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A Category Leader
Marla Beck (MBA 1998) is founder of Bluemercury, a retailer of high-end beauty products, and a 2019 recipient of the HBS Alumni Achievement Award. In this interview, she talks about building her business model around providing opportunities for women to lead.
“I think my success as a leader is due to a couple of strengths. Being attuned to other people and the diversity of their needs came from my childhood traveling with my father, because he interacted with people of all different levels.
“Also, developing people is really important to me, and the whole Bluemercury business model has been created to give people who work in our stores as beauty experts a career path and leadership opportunities. Even today, we have staffers who started as sales associates 15 years ago who run half the country and are leaders in our company.
“This willingness to develop, and grow, and teach people how to lead is a key source of our competitiveness and makes the company sort of the family company that it is today.
“One of the most amazing things to me is that we are a company that is 93 percent women. And when you look around the room at our management team, or our field teams, for me, that's an amazing accomplishment. I'm proud of that.”
(Published July 2019)
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