known as freaks," he reveals. "That is how a lot of companies see us. A freak show, but a successful one. But the truth is, we are different not because we want to be different but because we believe in a better way of doing things.

"It’s always bothered me that companies try to present themselves as having innovative products yet the company itself is structured as it was a hundred years ago.

"With all this technology and all this progress, don’t tell me we can’t do better. Of course we can. It’s just inertia that’s preventing change."

He recalls with notable irritation a recent conference where debate focused exclusively on the production of more goods, to encourage more spending.

"It was all about increasing productivity to get us out of a crisis. There was not one single word about ecology, not one," he says. "I mean, come on guys. This formula worked before because we didn’t have a strict limitation on the environment. If we keep producing more material goods to get the economy moving we’re all going to die in garbage."

A different approach

Which brings him onto greenwashing. So disillusioned is he, that FOREO does not talk about its solar panels, new energy systems and other green policies for fear of being tarred with the same greenwashing brush.

"We optimize our operations in every possible way to have less transport, less energy, less space, but we never mention it on our webpage or marketing because it feels dumb when so many companies are greenwashing," he explains. "We would feel like one of them, and it would feel like a defeat, to tell everyone about it."

Sedic concedes that FOREO’s philosophy and processes has made it ‘incompatible’ with many companies, hence it works with a ‘limited’ number of partners.

"Our core values don’t align with most companies in the world so we rely on doing as much as possible in-house," he says. "We are not driven by profit. We want to make a profit to finance further research, not to meet the goals of shareholders."

The few partners that FOREO does work with grew with the company and share the same values. So immersed in the business have they become that they are almost a subsidiary of FOREO. "As they say, if you have very few friends, you’d better have good ones," Sedic says with a laugh.

Those friends are largely located in China, a market more receptive to innovation and invention.

Regardless of the complexity of an idea, China adopts a ‘we can try’ attitude, Sedic says; a contrast to his native Sweden, or the United States, where the default response is ‘no’.

"For a company focused on invention and innovation, it’s impossible to work in an environment where every change is an uphill battle and where they don’t want to do anything differently," he says.

For Sedic and FOREO, being different – for being freaks – is what it’s all about.