YouSaid · the spoken record

Marla Beck

lines on the record: 101
first: 2022-10-24
most recent: 2022-10-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, you know, I tell our kids never miss an opportunity to be fabulous those opportunities come and you need to know how to seize them, but it is entrepreneurship is not an easy journey. I mean, sometimes I enter a class at Harvard Business School and I say to the entrepreneurs, you know, okay, raise your hand if you've ever had a sleepless night or a morning you can't get out of bed for. And about 95% of people in the room raise their hand. Entrepreneurship is really, really hard and I have tremendous respect for anyone who not only starts, but really pushes to survive long enough for good things to happen. There is no such thing as overnight success.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know first one story that we didn't talk about, which is Leonard Lauder wandered into Blue Mercury in about two thousand I happen to be there, so that's luck. But I seized that opportunity and went right up to him and said, I want to sell your brands. He said to me, you're too small, but stay in touch. And over the years he became a mentor of ours, and when we had tough times or we needed advice, we went to him.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea that we don't realize that the success that we've had at Blue Mercury is really a sequential set of miracles. If we were to say that we didn't realize that it wouldn't be fair and that we looked back, I think, during our journey and said, if these sort of five things didn't go right, if we didn't meet Invest, if we didn't raise that initial capital, if we couldn't have bought the store, that blue mercury, that would have been what we would call a single point of failure. So luck plays into it. But I think for listeners to know that you have to be doing the hard work, you have to be prepared. I mean, who said it better than Nike, which is just do it. You have to get in the game, you have to be in the game because you have to be in For these good things to happen to you”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never really saw a separation between our personal life and our professional life. It was one thing. I mean, we were in the beauty business. We love the industry. We brought our kids to store openings. They helped us clean the shelves. And even I remember our son, Luke, we would ask him what he thought about this location. And he said, oh, I like it. I think it's next to Starbucks, so customers will come by. And he was only eight years old. Was really an incredible journey for us.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, our family has milestones based on sorcount, right? So we got married at store four. You know, I had our first child, Arielle, at store five, who's now 19. And our Sophie at store eight, and then our son stored 12 through 20. So he was the growth phase. And so they grew up in retail and e-commerce, right, running from store to store. You know, and it was probably intense. I missed moments, you know, of their lives because I was traveling so much. So even, you know, the other day, you know, I still travel here and there for business now. My son said, could you please just tell me when you go to a different state?”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the reasons why we weren't ever really disrupted by other e-commerce companies because even to this day, beauty is one of the least penetrated categories online as compared to electronics, which is nearly almost all.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. I mean, in beauty, 80% still bought in stores until COVID hit. And so the adoption of beauty onto e-commerce really took a lot longer than we ever imagined in 99. Beauty always lagged because of this desire to try and feel texture, and there's colors that you need to try. And no matter what you do, the try on technology is just not the same as the real thing.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say also that The irony of selling to a department store wasn't lost on us, but it was an amazing recognition of the value we created, and it ended up being an incredibly symbiotic relationship, and they let us operate with resources we couldn't even imagine as a standalone company.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me also take you back to 2014, which is Sephora was expanding aggressively, Ulta was expanding aggressively, Barry and I really wanted to step on the gas. We saw a path to 350 stores, but we needed money, we needed resources to do it. And so partnering with Macy's would really enable us to fulfill our dream of this national brand with $350 locations. And we knew if we didn't have a new partner, we would fall behind given the pace of retail expansion at that point in the beauty industry.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say just one thing at that point was that the rumors of retail's death were greatly exaggerated. Those rumors were untrue if you looked at our numbers.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was essentially an unmitigated disaster. It just didn't work. And then with the backdrop of 08, you know, we closed these stores. And the truth is our investors were right with us. They stepped right to our side and they backstopped the business. I will tell you in 08, one of our great sort of claims the fame is even in 08 at the Nadir of what may be the last 20 to 30 years of the American economy still grew our revenue. We grew our revenue every single year from the beginning of time till the date that we left the company.