Africa Top Success Ils font l'Afrique
“My identity, I would like it universal”
Danièle Henkel was born in 1956 in Oujda, Morocco. She is a daughter of a Moroccan Jewess and a German soldier that she never knew because he was reported missing. She is now living in Canada where she is managing a company specialized in well-being, health and cosmetics.
A real success-story of a good self-taught, the founder who even told her career in a book “When intuition lays out a way”.
She had a multiple range of services. She had a unique target: make women more beautiful in neither making them suffer nor ruining them… A whole program!
So she proposed non-surgical solutions, natural cosmetic products. She also set up a laboratory for « diagnosis of food hypersensitivity « , sharper than a classic allergy test …
Her conviction: “our body is a sacred temple that needs to be psychologically and physically protected.”
Her first great success was a natural exfoliating glove named Renaissance. From this success, she agreed to be one of the five judges for a reality TV program on investment. “I said to the presenters of the program: do not ask me to be someone else than myself. If I have something to say, I will say it. Thanks to this program, I met again people of whom I lost sight many years now and what pleased me much, it is because they all told me that I did not change at all.”
Danièle Henkel spent the first years of her life in Oran before joining Algeria at the age of 6. Her mother, Eliane Zenati, was an illiterate businesswoman who was working for a woman owner of a bakery in Morocco. This owner bequeathed her the business at her death.
Her brother decided to marry her to one of his friends, a senior official in charge of the national company for water treatment.
She agreed and the couple got four children. In 1977, young mother of 21 years old, she started her brilliant professional rise in becoming an executive secretary at Pullman Kellogg, an American multinational.
She then entered the US consulate where she was in charge of diplomatic relations.
1988 was a decisive turning point in her life. Against the opinion of her husband and of her mother, she chose to settle down in Canada. One year earlier, she was fond of this country during a seminar.
January 8th, 1990, worried by the rise of fundamentalism in Algeria, she went to Montreal with her husband and her eldest daughter. She was 34 years old and started having hard times. She had no money, no job. She lived in the basement of a building, often thinking of the rest of her family stayed in Algeria…
«I was living with my mother, my husband, my four children, my half-brother and his family that I made come. I attended course for real estate agent, participated in a competition of trade agents launched by the government, organized a mission in China. A little girl as I was, I aimed high. I said myself: everything is possible, continue your way and do not give up. And if I had only a single message to deliver to women who want to go for business, it would be: go forwards and do not worry. You are good, you are strong, you are able. It is what my mom always told me and I did well in listening to her.”
She managed in obtaining a job in the community services center and then became an executive secretary at Claudel Lingerie. She managed to accommodate her family in a suburb to keep it gathered.
Danièle Henkel passed through bad adventures. She survived by selling Tupperware products but in 1995, she realized that opportunity will come from herself, from her audacity to create a business.
Exhausted, she got a bright idea when thinking under her hammam shower. She imagined her famous Renaissance glove. Without financing, she ordered 2 000, from China then from Morocco to test the market which she was selling herself by hawking to esthetics centers!
Soon, she comfortably earned her life which changed overnight. In 1999, Danièle Henkel won the best entrepreneur prize of the year awarded by ébusiness women network of Québec”.
Sure of herself and of her projects, she then founded “Les Entreprises Danièle Henkel Inc”. In 2009, the company signed with the French group LPG, leader in non-surgical treatments, for the distribution of their technology in Canada. The company was prizewinning “family small and medium-sized enterprise of the year” of Canada in 2012. The same year, this enterprise achieved a turnover of 5 million dollars.
In spite of this success, she did not forget her origin at all. “Love is my engine. An unbelievable force that allows us to feel suffering and joy. To define oneself as human being, we need others; we should work together.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6rLqIGgrjg[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MMAzQ7cD48[/youtube] 
