🧼 LESLIE TESSLER // CEO & FOUNDER @ HANNI
Leslie Tessler has built Hanni into a breakthrough body care brand that reimagines sustainable beauty for busy lifestyles. After burning out from beauty marketing, she spent 11 years in Argentina before returning to launch Hanni in 2021. Since then, she's scaled from DTC to all ~600 Sephora doors, raised $3.73M, achieved $1M Amazon run rate in under a year, and is approaching profitability while doubling sales annually—all with a team of just 4 people.
🔧 Sustainable Product Economics - Framework for balancing mission-driven sustainability with operational efficiency and margins
📊 Capital-Efficient Retail Scaling - Process for managing explosive retail growth with minimal team and maximum operational leverage
🤝 Category Education Strategy - Approach to teaching customers about new product categories when traditional shelf sets don't exist
⚙️ Product Line Architecture - Method for developing cohesive product ecosystems that solve interconnected customer problems
📈 Lean Team Operations - Systems for building high-expertise teams that can execute at scale with minimal resources
🎯 Customer Signal Reading - Framework for interpreting customer behavior to guide product development and business pivots
Whether you're building sustainable brands or scaling lean operations, Leslie's frameworks will help you balance mission with margins, read customer signals effectively, and build operationally efficient growth systems.
Perfect for: Sustainable brand founders, lean operations leaders, DTC-to-retail scalers, body care entrepreneurs
Guest: Leslie Tessler - CEO & Founder, Hanni
Host: Samantha Rose - Managing Partner, Hologram Capital & Founder, Endless Commerce
This episode was recorded live and is part of our series on operational frameworks that drive real business results. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.
What is Commerce is Chaos?
Look, we've all heard the polished founder story—the perfect pitch, the seamless scale, the overnight success. But what about the time you oversold by 100K units? Or when your 'seamless' integration crashed right before Black Friday?
Host Samantha Rose has been there—from founding her first consumer business, GIR, managing fulfillment and industrial design for your favorite brands, or acquiring distressed brands on her own.
Welcome to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for founders who knows that building a real business is beautifully, chaotically messy.