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that we psychologically hid behind the recession. He said I was the recession, the recession. The truth is it was an operational misstep. And what we realized was our customer wasn't at the moments. It was inconvenient for them. We didn't get the frequency of visit. It wasn't a client that was going to test and learn. And the sort of higher-end client in the beauty categories was really roaming the urban streets and the suburban streets.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which we had not done before. And so we put together a huge expansion plan, Mall Street stores, really aggressive. We opened the mall stores. They don't go that well because it's a much more competitive environment than our street stores. And then the 0708 crash comes.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing I would say is because of our early experience with everything fell apart, right, e-commerce out of favor, can't raise money. We were much more conservative than many entrepreneurs maybe would have been, but we had had that experience, and so we had seen really bad times.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The future seemed great, but we had our entire life savings, everything we had tied up in this business, and we didn't want to ever turn to our kids and say, well, what happened? Well, mom and dad went bankrupt. Well, why? Because we were so greedy and we wanted to build this 400-store chain. Oops, it didn't work out. Maybe we should have just kept it at five stores. So it was a way for us to sort of sell our cake and have it too.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say candidly speaking, we wanted to rebalance our risk equation. And so that That we were interested in selling some of our stock to fuel our lifestyle because we'd poured our entire life into this business. And I think it would be reasonable for us. In other words, we looked at this business. We had become at that point by store 10, we'd become known as the Starbucks of Cosmetics. I mean, we had a great reputation.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But still, I mean, to continue to expand, I mean, you guys needed lots of money. You needed tens of millions of dollars at this point. And so I guess in 2006, you decide to partner with an investment company. Why did you decide to do that? What was the thinking at the time?”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of Sephora, excuse me, senior vice president of Sephora merchandising said we just can't make a go over to Georgetown. We just can't get our customer that you keep taking the best customer and we can't make it work and that they just prefer you. And it was a big compliment to us. It was nice of him to say that. And that really helps sustain our thinking a little bit that we were on the right path.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the greatest compliments we ever got in the early days which really helped sustain us was the senior vice president of merchandising. We ran into him in New York one day and he said, I have to give you a compliment. He says, we just can't make a go of it in Georgetown. And he said,”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit at first, but their first strategy for expansion was malls, and we were not in malls. We liked the streets. We liked Georgetown, we liked downtown Philadelphia, we liked the suburbs, we liked Princeton, and so our real estate strategy was fundamentally different from theirs for a long time.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the advantage we had short term was that when they first came to the United States, their brand mix, the brands they sold were not that great. So we had a little bit of time. And, you know, we also got really focused early on about how our client service and our staff would be our secret weapon. So it wouldn't matter what our brand mix was, that we would be better at serving clients. And so the fact that they opened next to us made us stronger because we had to get really smart about how to compete really early.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Later on, it was, I believe, as we did a recapitalization of the business. This was a question that came up. And I just think for whatever reason, either it was our professionalism or it was the reading of the fact that how much we loved each other or how important we both were to the business, that they were able to get past that.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, sometimes investors don't like that. They don't like married couples or partners, romantic partners, just our business together. They don't like to invest in those businesses because they're worried they're going to split up.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially, I think I had some form of armor on, right? Which is, you know, first we went to these investors, raised the money, we almost lost the money. Know shield where I was trying to be a strong CEO.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we completed each other's sentences. I mean, it was just, it seemed to be pretty obvious that we were pretty. To me, that we would end up together. And I frankly had been enamored by Marla the entire time, but we kept it professional.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but what also happened in the industry about three or four years in is that all of these independent brands were purchased by L'Oreal, by Este Lauder, and Shedo so completely. Overnight we were then in business with the big companies, and that did two things for us. It provided a wall around us for new entrants because the Indie brands didn't need distribution anymore. They were in these big companies. And so the next person that wanted to build a cosmetics store had to now go to the big companies, which put in barriers. And it also gave the big companies este Lauder and L'Oreal a window onto what Blue Mercury was doing and said then they started adding more of their brands to our mix. And so actually The way the industry transformed really added another tailwind to blue mercury.