Bluemercury Founder Marla Beck on Making Beauty Personal
Some of Bluemercury founder Marla Beck’s earliest memories surround beauty. She grew up in Oakland, CA, playing around with products at Body Time, a store with homemade cosmetic and bath essentials.
As a teen, her beauty addiction only got worse: stealing ultra-luxe Lancôme foaming cleansers from her mother (along with Mom’s personal stash of pink Clinique toner), getting weekly facials at Dermalogica before most had ever even heard of one, regularly driving 45 minutes to a MAC store for her favorite shade of lipstick, and dying over the latest exfoliating apricot scrub with her girlfriends.
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“It was a new category at the time; we scrubbed our faces to death,” Beck says with a laugh. “I was always a kid who loved to try out products. Some girls like clothes, but that was never me. For me, I just loved beauty.”
For Beck, adding a personal touch to the latest beauty innovations has always been her biggest goal. She founded Bluemercury armed with that mindset, after watching Amazon founder Jeff Bezos give a talk about selling books via a little thing called “e-commerce.”
At the time, though, this was an entirely new concept. Email was in its infancy, the Internet connection was forever dial-up, and cell phones were not yet widely used. Regardless, Beck saw an opportunity to combine all her loves in one place with the near-advent of e-commerce—something her former career path wasn’t allowing her to do.
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Bluemercury was born at the intersection of a few milestones for Beck: realizing her job working in private equity for a company janitorial sales firm wasn’t a fit for her, seeing the booming possibility of online retail, and finally tapping into her love of all things beauty-related.
She saw so much potential. “At the time, you could only buy cosmetics at the drugstore or department store,” Beck says. “There was no Sephora, no Ulta and no other real retailers for beauty products.”
So, she took her Harvard Business School expertise and founded Bluemercury with her now-husband Barry, bringing the best beauty products to the online market—but the duo was a bit too ahead of the curve in the late 90s. It didn’t take off, because gadgetry and tech advances had yet to reach a fever pitch.
Instead, Beck transitioned from online (for a while) and into brick-and-mortar retail, opening the doors of the first Bluemercury location in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. in 1999 at the age of 29. Here the intent was to create a local beauty hangout of sorts, a place brimming with accessibility, where the everywoman could go to talk shop about their favorite products while getting the luxury beauty experience.
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Three years after initially conceptualizing Bluemercury, the brand reached a turning point. “We opened a third store in Philly, and we didn’t even have a store sign because of restrictions on the historic building we were in,” she says. “Yet customers were coming in screaming. They had been waiting for a place like this.”
Laura Mercier, NARS, Caudalie and Trish McEvoy are some of the brands Beck has tapped to stock the shelves of her 60+ physical stores and fill the pages of the website. Bluemercury also sells M-61 Skincare, a line created by the Becks in 2006. “I’m having so much fun with product development right now, and identifying white space in the market where we can help,” Beck says.
What makes an item Bluemercury-approved? Quality is first on the list, both in packaging and product itself. But there’s another element Beck needs to find before she’ll buy into a brand. “We love point of view,” she says. “We love brands with actual people behind them.”
Although continuously evolving and expanding, products from visionaries stand the test of time — and for a woman who’s always been on the cutting edge of beauty and business, that’s appealing. However, though Bluemercury homes in on the latest and greatest, even the idea behind the e-commerce hub was never to blanket the masses with every single product.
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“It’s not, ‘What’s the best product?’” says Beck. “It’s, ‘What’s the best product for me?’” For that, she employs experts in-store, who she claims often know more than she does. “For instance, I’m terrible at lipstick shades, so I’ll go to a professional in the store and say, ‘OK, for winter I want three different shades, I want a pencil, a gloss and a lipstick.’ I always ask!”
The cornerstone of it all is personalized beauty: great products and sound advice to help women feel their best.
