Years later, people rarely talk about the furnishing of a student room.

However, those first four walls of your own after moving out with your parents could be underestimated.

Because resources are usually limited and people find themselves differently at this time than they do between the ages of 45 and 50, the first stay may even tell you a lot about goals and desires in life.

Mareike Peters set up the twelve square meters in the student residence in Berlin in addition to a two square meter wet room and a tiny kitchen as follows: "My bed was on the left side, and I set up stainless steel tables on the right side."

Jennifer Wiebking

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

  • Follow I follow

From 2015 Peters studied communication management in Berlin.

The stainless steel tables were there for a different reason.

Her dorm room was part bedroom, part lab.

There she experimented with active ingredients intended to alleviate her own skin problems.

As a child she suffered from neurodermatitis, later from impurities.

At the stainless steel tables, Peters also tested what might benefit her sister, who was struggling even harder than her.

And how her grandmother reacted to the homemade tinctures.

When a problem becomes a business

For Mareike Peters, her own skin has always been an issue.

Today she lives Beauty.

On the one hand it was her own misery, on the other hand it is fascination: At just 22 years old, Mareike Peters founded a company that only confirms the talk of the generations.

She was born in 1996, and strictly speaking only those born after 1997 belong to the Generation Z group. But when it comes to saying that many of these young people went to work more concentrated than those after work-life balance and me-time aspiring millennials, when at the same time there is talk of a greater awareness of social and ecological sustainability in this age group, then both apply to her: She is 26 years old and today stands in front of the door in a spacious shop with the name of her company.

Only products from their NKM brand are on the shelves.

And that at Müllerstraße 10, not far from Gärtnerplatz in Munich.

The logos in the area are well-known, and here, too, established chains in particular can afford the rents at all.

In a similar situation, Mareike Peters and her business partner and friend Alexander Hefele, 32, are opening in Berlin this summer.

They already have a Hamburg store.

Last April, Forbes magazine included Mareike Peters in its 30 under 30 list.

Nevertheless, what she has built up in a short time with natural cosmetics is not a start-up, she says.

“I don't necessarily feel part of this world.

Of course I now know people who start and run companies, but it's not our way to get venture capital into the company.” For someone who works in the beauty industry, which has the quest for supposedly eternal youth at its core , then comes a remarkable sentence: "I want to do NKM until I'm old and wrinkled."

Mareike Peters has little time for empty promises.

Rather, beauty is her life theme, this only supposedly exclusively beautiful matter, to which, contrary to what its name and reputation suggest, inevitably also includes the less flawless sides, such as an uneasy body feeling.

role stereotypes.

Or skin problems, like Mareike Peters.

And because fate has probably predetermined her path a bit, it's no wonder that her own company started three floors above her Munich shop.

She completed her communication management studies in Berlin in 2018.

"Everyone knew I really wanted to do something different," says Peters.

She didn't go back to where she came from, to Brunsbüttel on the North Sea coast, but abroad, to Los Angeles and Paris.

A year later she moved to her boyfriend in Munich.

He lived on the third floor – Müllerstraße 10.