MEET BEAUTY’S QUEEN MIDAS, MARCIA KILGORE

Marcia Kilgore’s life has followed the classic rags-to -riches narrative, whereby a tenacious person who comes from nothing lights upon a brilliant idea, launches a successful business and goes on to live a charmed life. But there is one difference in this tale: the 49-year- old beauty entrepreneur from Saskatchewan, Canada, didn’t come up with just one brilliant idea, she came up with five – which have all gone on to become global success stories, including FitFlop and Beauty Pie. And despite having sold two of her brands for millions, she is still hard at it.

Marcia lost her father to brain cancer when she was 11 and watched her mother struggle to make ends meet. The youngest of three daughters, she was the one who most keenly felt the pressure to be responsible. ‘I was driven by the idea that no one would look after me but me,’ she says. She followed the path of so many before her desperate to make it and, in 1987, upon leaving school, moved to New York City. An accomplished athlete – she was a champion weightlifter in her teens – she began working as a personal trainer, which proved exhausting: ‘I’d start at 6am and finish late at night.’

As Marcia had an interest in skincare, having suffered from acne, she began giving facials in her tiny flat. She started with her database of personal training clients, but before long was treating the likes of Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Bette Midler and Uma Thurman. ‘Name basically anyone from that era and they were my client. I developed a reputation. It started out with them lying on my floor because I couldn’t afford to rent space. They’d want to stay for ever and tell me their life story.’ It’s not hard to see why. Marcia is cracking company: warm, witty, real and not at all arrogant about her successes. She and her French husband Thierry Boué (who works in sustainable, altruistic ventures such as anti-plastic initiatives) have two sons, 13 and 11, and divide their time between Switzerland, so the boys can grow up bilingual and ski, and London, where Marcia’s businesses are based.

Her knack for facials ‘organically’ spawned Bliss, the wildly popular transatlantic spa chain she set up in 1996. Three years later, Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton bought a majority stake in Bliss for a reported £21.6 million, which earned Marcia the moniker ‘the new Estée Lauder’. Then came budget beauty line Soap & Glory, which was meant to be ‘a hobby’ while Marcia focused on her babies but became ‘the monster that ate the UK’ and was snapped up by Boots in 2014 for a sum rumoured to be more than £40 million. It was while wishing she could use those slivers of time spent walking the kids to nursery to get a bit of a workout

“MY BEST IDEAS ARE THE MOST OBVIOUS ONES. I SEE THINGS THAT OTHERS DON’T ”