Listen to the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!
This week, host Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt Groupe and CEO of Glamsquad, a New York City-based beauty provider that delivers professional and affordable hair, makeup and nail services to customers’ apartments, offices, hotels — wherever a blowout is needed. It’s like Seamless for looking really, really good.
Alexandra describes the early days at Gilt as risky, challenging, exhausting — and totally exhilarating. The co-founders “were like superheroes,” full of passion and a seemingly boundless energy for the scrappy work that needed to be done. As hard as it is to imagine now, Alexandra and her team initially struggled to find companies willing to sell their merchandise through Gilt. But when the economy took a nose dive in 2008, things looked up: suddenly, all kinds of popular designers found themselves with hundreds of thousands of dollars in merchandise that couldn’t be sold full-price. Seven years of rampant success later, Alexandra left for a new challenge: developing Glamsquad — a company she already invested in (and whose services she used) — into a need-to-have for the busy women of NYC.
Recounting lights off in fashion show rooms and suspecting these designers literally couldn’t pay their electric bills. How the financial crisis gave Gilt the circumstances it needed to grow. The value of Harvard business school, her appetite for risk, being okay with failure, what’s the worst case scenario, ignoring naysayers,
Download the latest episode to hear Alexandra talk about growing a business in an on-demand economy, hoping for the unexpected, tuning out the naysayers, and why it makes sense that Glamsquad’s Series A investor was a woman.