Megaro, a village in the Pindus Mountains of Epirus, Northern Greece

Dérvo — The Founders

It started with a list.

Vasiliki & Brandon · Megaro, Greece to New Boston, New Hampshire

Every summer we go back to my family’s village in the mountains of Northern Greece. And every summer, before we flew, my friends handed me a list.

A quiet lane in a Greek village, bougainvillea over a whitewashed wall

Chapter One

Roughly the same list, every August, for years.

Anyone who has spent a summer in Europe comes home saying the same thing: the ingredients feel cleaner, the rules are stricter, it simply sits better on your skin. So the lists grew. Friends added to them, then friends of friends.

I would land in Boston with a carry-on I could barely lift off the belt, and spend the next week handing things out at the restaurant. I was, essentially, running a small Greek skincare import service out of my hand luggage.

The one thing that list never had on it was something of ours. That line took three years to write. It is at the end of this page.

Megaro seen across the valley, red roofs against the Pindus mountains

Chapter Two

My parents were both born in villages you will not find on a postcard.

Two small ones, high in the Pindus range in Epirus. I have gone back every single year of my life. Not holiday Greece — village Greece, where my grandmother’s neighbours still know my name and still stop to ask after my mother.

When Brandon and I had our son, we kept going. He is six now, and he has spent about as many summers in Megaro as most children spend at day camp. He knows the walk down to the square without being told. That means more to me than I know how to write down.

Hands reaching up into an olive tree at harvest

Chapter Three

Neither of us comes from beauty. Not remotely.

Vasiliki

Pizza Bella

A family restaurant in Bedford, New Hampshire. My father opened it. When he passed away in 2012 I stepped in to help my mother keep it going, and three years ago I took it over from her properly. It is still the thing I am proudest of.

Brandon

Roofing & Construction

My husband runs a roofing and construction company. Between a restaurant, a roofing business and a small boy, there was never really a spare evening lying around. We started anyway, which I think says something about both of us.

Dérvo Créma, photographed against a warm stone wall

Chapter Four

Why are we carrying other people’s brands home, when your family’s village is full of the things everyone keeps asking you for?

Brandon said it out loud one evening, somewhere in the middle of all of it. Neither of us had a good answer. That was three years ago.

We started writing to labs all over Greece with very little idea what we were doing. Some were lovely about it and offered to put our name on a formula that already existed. Others said they would begin from nothing with us. We went with the ones who said nothing.

They sent through a questionnaire. We filled it in across a handful of late nights at the kitchen table, after the restaurant had closed, and that was the real beginning.

Sprigs of sideritis, Greek mountain tea, beside the Dérvo bottle

Greek thyme honey in a bowl with wild thyme and dried sideritis

Chapter Five

Everyone in my family has taken both of these their whole lives.

Every kitchen I grew up in had a jar of honey on the shelf and a bundle of dried mountain tea hanging somewhere near it. I had simply never once seen either of them inside a skincare bottle.

If we trust them this much on the inside, why are they not in what we put on our skin?

Chapter Six

People ask what three years were for. Honestly — all of it.

Year oneAlmost twelve months on the formula and the scent alone. The honey and the tea had to genuinely be in there, but quietly, so it never smelled like something you would eat.
Year twoStability testing, then efficacy testing, then clinical trials with real people — because a lovely story about a village is not proof that anything works.
Year twoFinding a manufacturer who could manage small batches and still bottle it the way we had imagined it.
Year threeFinding designers. Naming it. Building a brand and a website from nothing, neither of us having ever done either before.

Outside a handful of close friends in the last few months, we built the whole thing privately, and that was deliberate. We wanted room to get it wrong quietly. To argue about it. To very nearly give it up, twice, without anyone watching us do it.

And we did argue. There were evenings when it felt like far too much for two people. There were tears. I am not going to pretend otherwise. Then a box arrived, and I held the first real bottle in my hand, and all of it went quiet.

Chapter Seven — The Name

Tree — in the local dialect

The Pindus range, about two hours from the village

Chapter Seven

Dérvo is a mountain. A real one, about two hours from our village.

In the dialect spoken around there the word means tree. Something rooted. Something that takes years in the ground before it gives you anything back.

Which, as it turns out, is more or less exactly what this has been. Three years later, the sixth line on that list finally has something written on it.

We are not from the beauty industry. We are two people who love a place enough to spend three years, and every spare hour we had, trying to put a small piece of it into a bottle.

Thank you for being here. It genuinely means a great deal to both of us.

Vasiliki & BrandonNew Boston, New Hampshire

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