1. What specific factors do you believe led Leslie Blodgett and her small firm to success?

2. Bare Escentuals is now part of a much larger company. What kinds of changes might take place at Bare Escentuals over the next few years?

Leslie Blodgett was always passionate about color, cosmetics, and making people feel good. After college she went to work for Max Factor, a small firm that was acquired by Revlon and then Procter & Gamble. When Blodgett got a call from one of the investors who owned a little makeup company called Bare Escentuals, she had never heard of the firm. The company was the first to offer a mineral-based powder makeup that might actually succeed—and Blodgett was intrigued. “A powder foundation that was good for your skin made great sense,” recalls Blodgett. “But the shades Bare Escentuals had created weren’t working. They were gross. I knew complexions and how to match skin tones—and I saw a huge opportunity.” Blodgett went to work for the small firm and became CEO within a few months.

“There were seven of us in the office just winging it,” Blodgett admits. With her cosmetics knowledge, Blodgett immediately relaunched the line as bareMinerals, which included six eye shadows, six blushes, five powder foundations, and brushes—all designed to work together. But by the end of the first two years, Blodgett worried that the company wasn’t going to make it. As she was channel-surfing late one night, she stopped at the TV shopping channel QVC. As she watched, Blodgett formulated a plan—if she could get bareMinerals on the air, she knew she could sell the products. It turned out that QVC agreed with her, and Blodgett sold $45,000 of products in her first airing. The shopping channel immediately re-booked her on a regular basis.

Blodgett continuously looks to her customers for inspiration—both for product and marketing ideas. She began hosting events at the boutiques, inviting customers to share their ideas and tips—after which she began to name new products after specific customers. Blodgett then expanded Bare Escentuals’ TV presence with infomercials that gave her more time to explain the products and application processes. Looking for a wider distribution network, she hounded Sephora until they offered her space in their stores. Shortly after that, Nordstrom came calling. Meanwhile, Blodgett decided that if small in-store events were good, bigger events were better—and she organized cruises for customers.

Over the next fifteen years, Blodgett brought Bare Escentuals, step-by-step, from small-business status with six stores in northern California to its recent sale to Japanese beauty giant Shiseido for $1.7 billion, with 130 boutiques across the nation and 2,200 employees.

Blodgett herself became a cosmetics and smallbusiness celebrity. But the company was growing too quickly and she recognized that Bare Escentuals couldn’t keep up with the demand for new products. So she hired a new chief financial officer who, with the sale of the firm to Shiseido has become CEO, while Blodgett has assumed the position of executive chairman. She continues to be wellknown for her approachability, answering her own emails from customers, always striving for the personal touch that makes her business style unique.

Throughout the company’s growth, Blodgett never lost sight of her own passion or her company’s mission to offer the highest-quality cosmetics that not only look natural but benefit the skin. She believes that making people feel good about themselves is her most important task. “I don’t want to be a business,” Blodgett says. “I want to be a community.”