Entrepreneur finds niche in makeup market
Some people are lucky enough to have one good idea in life that they then build into a successful business. Marcia Kilgore had five.
First , in 1996, she founded Bliss, a New York City beauty emporium with a cult following that mushroomed into a lucrative line of beauty products and later became the first North American acquisition made by LVMH, for an estimated $30 million.
Then there was the affordable bath, body and cosmetics brand, Soap & Glory, which became a staple of British bathrooms and was sold to drugstore chain Boots Alliance in 2014. Next came an ergonomic footwear line, FitFlop; and then Soaper Duper, a vegan bath and body products label.
But it is her fifth company, Beauty Pie, that the 52-year- old serial entrepreneur believes to be her best idea yet.
“I’ve had some good ones in the past,” Kilgore said. “I’m proud of them all. But Beauty Pie? Beauty Pie eclipses the rest.”
Beauty Pie, which has its headquarters in London, began operations four years ago and is a buyers’ club for beauty addicts. Members pay a monthly membership fee for backdoor access to some of the world’s best fragrance, skin care and cosmetics factories, many of which supply big-name luxury brands that go on to charge sky-high multiples for the products once they are stamped with their logo. With Beauty Pie, members can get regular deliveries of Japanese skin cleansers and South Korean serums, Italian lipsticks and perfumes sourced from Grasse, France, all of which arrive in signature rosy pink packaging.
The idea came to Kilgore one afternoon in a Milan train station as she made her way back from a beauty manufacturing region in Italy known as Lipstick Valley. She had about $5,000 worth of free samples from local factories in a shoulder bag.
“I suddenly thought, ‘ What if all the women who usually buy these products in Sephora or department stores could have this feeling that I have right now?’” Kilgore recalled. “That they were getting a great deal by cutting out the middlemen. That they could access beauty at real cost, meaning they could go on and
afford and explore so much more in terms of great products. I knew making customers feel good like that had real power, even if it would also put some noses in the industry out of joint.”
After all, making clients feel good is what energized her businesses from the beginning. Kilgore was born in 1968 in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her father died when she was 11. Money was tight, and after high school, she moved to New York with $300.
For several years, she worked as a personal trainer, and then, having taken an aesthetician’s course after recur
ring bouts of acne, Kilgore found a new niche: offering facials from her East Village apartment.
In 1996, she opened Bliss Spa in SoHo. A Vogue article waxed lyrical about her rubs, peels and wraps. Oprah Winfrey, Calvin Klein and Madonna became clients. The waiting lists for treatments like the Quadruple Thighpass and Double Oxygen facial with Kilgore were up to 18 months long. (In 1997, Julia Roberts told People that even she sometimes had a hard time getting an appointment.)
A kitschy best- selling product line followed, as did spas and a decade of 90hour workweeks for Kilgore and her team, who would relax customers with King Kong videos in the electrolysis room and talk to them like old girlfriends.
“Bliss stood out as a brand because it had a personality that was quirky and interesting and different from everything else out there back then, just like Marcia herself,” said beauty entrepreneur Bobbi Brown.
“She was also a shrewd pioneer who opened up a whole new lucrative sector of the health and beauty sector,” Brown said. “She has never been someone who is afraid of taking chances.”
With each of her ventures, Kilgore appears able to bottle and then sell a moment in the beauty zeitgeist, an industry once dominated by a handful of global behemoths. In recent years, however, independent startups have proliferated, their success buoyed by innovative products, social media savvy and eager consumers.
Beauty Pie has arrived at a time when shoppers are more aware than ever of how and where their products are made and increasingly prize transparency from retailers. Online subscriptions, for toiletries and flowers and household goods, have also grown in popularity, particularly since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
An annual Beauty Pie membership costs $ 99, or starts at $10 a month, which then includes lower prices on more than 300 products.
“At one point I thought I might need to get a bulletproof vest for ruffling the feathers of the beauty old guard with all this, that I couldn’t do it, that everyone might hate me,” Kilgore said from Geneva, where she lives with her husband and two children. With skin so luminous that it cuts through the fuzz of the Zoom screen, she is an alluring ambassador for her brand including on social media, where she frequently offers tips and solicits feedback on new releases.
“But then I thought about it again,” Kilgore said. “This is about democratizing luxury beauty. It is about respecting the intelligence and needs of a customer I know I understand.”
If she had given in to her fears, she said, “I would hate myself. If you are almost too terrified to do something, there is usually a reason. The reason being it’s a really good idea.”