Anyone who was alive in New York City in the 90s and had pores was either delivering them to a particular spa in SoHo, waiting to deliver them to a particular spa in SoHo, or bitching to anyone who’d listen about how they couldn’t deliver them even though they had a gift certificate that was about to expire and called the particular spa every day at eight, noon, and five.
Everyone went there unless they couldn’t. It was democratic in its appointment policy, which is not exactly how New York works. Hillary Clinton, to name just one, reportedly couldn’t get in.
Once you entered, though, the tension vanished from your body along with your dead skin cells. There were brownies, cookies, and wine in the lounge. Apples and carrots, too, but why bother? There were supermodels and actors in the changing room, and sometimes they showed you how to use the locker key. (Thanks, Amber.) It was a hang. It was all bliss. It was called Bliss.
Marcia Kilgore, the facialist who gave birth to Bliss Spa, went on to start four other businesses, which reimagined assumptions about service, soap, sneakers, and serums, alliteratively. Each invention sprang out of a specific dissatisfaction, some of which may have looked quite small to those whose vision wasn’t quite twenty-ten.
First, the facials. As an N.Y.U. student and part-time fitness trainer (remember Madison Avenue Muscle, a punk-style basement gym that looked like an after-hours club?), Kilgore saved up for her first facial, a reward after her economics final. Let’s not name the salon, because it’s still in business and may not appreciate it. “I had really terrible skin,” she tells me. “I remember lying on the table.... And this woman looks at the magnifying glass at me and goes, ‘What a pity.’”
Afterward, dejected and blotchy, Kilgore thought, “You know what? If I ever have a place like that, I would never make people feel bad about themselves.” Bliss, in name and attitude, was the antidote.
There were brownies, cookies, and wine in the lounge. Apples and carrots, too, but why bother?
Kilgore transformed the facial experience from haughty and judgmental to happy and cool. She was the definition of hands-on, giving facials, burning CDs—no whale music, no Enya—answering phones, and making “I’m sorry” calls each evening to all the people on the waiting list. Three years later, in 1999, she sold Bliss to LVMH for a reported $30 million. She stuck around through the second sale of Bliss, this time to Starwood Hotels & Resorts. And then it was thank you, next.
She moved to London and clocked a few concurrent themes that would seem unrelated to you and me. One, H&M’s collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld, offering “great design for really affordable prices,” says Kilgore. Two, “a story about David Beckham throwing out his underwear, never wearing it twice.” Three, “the Zeitgeist about people spending too much and wasting a lot,” not including David Beckham. And, last, the rising popularity of retro design.
In 2006, she tossed all that into a Vitamix and came up with Soap & Glory, inexpensive bath and body products in pink boxes with kitschy black-and-white photographs. Kilgore regarded Soap & Glory as a hobby until it was selling so briskly that Boots offered first to carry it and then to acquire it. And for Kilgore, it was, once again, toodle-oo.
At this point, the former physical trainer had a young son and a schedule so packed she couldn’t get to the gym. What if there were a shoe that could engage her quads and glutes as she walked her son to school? Working with biomechanical engineers, she drew a picture of a sandal and took it to a meeting with executives from Bath & Body Works. Just a drawing on a piece of paper. “They said, ‘We’ll order 30,000 to 300,000,’” she tells me. That was FitFlop, a business she still owns that she says does about $180 million in sales a year. “It was, for me, the new beauty product.”
Along the way, there was also Soaper Duper, a small collection of mostly natural body products that seems to have vanished. A mere footnote. Let’s slip on our FitFlops and move along.
Kilgore’s current big idea hit her when she’d forgotten her moisturizer on a trip to a shoe factory in China. She wandered into the duty-free maze in the Hong Kong airport and discovered something most people know all too well: moisturizers are expensive. “Are you kidding me?” she may have said aloud.
On another trip, this time outside Milan at Intercos, a leading cosmetics contract manufacturer, Kilgore’s idea started to gel. Intercos supplies makeup to virtually every high-end brand on the shelves at Sephora and Ulta. I’ve worked with them and can attest: the showrooms and the quality are jaw-dropping. Kilgore left her meeting with a bag of samples over her shoulder, and realized, “I have $5,000 [worth] of cosmetics, street value. I wish my friends could come here with me.” The hair on her arms stood up.
She dreamed of giving everyone access to these goods without the various middlemen (if you don’t count Kilgore) and retailers, each with their attendant markups. She would charge a membership fee “like a buyer’s club, like Costco, ” she said. “Then they can buy stuff for a quarter of the normal price.”
Off she went to Swiss labs for creams that resemble caviar, to French labs for silken body lotions, to Italy for finely milled eye shadows and pigment-dense lipsticks, to Korea for scrubs and masks of volcanic ash, and to Japan for cleansers and serums of unimaginable glide. She asked the chemists to stuff the products with the maximum percentages of active ingredients and “peptides out of your eyeballs,” she says.
She called it Beauty Pie, as in “Get a bigger piece of the beauty pie,” she says. The pie being skin care, makeup, hair care, bath, fragrances, and supplements from the same labs as all the fancy-pants labels. An annual membership costs $59, and the markup on each product is about 3 times versus the usual 10 or 12, she says. Beauty Pie’s most expensive cream is $59 for members; $175 for non-members.
This might rattle the brains of people who associate price with performance, but Kilgore was also concerned that this might rattle the brains of her competitors so much that they’d retaliate. “I thought I was going to need a bulletproof vest,” she says. “‘Oh, man, everyone is going to hate me.’ And then I thought, ‘But millions of women will love me.’”
She was also afraid that the big brands would force suppliers to choose between their robust contracts and Beauty Pie, the David to their Goliath. She kept her plans a secret until a month before the launch, in 2016. In the end, no one voiced objections to her new business model, at least publicly.
She says there are more than 200,000 Beauty Pie members now, “but we need millions, and we will get millions,” she says. To reach that, she’s working on gaining traction in the U.S. and opening physical stores. It sounds a bit like the path to Glossier.
“It’s all about happiness here,” Kilgore tells me. And that’s her through line from Bliss to Beauty Pie. It’s pleasure served with a sense of humor and a sprinkling of optimism.
The serial entrepreneur has one more idea up her sleeve. “I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell anybody.” And then she does.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look