When Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna met as twentysomethings on their first day at Harvard Business School they had no plans to create a global beauty business. They had more pressing concerns as they had almost immediately to co-ordinate a spring holiday to Mexico for 50 of their classmates.
Organising the holiday served a purpose. It helped the women to realise they worked well together as a team, “but we didn’t necessarily want to start a business together”, says Ms Barna, now 29, a management consultant before going to HBS.
That all changed less than a year later, when Ms Beauchamp and Ms Barna became the co-founders of Birchbox. Each month the New York-based company sends a box filled with beauty samples to subscribers in the US, the UK, Spain and France.