There are inauspicious times to launch a business and then there are disastrous ones. Alexia Inge chose the latter. It was 2008 and the global financial crisis was in full swing. In February, Northern Rock was nationalized. In September, Lehman Brothers collapsed. And in June, Inge and her business partner, Jessica DeLuca, launched Cult Beauty, a Web site selling beauty products that nobody had ever heard of, to a world that had better things to think about and customers who had no money to spend. It should have sunk without trace, and it very nearly did. They recently sold it for $378 million. It all began with a chance encounter and a long lunch.
It was just before Christmas in 2006. Inge was 29 and working in PR. Tasked with drumming up publicity for a private members’ club in Covent Garden, she invited a journalist to lunch. The contact bailed, but sent along someone else, a young woman who was sharing her office. It was DeLuca. The pair bonded over their shared obsession with beauty products: the brands, the packaging, the serums, masks, oils and potions that filled their bathrooms. DeLuca was a management consultant and former investment bank analyst, who was fed up with being sold expensive products that didn’t work. Inge was fed up with the myths, misinformation and overselling in the beauty industry, which she’d seen from the inside. She’d been a successful model in her early twenties and watched makeup artists working their magic on her. She pored over their kits, asking them what they really used and rated, as opposed to what they said they used, which was often very different and intended to please the big, influential beauty brands.
