Keeping skin care all in the family
The Heideggers sold Kiehl’s, then created the luxury unisex skin-care line Retrouvé
Sitting down to talk skin care, Jami Morse Heidegger, whose family once owned beauty brand Kiehl’s, first apologizes for the man-cave décor — rustic leather sofas and husband and business partner Klaus Heidegger’s John Wayne posters — at the couple’s 25-acre Malibu ranch, where grape vines, flowers and fruit trees thrive alongside show horses.
Although the family’s main residence is in Chatsworth, the ranch, which offers views of the Pacific, doubles as an office. (The ranch is on the market for $55 million.)
Indoors, Morse Heidegger, 56, wore her Thierry Lasry sunglasses, a necessary accessory to protect her eyes from acute light sensitivity and part of her face from the sun.
Morse Heidegger, who has spent her life working in the beauty industry, and her husband sold Kiehl’s to L’Oréal for a reported $100 million to $150 million in 2000. They then moved on to their latest beauty venture, the unisex skin-care line Retrouvé, which was developed with former Kiehl’s chemist Stephen Musumeci and launched in France in 2014 before its stateside debut in 2015.
Formulations for Retrouvé contain concentrated ingredients, including oil from avocados grown on the Malibu property using natural permaculture methods. Plant-based squalane (an emollient similar to human sebum), high-quality oils and vitamin E are also used in the skin-care products.
“I have to admit when we first sold Kiehl’s, I was a little less money-conscious,” Morse Heidegger said. “I just wanted the best products for my skin, and I didn’t care what it cost. I started making products for myself in about 2001 because I started to experience dry skin and hormonal aging.”
Sold in 10 countries, the Retrouvé line consists of a cleanser, serum, two moisturizers, eye balm and exfoliating pads, ranging from $65 to $445 and available at retrouve.com, Ron Robinson and select spas in L.A. Among the other products in the pipeline are a body oil and lip balm slated for 2018.
Also in the works, Morse Heidegger said, is a method to extract vitamin C from lemons, oranges and grapefruit harvested on the ranch and plans to cultivate pomegranate, white tea and herbs for the products, which are made at a laboratory in New Jersey. The couple ships crates of their ranch-grown avocados to the East Coast.
The East Coast is where her family got its beauty start. “My grandfather [Irving Morse] went to pharmacy school at Columbia University and apprenticed with John Kiehl in the late 1800s,” Morse Heidegger said. Her grandfather eventually acquired Kiehl’s in 1921. Her father, Aaron Morse, went to work at Kiehl’s in 1954 and told her grandfather, “We should turn these ointments and poultices into skin care.”
“So that’s how the products got started in about 1958,” she said. “As far back as I can remember, I mixed custom perfumes that we would name and sell, including Innervisions for Stevie Wonder, when I was about 9 years old.”
In 1988 the Heideggers purchased Kiehl’s from Aaron Morse for $600,000. A former Austrian ski champ and entrepreneur, Klaus Heidegger oversaw the factories and brought the company up to digital speed, while Morse Heidegger built a booming business with innovations such as product sampling and dedicated charitable products.
Twelve years later, the couple sold Kiehl’s. By then, they were raising their three children in Los Angeles, but retirement wasn’t in the cards, as Morse Heidegger turned a side project into a new company.
While attending horse shows to support her daughter Hannah, Morse Heidegger was asked about her glowing complexion. So she began to hand out samples of a moisturizer, insisting that it would never be sold. But in 2011, she said her husband finally convinced her by saying, “All you have to do is make the products. I’ll do everything else.”