Beauty Pie founder Marcia Kilgore: ‘We all need that lift, don’t we?’
By any measure, founding and then selling two companies would be enough for most people to retire happy. But not for serial entrepreneur Marcia Kilgore. “I just really like making things,” says the Canadian businesswoman.
At 53, she is on her fifth venture: the makeup and skincare buyers’ club Beauty Pie. She was the founder of footwear firm FitFlop and beauty brand Soaper Duper; she
sold a majority stake in her Bliss Spa skincare brand to LVMH in 1999 at the age of 30, for a reported $30m; and in 2014 her Soap & Glory affordable beauty range was snapped up by the owners of the Boots chemist chain.
“I make things I would want to buy,” Kilgore says. “I think ‘would I buy this?’ and if I would, I’d want to make it – and make it better and better and better. It’s a challenge, like solving a puzzle. I don’t know why, I just love selling stuff.”
Kilgore is splitting her time between Beauty Pie’s London headquarters, her home in Switzerland, and New York, where the company has just opened an office, and admits feeling “exhausted” after waking at 1am. But she shows little sign of tiredness as she sits in a studio in west London, talking animatedly about the beauty industry and reeling off statistics.
Kilgore has been in the industry since her late teens, although she “fell into” it, after taking a course in skincare to try to improve her acne. As a student in New York, she began giving facials to pay her way. She opened Bliss Spa in 1996 – clients included Uma Thurman and Madonna – and later created an accompanying product range.
She founded Beauty Pie in 2016 in response to “egregious markups” in the sector – a practice she says she was “complicit” with earlier in her career. Kilgore recalls being told by one of the world’s largest
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