How being female impacted her journey
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Tadrissi credits a lot of her success to her mom. Tadrissi’s mother was a single mother who worked three jobs to support her kids. Her mother was so driven, she even ended up going back to school later in life, attending the University of Toronto at the same time as Tadrissi.
Now Tadrissi has a very established spa and beauty business and enjoys weekly meals and manicures with her mom and three daughters. Tadrissi also has a very dedicated team of employees, many of whom have been with her for over 15 years. It’s not a surprise that Tadrissi’s team is so loyal, as she leads through empowerment. Tadrissi treats her employees as partners and encourages their collaboration because she believes that the people who are client-facing are the most important to her businesses’ success.
Tadrissi wears many hats including entrepreneur, leader, innovator, founder and mom. We connected with Tadrissi to learn more about her journey and the advice she has for other entrepreneurs.
Q&A with Celine Tadrissi
Q: If there was a Coles Notes version of your journey from building Hammam Spa to Céla, what would it say?
A: I’ve always been into beauty since I was young, but, especially at that time, it wasn’t seen as a strong career choice. So I went to university for business and accounting. We gravitate to things we’re naturally interested in, and I think those are things where we can really succeed. Whatever I did, wherever I went, I always noticed everything to do with beauty, spas and the rituals behind them. That was the inspiration for Hammam. When we first opened in 2005, there was only one other experiential spa in Toronto, so it was risky and scary. There were many learning curves but it’s so wonderful to see the Hammam that I imagined come to fruition.
We do a lot of treatments at the spa and that requires a lot of product. I have great relationships with our product partners, but there were a lot of gaps in terms of what I wanted. A lot of the products we were importing, as there was nothing available locally. I started looking for local raw ingredients and we started making our own scrubs. We didn’t intend to make a beauty line. Over the years we were kind of running an informal lab; we would get feedback from clients from the smell to texture. We came up with some great products and the clients loved them so much that they wanted samples. So we ended up giving away our products, and I thought we should probably go all in and start a beauty line.
Q: Do you think being a woman impacted your journey?
A: 100 per cent.
My first internship out of university I worked in an old-school male-dominated environment so I felt like I had to over-perform and go above and beyond. But I think we have generally transitioned into a more inclusive environment since, and it’s really nice to see support for women. Sometimes there are assumptions made that someone who spends time on their beauty ritual didn’t work as hard because they got ahead based on appearances. Which I don’t think is the case, especially for long-term success. In some ways, it can be a hindrance instead of an asset. Not as much now, but in the past, people didn’t take you as seriously.
Q: What goes into developing a wellness product line?
A: It’s something that you constantly have to be looking at from different sides. First and foremost, it’s the client experience and journey. So it’s important to always be aware of what they see, smell and how they feel. To be successful and scalable, you need to have a good staff. You need to have a good backbone for the business on that operational side. With both Hammam and Céla we didn’t have investors, we started from scratch. So I learned along the way.
Going back to being a female entrepreneur, it’s more and more about supporting each other. During COVID-19, it was a difficult and frustrating time for hospitality. I started reaching out to the other spa directors in the GTA to understand what was happening because the rules were really grey in terms are what we were and weren’t allowed to do. So I started a group with other luxury spa directors, like from the Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons and Hotel X. We meet quarterly but are always chatting and sharing ideas and problem-solving together. It’s been so rewarding because sometimes it’s lonely being an entrepreneur and sometimes there isn’t anyone who I can get honest feedback from.
Q: Are there a lot of luxury beauty lines that are made from Canadian ingredients?
A: I don’t think there are many other lines that are putting as much time into sourcing and researching ingredients. There aren’t many companies that focus on Canada for skincare ingredients, and that’s one of my “whys” behind Céla. Canada has some of the best natural ingredients for skincare, but it hasn’t received credibility yet. That’s because the supply chains haven’t been properly set up yet, so that’s one of my goals; finding those ingredients, making the processes and bringing the product into a more prestigious regard.
Q: What are your favourite wellness and beauty products?
My next favourite is the first product I developed with York and Seneca, it’s a face oil that is just launching. And that is the product I’m most proud of at Céla because we used so much time researching and really got to know all the suppliers for it. It uses red maple bark with is amazing for collagen production. It has a lot of Canadian-sourced oils like tea oil. I use that on my face morning and night.
Q: What advice would you give other female entrepreneurs in Canada?
A: Canada is an amazing country in the sense that it’s really supportive through whatever area you want to go into and for the most part encouraging. I think I suffered more than I needed to out of fear of failing or out of people not liking me because sometimes I need to say things that I know the other person doesn’t want to hear. And I think that’s common with women, sometimes being non-confrontational. But if you stay true and operate from a place of integrity, it will pay off. And you’ll sleep at night.
Sacrificing comfort for long-term gut-based decisions is really important to consider. And knowing what you want to do and sticking to it. A lot of times, we get influenced by other people’s feedback and then we second-guess ourselves. So at least a couple times a year, I put all the day-to-day tasks aside and take a look at my big numbers, where I plan to go, what’s important to me and what’s the end goal. Stay focused. Know where you’re going, why you’re headed that way and what’s important to you, and check back to ensure everything is going according to plan. That’s key to ending up in a successful place.
rmann@postmedia.com
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