Bluemercury’s Barry Beck on Being a Disruptor

Barry and Marla Malcolm Beck had an “eye for disrupting” the beauty business with their luxury beauty retail chain, Bluemercury. The pair had a plan to problem solve the beauty buying journey, Barry Beck told attendees at the forum in New York. Beck, an entrepreneur since his early days, had recently sold a business and was looking to start another one. “When I was 10 years old, I was shoveling snow and had contracts with every house in the neighborhood,” he said. Years later, “I had an urge for my next big opportunity, and with the advent of the Internet, I knew the world was poised for change.” He and Marla developed a plan for a luxury beauty e-commerce site, and raised $1 million from investors. Then they found out that there were two other competing sites in the works, and that those start-ups had reached raised $10 million. Then the Nasdaq crashed, venture capital dried up, and Bluemercury was left with $150,000 in the bank. “As our Internet company continued to burn money…we realized our only way to achieve a return for our investors was to combine our online business with a [physical] store,” Beck said. So, the couple bought a store called

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