The Ivatherm owner says she chose to go to France because the market there has the know-how and technology that Romania does not, writes Business Magazin in its latest issue.
The story of Ivatherm, the only Romanian competitor on the dermo-cosmetics market started in 2005, when Rucsandra Hurezeanu, the owner and manager of the company, felt the need to create her own business.
“I graduated from the Medical School and immediately after that took a job in the pharmaceutical industry, where I stayed for ten years. I moved up little by little until I felt I couldn’t move any further and it was time I started my own business.”
She admits that she had someone in whose footsteps to follow, namely her mother, who opened the first private retail pharmacy in the early nineties. The business then expanded to distribution and production.
It was her mother than provided the financial support to get her started. She would not provide details about how much money such an investment takes, merely saying it is quite a lot.
Rucsandra Hurezeanu started out by studying the properties of the thermal water in Herculane, the oldest spa town in Europe, she says. She went to France and hired a team of scientists to study the Herculane water.
“There they asked me: ‘Are you sure you want this water?’ Everybody was skeptical. Three months later they called me and said, ‘Mais c’est extraordinaire votre eau!’ (“But your water’s amazing!”),” she recalls. “They told me it was the best water and had anti-inflammatory properties.”
The thermal water Ivatherm uses is taken from a very high flow thermo-saline spring. “Most springs in Herculane are sulfur hot springs.” The water comes from 2000m deep within the Earth and when it reaches the surface it has [a temperature of] almost 45 degrees Celsius, which makes it almost sterile. “It retains its structure and is not altered by transport.”
Rucsandra Hurezeanu, 39, says she wanted to go to France both for research and development and manufacturing, because that country is a very large market, worth EUR15 billion, compared with the less than EUR1 billion market in Romania. She says this is also where many producers do not have their own brands but make products for companies on other markets. Ivatherm only does the primary packaging there and the final packaging is done in Romania. The containers, however, come from Spain, Italy and Greece.
In Romania, a market where most companies and also the largest are part of multinationals such as Vichy and La Roche Posay, both of them L’Oreal brands, Ivatherm sells about 200,000 products a year, that is about 1,000 per business day.
“We have a 10% market share. In our battle with multinationals we needed an effective sales team.”
The company has 35 employees, most of whom work in sales and promotion. Ivatherm products are sold to 1,000 retail pharmacies throughout the country. “The pharmacy conveys the idea of safety and affordability.”
Rucsandra Hurezeanu admits that it was harder than she thought at first, because consumers needed to be educated since they were not used to buying such products from a pharmacy. At that time there were three or four rivals, and now 15 or 20 companies are fighting over a slice of the EUR20 million market, she says.
The market has a lot of potential, but its growth depends on the state of the economy.
Ivatherm’s sales went up 10% this year to 7 million lei. “I hope we’ll see 15% growth next year.”
Rucsandra Hurezeanu says that she wants to enter the Ukrainian market and expand the product portfolio from the current 38.
“I’m also thinking of diversifying the business, but I would not rather not provide any details yet,” she added.