Our investment in Beauty Pie

Jen Andre

Our investment in Beauty Pie

DEC 18, 2020

It’s awesome to finally take the wraps off our investment in Beauty Pie.

Beauty Pie was founded four years ago by the irrepressible Marcia Kilgore, a Canadian-born serial entrepreneur who has had a stream of successes in the beauty and footwear industries since she dropped out of college at NYU.

Marcia Kilgore, Founder of Beauty Pie

She has started five companies over two decades. Her products have sold in 60+ countries. She really should have kicked up her heels some time ago but a few years ago she got inspired by an opportunity to entirely reinvent the way the beauty industry works and she couldn’t rest until she took a run at it – the result is Beauty Pie, what she believes to be her best idea yet.Beauty Pie is the first luxury beauty product buyers’ club. By selecting a membership plan, members get access to the best products from the best labs in the world (many of whom supply a variety of legendary high-end brands) at close to cost price. It’s an amazing piece of business model judo – remove the retail and brand ‘tax’ and instead create a way for people to get access to underlying products directly, cost-effectively and transparently. It is also an intensely personal mission

Beauty Pie is a buyers club for luxury cosmetics.

Elizabeth Paton at The New York Times has the full story so I won’t recreate it here but, suffice to say, we are super excited to be part of the Beauty Pie journey going forward. In fact, the hardest thing here was convincing Marcia that we could help – that was a fun mission in itself and, for me at least, involved stalking her in Geneva.

You’d think that an uber-successful entrepreneur, based in a glamorous place like Geneva, building a high-end beauty company would have a glossy office in the centre of town.In reality, I had to convince a local cab driver to take me out to an industrial park in the middle of nowhere to the low key bunker where Marcia is actually based.This is about yet further reducing the costs for the business (and ultimately the customer) and keeping the focus ‘real’ for everyone involved.