Bluemercury at 20: Beauty’s Blue Streak

For Bluemercury founders Marla Malcolm Beck and Barry Beck, the great Internet bust of 2000 was an unexpected boom. The couple founded the business in 1999 as a pure-play beauty e-commerce business. Before even offering a single lipstick for sale, they had raised a million dollars, hired 20 employees and started to build out a web site. Then the bubble burst. Literally. In March 2000, the Nasdaq index started a free fall that would result in its value decreasing 76 percent in two years. Venture capital dried up instantly and the Becks were down to their last $150,000. “We were in trouble,” recalled Beck. “We were too early, and sometimes being early is just being wrong. In fact, even today, cosmetics are still one of the lowest penetrated categories in e-commerce.” Their solution was to buy a local beauty boutique in Washington, D.C., and rechristen it Bluemercury. Twenty years later, the company has established itself as a key player in the U.S. beauty retail scene, with 184 stores nationwide, including 14 stores in its D.C. home market. “After the dot-com bust, you couldn’t raise any money. We really built the business store by store,” said Malcolm Beck, who remembered the early days when the washer and

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