He continued to admire makeup from afar until the day he stumbled into Sephora when he was 17. "I walked in not knowing what it was; I remember going through their revolving doors and I was overwhelmed," he says. "I was like, 'Oh, my God. This is where I want to work.'" Then his mom quickly whisked him out of there.
Soon after he went to the library to apply for a job at the retailer, but having previously only worked as a busboy, at the grocery store, and at the Bronx Zoo, he didn't hear anything back. It took months of cold-calling any executive that he could find a number for to get hired as a fragrance consultant at the Sephora branch opening up in Flatiron.
"They just put me at the door, and we had those really fancy black suits and a black glove on one hand," Dedivanovic says. "And I would just say, 'Welcome to Sephora,' 'Welcome to Sephora,' every two seconds, every time someone walked in."
Then, one day, a woman shopping for a new lipstick asked his opinion on what shade to buy. "I just remember, for a moment, thinking, 'Well, I'm not allowed to do this. I should ask someone else to do it," but then I just went," he says. She tried it on and immediately loved it.
"That essentially launched my career in makeup," Dedivanovic says. "It was the first time I actually felt confident about something that I wanted to do in life. At that moment, I had found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life."
Having been raised to believe that there's no place for men in makeup, Dedivanovic was scared to pursue it fully, let alone tell his family. That's when he hatched the plan to become a brand founder like many super-successful professional makeup artists before him. He felt that if he became a makeup artist and a businessman, that his family would understand his career choice. "I thought that would maybe make my mom proud, or maybe make it OK that I was a makeup artist," he says.