How Anastasia Soare built a $3 billion beauty brand from nothing

Executive overview

Anastasia Soare arrived in Los Angeles at 31 with no money, no English, and no contacts. Within a decade she had built Hollywood's most sought-after brow studio; within two, a consumer brand valued at $3 billion.

Her growth came in three distinct phases: hand-building credibility through free work and celebrity word-of-mouth, scaling via traditional media and retail partnerships, then catching the Instagram wave early through her daughter's instinct.

The core insight: master one highly visible skill, let it walk out the door on people's faces, and let the product need sell itself.

From Romania to Beverly Hills

• Grew up under communist Romania: property confiscated, food scarce, electricity rationed.
• Husband obtained political asylum in the US; Anastasia waited three years for a passport, then left with $0 — Romanian law made carrying dollars a jailable offence.
• Arrived in LA drawn by Hollywood films watched illegally behind closed drapes.
• Got her aesthetician's licence in Romania while waiting; landed a temporary salon job through a church community connection.
• Noticed that Hollywood paid no attention to eyebrows despite their power to change facial emotion.

The golden ratio as a business edge

• Spotted in her own photos that pencil-thin, rounded brows made her look startled.
• Applied the golden ratio (1.618) — a mathematical proportion the human eye is encoded to perceive as balanced — to brow shaping.
• Clients began asking what she had changed about her appearance; she started shaping theirs.
• Her employer wouldn't charge more than $10 for the service. She decided to go alone.

Building credibility through free work

• Rented a single room in a Beverly Hills salon — "nothing to lose and everything to gain."
• Gave free eyebrow shaping to every shampoo girl, hairstylist, and makeup artist she could find.
• Goal: get practitioners to believe in her skill and refer their own clients.
• First major press break came when Allure asked to write about Hollywood's "best-kept secret" using a celebrity client — Michelle Pfeiffer agreed.
• Eyebrows were chosen deliberately as the marketing vehicle: visible on every face, comfortable for celebrities to discuss publicly.

The Oprah moment

• Appeared live on The Oprah Winfrey Show to shape Oprah's brows on camera.
• Anastasia had visualised being on the show since her first weeks in the US, watching without understanding English.
• After the episode aired, the phone didn't stop ringing. The brand became a household name overnight.

From service to product

• Clients asked for the brow-filling product she used in the salon so they could maintain results at home.
• This created organic, authentic demand for a product line — not a strategic pivot.
• No outside investors would fund an "eyebrow product" in the 1990s.
• Funded the business by working non-stop in the salon and flipping houses, recycling profits back into the company.
• Nordstrom invited her to launch there in 2000; she opened in-store brow studios staffed by trained aestheticians.
• The service studios educated consumers on using the products — and marketed them simultaneously.

Pre-social media growth

• Traded eyebrow services for TV appearances: did brows for anchors and producers; got airtime to talk about products.
• Flew to cities on Sundays and Mondays — local TV appearance first, then Nordstrom training.
• Cultivated beauty editors across every major women's magazine.

Catching the Instagram wave

• Daughter Claudia joined the business as a teenager and pushed for Instagram when it launched.
• Anastasia resisted, associating it with Facebook. Claudia insisted it was different.
• Posted one tutorial video on a brow pencil; a comment from a woman in rural India — unreachable by any traditional channel — proved the platform's reach.
• Shifted to 24/7 posting and hired younger talent to run the accounts.
• Aligned early with Kardashian-era influencers native to the platform.

Taking private equity

• By 2018 the business was doing ~$300–320 million in revenue with strong margins, 100% founder-owned.
• Took investment from TPG to fund international expansion — a capability she judged would distract her from marketing and product, her irreplaceable roles.
• COVID was the sharpest setback: stores closed, testers banned, makeup sales collapsed.

Advice for aspiring founders

• Decide first what you actually want: entrepreneurship is relentless and never fully stops.
• Master your skill before anything else — it is the foundation everything else is built on.
• Market that skill actively; visibility compounds.
• Surround yourself only with people who share your vision.
• Passion converts work into purpose; without it the hours are unsustainable.
• Her retirement plan: working nine to five.