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Marcia Kilgore Built Five Beauty Brands Without a Business Plan
The Beauty Pie founder dropped out of Columbia University after her tuition plan fell through. She developed five rules for building a business along the way.
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Marcia Kilgore built five consumer brands without a formal business plan for any of them. Beauty Pie, the subscription cosmetics line, is the best known. Before it came the luxury spa Bliss and the beauty range Soap & Glory. The footwear brand FitFlop followed. The 57-year-old entrepreneur did not start with a grand plan. She moved from Canada to New York to study at Columbia University. Her tuition plan fell through. She had to work.
"You can't sit around thinking: 'What am I going to do?' You have to survive. I knew I had to use the skills I had to support myself and then I would figure it out," she said.
She worked as a personal trainer and took beauty classes at night. "What ended up transpiring was that I was quite good at the beauty industry job," she said. She dropped out of university to pursue it.
In her early salon, she did the laundry and staff training. She performed treatments herself. When she opened Bliss Spa in London in the 1990s, she had trained a full team ahead of the opening. Many quit on opening day. "The good thing is I know how to wax and do facials, so I could do all of the appointments myself," she said.
That experience taught her to build a business where she has deep, hands-on knowledge. "You want to have deep expertise, so you're not left swinging in the wind if people disappoint you or things come in from the side and surprise you," she said.
She applies a "so what?" test to every idea. "If you can't answer 'so what?' in one sentence, your idea isn't good enough yet," she said. The idea needs refining until its purpose is immediately understandable. She does not necessarily mean abandoning it.