“I don’t know whether you can call it semi-retired, but I cannot just drop everything. It will be boring,” says the 67-year-old medical doctor turned brand builder.
He found success in skincare through Splash Corp., which he sold to Indian firm Wipro Consumer Care in 2019 for a cool P9 billion to P11 billion.
From medicine to business
Seeing and hearing Doc Rolan today, it seems difficult to imagine that he once roamed the hard streets of Quiapo — Arlegui, to be exact. Coming from the clan that owned Hortaleza Vaciador, he would spend summers helping in the family business, which had 24 branches.
“I’d bring food that my mother cooked to the store, riding a jeepney,” Doc Rolan recalls. “I’d feed the vaciadors at yung mga humahasa.”
Even as he went to medical school at the University of the East and Fatima University upon the prodding of his parents, and later completed two years of residency training, his heart and mind were never really in medicine — or schooling, for that matter, having previously dropped out of different schools.
(Years later, he would enroll in Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management Program after realizing he couldn’t read a balance sheet and knew nothing about profit and loss)
“I didn’t think I could raise my family as a doctor as I didn’t have the family name,” says Doc Rolan.
Instead, his exposure to Hortaleza Vaciador inspired him to go into business, making products he knew were simple to produce.
His first? Acetone.
“Because you just do repacking, no need to do formulation.”
This was followed by hairspray, sold in small drugstores and beauty supply stores under the RBH Cosmetics label, timely as it was the era when “you wanted your hair to be strong.”
Mentor and fitness enthusiast
Doc Rolan has been building a visible presence on social media — on Threads, for one. There, he regularly posts nuggets of business wisdom — all spontaneous, he insists. One recent post reads:
“People ask me often if they should quit their job and start a business. I never answer yes right away. I ask them what part of their day makes them feel alive, building something risky or doing something extremely well inside someone else’s company.”
As a mentor and coach to founders and next-gen leaders, he’ll gladly make time — gratis — over coffee or through messaging, “sharing my story, my knowledge, my wisdom.”
Over on Instagram and Facebook, followers can’t help but notice that he has also become a fitness enthusiast. Looking fit and trim, he hits the gym and goes running three times a week, complemented by conditioning, ice baths and sauna sessions, while using AI to track his progress.
The transformation came after Doc Rolan discovered longevity medicine, an approach focused on healthspan — living longer in good health and remaining fully functional — rather than simply extending one’s lifespan.
“With lifespan, you can live up to 100 years, but what if you’re bedridden? Or if, say, I’m in a wheelchair being pushed by my children and can’t carry my luggage, why bother travelling? I’ll just stay here,” he says.
A series of past health scares — liver fibrosis, a pancreatic cyst and alopecia areata — which he associates with the stress of running a growing enterprise, led him to take charge of his health and ultimately exit the business he built from the ground up.
“I was drinking heavily and there was a 20 percent chance that the cyst would develop into cancer,” says Doc Rolan, who should be in Beijing for a HYROX competition by the time this is published.
Building Splash
But it was through facial cleansers — a segment long dominated by Eskinol, then a product of Metro Drug — that he would become a gamechanger in the market.
“I was the first to innovate and introduce avocado and cucumber extract,” says Doc Rolan, which also explains the choice of Extract as the brand name. “At that time, it was just boric acid to take out dirt.”
In four short years, Extract did so well that Manny Pangilinan, who controlled Metro Drug, offered to acquire his company — by then called Splash Cosmetics — for a hefty sum. But he declined.
“I wasn’t yet a rational person,” Doc Rolan admits. “I was still emotional over my business.”
By this, he meant wanting to go big and compete with multinationals like Unilever. That ambition led to further innovations that shook up the market.
“I started the whitening craze in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. I also created a new category called exfoliants,” says Doc Rolan.
With a limited marketing budget, he had a knack for descriptive brand names that made his products stand out — remember Skin White, Extraderm and later Maxi-Peel? As focus group discussions were costly, he instead relied heavily on informal consumer insights and the positive feedback his products generated.
“They’d say, ‘My face is glowing,’ or ‘My skin is getting better’.’”
With Maxi-Peel sales reaching the P300-million to P500-million mark, Splash next challenged the likes of L’Oréal in hair coloring, launching Kolours with Ricky Reyes as endorser. The brand eventually became number one.
Attempts at penetrating other segments like shampoo and toothpaste proved more difficult.
With the Splash Research Institute in place to handle research and development, Splash Corp. went public through a P2-billion IPO.
“I needed to expand,” says Doc Rolan of the move.
Beyond skincare
Following his exit from skincare, Doc Rolan turned his attention to the Barrio Fiesta line of food products, acquired from the Ongpauco family in 2011 amid a mature market already dominated by established players. The business is now under Prime Global Corp., which recently inaugurated a new manufacturing plant.
“Barrio Fiesta is a master brand that can go beyond bagoong,” Doc Rolan explains. “I saw opportunities to expand the line while also growing geographically in the US and North America.”
Further diversification led to the formation of Prime Global Finance Corp., spurred by Hortaleza’s own early difficulties securing financing. A fledgling venture is a hotel in Tagaytay called Hortz — incidentally, also the name of his boat, a catamaran.
Coming full circle
With day-to-day operations now in the hands of his sons — Alexone leading Prime Global and Alfonso, Prime Global Finance — Hortaleza Corp., seeing a gap in the market, is staging a comeback by returning to the very industry where it made a splash — skincare.
“Love ko pa rin ang personal care,” says Doc Rolan.
The return comes via the Hortaleza M.D. brand, with products including a Skin Renewal Set that cleanses, resurfaces, hydrates and protects.
When asked about his mandate and marching orders to his sons, who are also active on social media and have joined him in his fitness journey, Doc Rolan lays it out plain and simple:
Run an aboveboard operation, practice proper corporate governance and embrace values you can pass on to your children and grandchildren — sound advice as Hortaleza enters its next stage of growth and evolution. —Ed: Corrie S. Narisma
Features Reporter
