Meet The Woman Who Built A $3B Beauty Brand from $0 | Anastasia Soare

What It Covers

Anastasia Soare built Anastasia Beverly Hills from $5,000 in savings into a $3 billion brand after arriving in Los Angeles from communist Romania in 1989 with no English, no money, and a three-year-old daughter. She created the eyebrow category in beauty, selling one BrowWiz product every nine seconds globally, and shares the mindset and operational decisions behind that growth.

Key Questions Answered

• •Category Creation Over Competition: Soare entered beauty by identifying a completely absent market segment — eyebrow shaping and dedicated brow products — rather than competing in an established category. When no employer would let her specialize in eyebrows, she used $5,000 in savings to rent a single room in Beverly Hills. Convincing the landlord by appealing to their shared immigrant background, she offered a six-month trial period to prove viability.
• •Service-to-Product Scalability: Soare hit a hard ceiling doing 100 eyebrow clients per day with two hands. She recognized that products — unlike services — carry unlimited scalability without proportional labor increases. Her 51% EBITDA margin on the product line validated this shift. Entrepreneurs with service businesses should identify which core deliverable can be productized and sold independently of their direct time and physical presence.
• •12-Year Retail Hustle Before Overnight Success: After Nordstrom approached her around 2000, Soare spent every weekend for twelve years traveling to stores across the country, personally waxing eyebrows and teaching clients how to use her products. Her daughter assisted with sales at each appearance. This sustained, unglamorous in-store education effort built the brand's retail foundation before Instagram existed and before the brand had marketing budgets comparable to L'Oréal or Estée Lauder.
• •Instagram as Asymmetric Marketing Leverage: In 2012, Soare's daughter Claudia identified Instagram as a distribution channel. Posting before-and-after eyebrow photos, they responded personally to comments — including one from a customer in a rural Indian village who couldn't access the product. From 2012 to 2016, Anastasia Beverly Hills generated earned media value surpassing both Estée Lauder and L'Oréal, enabling the brand to launch a full makeup line without the advertising spend those companies required.
• •Raw Material Quality Control as Brand Protection: Soare personally approves every production batch of BrowWiz before manufacturing begins. The same formula produces different results depending on raw material origin — yellow pigment sourced from Spain carries a warm orange undertone while Brazilian-sourced yellow skews green. Without batch-level approval, color consistency fails. Founders in physical product businesses should build founder-level quality checkpoints into production, not delegate them entirely to manufacturers or quality control teams.
• •Hiring for Hunger Over Credentials: Both Soare and co-panelist Joe De Sena prioritize hunger and desire to grow over existing skill sets when hiring. Soare notes that candidates who claim sole credit for growing a company to $200 million are misrepresenting team contributions — a red flag. De Sena uses a three-call rejection test for sales roles: candidates who call back after being hung up on three times demonstrate the persistence that cannot be trained into someone who lacks it naturally.