The story of Marius Dobre, who built the largest community devoted to making Romania's women more beautiful

If someone had asked me a few years ago how a family business begins, I would probably have given a nice, measured, textbook answer. Today I know better what to say: a family business does not begin with a business plan and a neatly built spreadsheet. It begins with one person who dreams, and another person who loves them enough to believe in a dream that has not yet taken shape.

In our case, Adriana was the expert and I was the dreamer.

Adriana was always gifted. She was good not only with hair, but with people. She was an expert in the art of beauty. She knew how to turn something ordinary into a feeling of wellbeing. And I knew that, if she had the courage to give herself fully to her passion, she would create something remarkable, while I would build something that showed her off and left its mark on the lives of thousands of specialists in the industry.

In April 2018, Adriana left her salon job and decided to become a trainer in special hairstyling. She took that step without a safety net. She was young, ambitious, but with no clear role model in the industry and no guarantees. Her passion stood in for everything else. At the time I was working for an Australian fintech and supporting her however I could, a few hours before my shift started and a few more when I got home.

Then, in 2020, the pandemic arrived. Everything she had built came to a halt in a single week. Courses and events cancelled. People in a panic.

But Adriana did not sit on her hands. That was when I started getting more involved, and that is how the live broadcasts from the Dobre family living room came to be, as we jokingly called them. We had improvised tripods, poor lighting, zero experience with video, but we had the conviction that we had to try something while most of the industry felt stuck. And rightly so, nothing like this had ever happened to them and they had no reference point at all.

I worked, some days, 14 to 15 hours: my job, our little business, deliveries, filming, editing. That is what beginnings look like: chaotic, unfair, but full of drive.

Up at 6, work for the business until half past 8, the job until 6:30 p.m., then work again for us, sometimes until 12 or 1 at night.

In 2021, when life began to return to normal, Adriana resumed her in-person courses. That was the moment I handed in my resignation. I had a steady salary, 3,000 euros a month. But I could not build two lives in parallel. I chose ours.

We began organizing courses across the whole country and ran from one place to another: Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara, Iași, Baia Mare, Suceava, Galați, and even Italy. We tested strategies, business models, products. We opened our first online store. We made plenty of mistakes. We learned an enormous amount.

In March 2022, The Beauty Education was born, the name under which all our values came together: education, professionalism, community.

In November 2024 we took the big step: we brought everything together into a single digital ecosystem. Back then we had 830 active members. Today we have almost 3,000 active members, we have sold our courses (online and in person) to more than 6,000 professionals, in an industry that adds up to only 10 or 11 thousand people in total. Our online store has over 1,000 products and has grown by 40% compared with the previous year. In 2024 we organized The Beauty Saga, a two-day event with more than 200 participants, at the Athenee Palace in Bucharest. It was clear we were becoming the most important education hub in Romania's hair industry.

But while the numbers were growing, our own life was changing too.

In June 2023 our little girl was born. The most beautiful moment, and the beginning of the most complicated period. Adriana's brand depends on her. But a mother who has just given birth cannot film eight hours a day. She cannot be live nonstop. She cannot answer hundreds of messages. And suddenly, our rhythm collapsed. Engagement dropped. Sales dropped. Visibility dropped. And the guilt grew.

She felt it, and so did I.

This is the part no one talks about. That entrepreneurship comes bundled with a heavy emotional load. That the family pays the price. That there is no protection. That there is no pause. That there is no putting things "on hold" when it comes to the business.