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's high risk. To the perception that your brandy is either lower quality. It's gone down market, less exclusive. I mean, the brands are just very protective. How exclusive they are, how many street corners, how many points of distribution they have in Philadelphia. We already have one here. And we don't want to have too many because the perception, you know, this is, there's a lot going on there. And then you couple that with... Fifty brands, and they're all got their different perceptions of what their perception should be. I mean, it's a lot. It's a pretty complex Venn diagram.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're a cosmetics brand like Chanel, What's the difference between what your lipstick you're selling really and another brand that's sold at CVS?”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so traditionally, you know, when you scale businesses like a Home Depot or a Target, you try to move to be more self-service. And that's really the genius of Sephora too, right? It's very self-service, very accessible. We took a different path and figured out how to do it in our own way.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It will never scale, and the challenge was that he felt it was too complex because we wanted to be consultative, give samples. It wasn't enough of a supermarket or a factory. And that's never what we strive to be. It was just something completely different.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would just say one of the things about that we were also in the high advice category. And I'll never forget when we were looking to raise money, it was Marla's very upset about this, a very well-respected investor said to us. Visit us at our most successful store, Princeton, New Jersey, at the time, store number five, and said that this business will never work”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we ended up retaining these beauty experts and then they retain this knowledge expertise and these relationships with our customers and then because of that the customers continue to come back searching out a particular beauty expert who I guess at one point when we hired Goldman Sachson company to look at our business they found an anomaly there were certain employees They couldn't understand. It said that they worked at the company longer than Marl and I and we founded the company how was that possible? Because there were several employees that came along with the purchase of the EFX store and just never left. And so, you know, we really had incredible retention of our people.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a bet the company moved for us. If Philadelphia didn't work. We would have been done because we spent the last bit of money opening the store. It was very hard. The Blue Mercury model wasn't proven yet. You know, we weren't sure that it was really going to work. But Philadelphia was an amazing success for us. And so that really solidified.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, we were scrappy then. I mean, we had almost gone out of business, you know, that sort of near-death experience. We turned over every penny. We were really thoughtful about everything we did. But we debated Barry didn't want to go to Philly. He did not want to make that move. He thought it was too big of a reach. So I won that debate.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a major city that was reasonably nearby, and guess what? If we had to, we could always sleep on my sister's couch. So it was convenient.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were very, very lucky. We would have gone bankrupt also. And so, but we also, at that point, we weren't paying attention so much to the internet. We were spending 24-7 in the stores that were open seven days a week. And trying to figure out that business. And I said, if we want to prove out a model, a business model that works, we have to go to a new city and a new market.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, by 2001, because at this point you have two stores now in Washington, D.C. Bubble bursts and these other competitors who were e commerce only like Eve.com, they just kind of blew up. They went, you know, they go to business. I mean, in a sense, you guys kind of got lucky by struggling in 99 because you didn't have all your eggs in that e-commerce basket.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And ask for a new moisturizer, immediately the Blue Mercury Beauty expert would start diagnosing what you wanted, which is, as your skin dry, do you want something in a jar? Do you like a lotion? And so the focus now became on not the brand, but the client and what she, mainly she, wanted. And we had a really fun mix of brands, some of which they had never seen.