They all have hot pink Air Jordan 1 sneakers with "Birch" on their left heel, "Box" on their right, and their names embroidered on them. They remember the early days in 2010, when the company was one of Silicon Alley's brightest startups. And they remain close, united by a philosophy of growing quickly and celebrating in style. [The New York-based founders banded together at the company, a pioneer in subscription services that shook the beauty industry to its core with sophisticated marketing and an ambitious business model between 2010 and 2015, and at one point was valued at $500 million.

They survived the company's peaks and valleys and describe their time there as a startup boot camp that was more than money could buy. Birchbox's 19th employee (now 230), Rachel Liverman, co-founder and CEO of Glowbar; Daypika Mutiara, founder and CEO of Live Tinted, who was the brand strategy manager; Love Stories TV founder and CEO and Rachel Jo Silver, former head of social media at Birchbox; Nidhi Kapur, founder and CEO of Maiden Home, who oversaw business development; Linden Ellis, co-founder and marketing associate at Coterie; Communal Creative founder and CEO and former creative director Jess Williams.

Birchbox came on the scene in 2010, during the heyday of Silicon Valley's reemergence, when many people looked to the men in hoodies running Bay Area behemoths like Facebook and Google for the future. Birchbox, headquartered in Manhattan and dominated by women, looked like a different kind of animal on paper. Haley Barna co-founded Birchbox with Katya Beauchamp, a Harvard Business School classmate and current CEO, and Molly Chen, whom she met while an undergraduate at Harvard.

The three co-founders leveraged their personal values and what they disliked about their previous jobs (magazine (Chen), management consulting (Barna), and investment banking (Beauchamp)) to create a radically transparent and welcoming workplace where everyone can influence the business. This culture can be informally summarized as follows.

1: Remove barriers. The co-founders never sat in a corner room, but in the same space as the entire team. Says Chen, "We made it easy for people at all levels to talk to us."

2: Make the peaks and valleys transparent. The number of Birchbox subscribers was prominently displayed and discussed with the entire team each week. Says Williams, "That transparency was really motivating." "We would celebrate every moment, like when we crossed a sales milestone, or how many times a photo was "liked" on Facebook. was "celebrated every second,"

and when a photo was "liked" on Facebook, etc.

"The numbers created this energy," says Kapoor.

Third: Try new things and see what works. 'When I look back at my early Instagram photos, they weren't exactly beautiful. They were dark, weird pictures." I would do fun braids in my hair on Saturdays and take pictures and post them. I was doing what I liked and trying to do what I liked."

The photos were not the most beautiful.

The atmosphere in the office was like a never-ending adrenaline rush. 'We were high-fiving all day long,' says Liverman, who was responsible for bringing new beauty brands on board. It was like the stock market. You're on the phone, you're making a pitch, and then you put the phone down and it's like, 'It's over.' It was magical." She says. 'We saw the response from our clients. It was like one day we had 500 subscribers and the next day we had a million. Unfortunately, that trajectory stalled. 0]

Birchbox scaled rapidly, raising as much as $90 million in venture capital funding to date, but that level of growth became unsustainable, the women say. As competitors came along and the company swelled from a few dozen employees to more than 300 spread across North America and Europe, its early successful strategy began to falter. It was during this difficult period that the real lessons were learned.

"We jumped out in shipping containers, set up a store in Soho, and even ran TV commercials," says Ellis, who was part of the marketing team. Ellis, employee number two of the frozen foodservice company Daily Harvest and co-founder of the party supply company Coterie, continues. If you spend too much money on marketing and don't get your customers' money back within a year, you're setting yourself up for disaster."

That Ellis did not have the right experience for his job points to another lesson: Liverman, who left Birchbox in 2016, says, "We should have hired experts who look like us, act like us, and have years of experience, not smart new graduates. should have been hired," he says (in the same year the company made two layoffs, cutting about 15% of its workforce). Last year, Liverman launched Grover, hoping to do for Facial what Driver did for Blowout.

The teachable moment extended all the way to the top. "There was a lot to learn, especially as a first-time founder," says Beauchamp, who remains CEO of Birchbox." There was great promise and ambition, but also a lot of humanity."

"There were a lot of lessons learned.

Many lessons fall into the "to do" category; Williams, who launched the design agency Communal Creative in 2015, says, "The spirit of thinking beyond the task is something Birchbox instilled in me." We were looking for unique ways to add a sense of surprise and discovery: how to add something that subscribers wouldn't expect."

"Working at Birchbox was my first experience seeing entrepreneurship firsthand," says Kapoor, who launched Maiden Home, a direct-to-consumer furniture company, in 2017. 'I didn't grow up seeing it. It always seemed unfeasible, and I was resistant to taking that kind of risk, but seeing it in action made being a founder seem mystical." Today, her company has 10 employees. She says, "All the traditions and processes we had, of celebrating victories, talking openly about challenges, and being transparent, I want to instill in my company"

.

"I want everyone to walk into the Live Tinted office the way I walk into Birchbox every morning," says Mutiara, who launched her makeup and skin care company in 2019." I have learned the power of building a team that is passionate about the business. I went into the office feeling like it was my own company and I was ready to work hard."

Another reason to work hard: Birchbox employees rely on each other for capital and advice. Kapoor is one of Mutiara's angel investors, and Barna is one of those who invested her personal funds, though she is now a partner in the VC firm First Round Capital. Barna also invested her personal capital in Love Stories TV, a silver startup wedding video company, and Chen invested in Grover through Cleo Capital, a women-led venture capital firm founded by Sara Kunst that counts Chen as one of its scouts. Ellis is text-chained to a former Birchbox employee (called Labradoodle "because we're all into dogs"), and Silver is text-chained to a former colleague who has gone on to key roles at companies like Wal-Mart and Rent the Runway They are.

Birchbox is still in business; it sold a majority stake to investment firm Viking Global in 2018, and Birchbox-branded shelves have popped up in Walgreens stores nationwide: in Glowbar, Love Stories TV, Maiden Home. For Beauchamp, who invested in Glowbar, Love Stories TV, and Maiden Home, seeing former employees flap their wings is "nothing but sweet," she says. "It's hard not to get excited about investing in the possibilities they're going to invent. Life is long.

This article appeared in the March 2020 issue of Marie Claire.

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