Marcia Kilgore is a serial entrepreneur in the truest sense of the term. Not content with creating just one globally renowned brand, Marcia is responsible for Bliss Spa, Soap and Glory, FitFlop, Soaper Duper and now Beauty Pie. But how did she become Queen of Startups?
Bliss Spa, her first startup in NYC, saw her give facials to Demi Moore, Courtney Love, Christy Turlington, Bette Midler and Calvin Klein to name drop but a few regulars. She sold this to world leader in luxury products LVMH, before turning her hand a couple of years later to Soap and Glory.
From there she founded FitFlop, Soaper Duper and now Beauty Pie, an exclusive buyers club for luxury beauty products, without the luxury beauty bullshit.
“I love the part of a business where you're really struggling to figure something out and it's really hard and you're solving real problems and really moving that dial every day and able to create new things. But when it sort of gets masked out and it's not about creating new things for customers anymore and you get too far away from it and it's charts and spreadsheets, that's not really my thing.”
Rather than discuss just one of these behemoths, Marcia is incredibly candid about all of them, talking about the genesis of each, her entrepreneurial journey and the mistakes she’s made along the way.
“There usually comes a time in my businesses where people say, ‘Oh, you've got to stop doing customer interface, you've got to stop doing the copywriting, you’ve got to stop doing the naming of the products’. And actually, that's what I do better than other people. So I shouldn't stop doing the part that I love doing. That was, I suppose the mistake that I've made in the past.”
We chat about:
What set her on her entrepreneurial path
That urban legend about Jean-Claude Van Damme
How LVMH wooed her
Stopping your brand getting watered down
Learning to deal with the big companies
Lifting the lid on the beauty industry
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