The Reckoning
If Ms. Bodnar is cagey about specifics, it’s as a result of she has confronted controversy. There’s the plaintiff who sued Thrive in 2018, alleging that the corporate used to be now not donating to charities in the best way that it claimed. (The lawsuit led to a “stipulated” dismissal; Ms. Bodnar signed a non-disparagement settlement that precludes her from speaking about it.) There are the trolls who pressured her on social media when Forbes added her, in 2019, to its “richest women” listing.
“It was actually quite scary when that list came out,” stated Ms. Bodnar, who splits her time between Seattle and Los Angeles, the place Thrive is headquartered.
Ms. Bodnar grew up in rural Washington State. “We went to church every Sunday, but Allure was my bible,” she stated. She labored at Sephora to pay her means via neighborhood school, which ended in a task on the Seattle workplace of Clarisonic, a maker of a mechanical face brush that L’Oréal received in 2011.
“Among all these men on the team, she was very impressive,” Carol Hamilton, the president for acquisitions for L’Oréal U.S.A., recalled. “She wanted to understand the ‘why’ of the work, how big companies operate.”
In 2013, Ms. Bodnar’s shut buddy, Kristy LeMond, who have been operating within the nonprofit sector, died of sentimental tissue sarcoma, a unprecedented most cancers. Ms. Bodnar had a reckoning. She surrender L’Oréal. She purchased a number of make-up. She wrote a marketing strategy within the notes app of her iPhone: vegan make-up with a trade fashion that mimicked Toms and Warby Parker, the pioneers of the purchase one, give one fashion.
She were given an afternoon task at Bulletproof, the complement corporate, to finance her after-hours inventions, like false eyelashes that “work whether you have lashes or not,” Ms. Bodnar stated. “So much of what I heard in the beginning was, ‘If a woman’s going through cancer, we tell her not to wear makeup.’ I was like, ‘That’s not an acceptable response.’”