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the difference was when you go to a department store like a Macy's or a Bloomingdale's, everything is sold counter by counter. And back then everything was behind glass counters. So if you wanted to. Clinique, you would go up to the counter and ask for clinique tone or famous product, pay for it. And then if you wanted your mascara at the Lancone counter, you would have to start over with the sales associate from Lancombe that is paid for by the company. So the department store model was designed to serve the brands, not to serve the customers. So the difference at Blue Mercury was that the staff were trained in every brand. And so the focus became on the client, which is if you came in”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess at one point, he has a funny point we opened up our fourth store. I guess this is fast forward in Philadelphia. And one of my friends from high school was near my high school in Philadelphia, and he said, is it true that you and your wife founded Blue Mercury? And I said, yeah, is there a customer service issue? What's the problem? He goes, wow, you guys are so cool. This is so cool. I remember calling Marla. I was like, you're not going to believe it. She said, what now? I said, I think I actually think we might be cool.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, that I'll never forget one day we saw a throng of customers. Marl and I used to work the store ourselves, and a throng of customers were racing down M Street chasing this poor man. And then as he came to the store we realized it was a guy and a gal, and as they got closer, we realized it was Rod Stewart very quietly opened the door. There was no one in the store at the time. He ducked in to protect him. Own the store, and he never acknowledged that he was Rod Stewart.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think the other thing is Washington, D.C. is much more cosmopolitan and was than you would expect You have the embassies here, you have people from all over the country that move to Washington. And by the way, there were a lot of international hotels here. And so the hotels would send Their clients to blue mercury if they asked, you know, I need beauty products or I need a gift.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will tell you that it was some insecurity for us because we would go to New York City and meet Marlon. I would go to New York City, meet with these vendors. And they would say, what do you know about the beauty business? You're in Washington, D.C., and we used to have to come to New York and do the rounds. And we would have to go and essentially pay homage and see all these brands, and they were all in New York City, and we would run around New York. And this was really important, this relationship part of the business. In fact, I remember one investor asking me how much longer do we have to continue to dance with these brands? And I said it never stops. It's a constant relationship building. And so we were out of the New York scene.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's essentially the Walmart effect, which is the sense that this family was able to build a business out of the limelight, away from the city.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, alright, so you have now this store. You're going to manage it better. And by the way, a lot of people don't think of Washington, D.C. as a center of fashion or, you know, on the vanguard of like a cosmetics store. It's seen as a kind of a sleepy, you know, it's sort of a joke when it comes to fashion, people kind of think there's boxy suits, Brooks brothers for men and Anne Taylor for women. It was just not to criticize those brands, but it was just very conservative. People didn't think of Washington, D.C. as a place where you would open a cool cosmetic store. Why did Washington, D.C. actually work to your advantage? Because you were thinking New York, LA.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it wasn't that hard. I mean, it was people were coming there already for cosmetics. It was the only place you could buy cosmetics in Georgetown. It was just a poorly run business. And so I would say we worked at it, but it wasn't that hard to turn it around if you invest in the staff and invested in the inventory because it was such a unique business.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I mean, you are focusing all of your energy on an e-commerce business at designing a really cool site and making it easy for people to use in 1999 it wasn't easy. There were a bunch of steps. Now you're pivoting focusing tons of your attention on a store. What did that mean? I mean, how are you going to differentiate the store from what it was before to actually make it work?”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great business lesson because it's one of these things where you live long enough to live forever and that you have to be able to survive in business long enough for good things to happen. And this was one of the things that we quickly saw cut our overhead, went down to our last $150,000 and looked to the left and right there was this store opportunity, which probably had we not gotten into trouble would never have availed itself to us.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would just say that I don't know that we saw that. And for many, and many years we looked to the brands and thought maybe we were in the wrong business. We should be in the brand business. So we didn't see all that. It was much more of a survival move.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple things. One is we stabilize the business right away, right? So we had a new bank loan, so we bought a ton of inventory. We added brands. We hired staff. New staff and paid them really well because the old staff was not actually getting their paycheck every week. And so we transformed that one store and store businesses are good because you actually get the revenue right away from the customer. You get the next date from the credit card company. And then if you have inventory terms, which we convinced everybody to give to us, the cash flow is great. And so it took us a while, but we actually built up the cash flow and the revenue of this store, and it ended up funding the e-commerce business.”
2022-10-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT