DTC POD #235 - Alexandra Wilkis Wilson: Becoming a Business Titan (Gilt, GlamSquad, Allergan, Clerisy)
Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:46
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Blaine Bolus 00:00:51 - 00:01:28
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Blaine Bolus 00:01:34 - 00:01:45
Alexandra, why don't you give us a little quick background about your career, your history as an entrepreneur, and just a quick background so our audience gets to know your story.
Alexandra Wilkis Wilson 00:01:45 - 00:02:28
Sure. So I am a serial entrepreneur now turned growth equity investor. I am most known for being co founder of Guilt, which we launched back in 2007, really the leader in flash sale ecommerce in the US. And after that went on to be co founder CEO of Glam Squad in the on demand beauty services arena when there was the uber of everything I had to get my fix of on demand. Went on to do another two startups. Partnered with a man named Michael Klein. One of those, it was called Fitz. We sold to Tradesy, a peer to peer luxury reseller.
Alexandra Wilkis Wilson 00:02:28 - 00:03:24
The other one we sold to Google before it launched. And then I spent two and a half years leading everything digital and consumer at the pharmaceutical company Allergan, which was a lot of fun to be in big corporate with pharma budgets learned a lot. For those that don't know Allergan, you might know botox or juvederm. So they had a big, exciting aesthetics portfolio, and I hired and led a team of 70. And then after Allergan got acquired by aBVI, I finally went down the path I knew I would eventually go down, which was investing. So I partnered with a woman named Lisa Myers and we launched a growth equity fund called Clarity. And it is consumer and tech zoomer focused and growth equity stage. So for us so far, that's been series B, and we've made three investments.
Alexandra Wilkis Wilson 00:03:24 - 00:03:30
It's an $84 million fund and we are having fun with our fund, let me tell you.
Blaine Bolus 00:03:30 - 00:04:06
It's so exciting to be able to apply all that experience operating and not just in one specific sector, but across multiple different types of companies and being able to apply that again as an investor. So I think that's really cool. I definitely want to cover a lot on the growth investing side, especially in the consumer and tech sumer sort of space. But why don't we go back a little bit further to Guilt and maybe even before Guilt, right? Like, I think today a lot of people who are listening know Guilt and it's like an icon in ecommerce. It was like one of the big sites that popped up. It was actually even for me, it was one of the first places, it.
Ramon Berrios 00:04:06 - 00:04:36
Was my first ecommerce shopping experience. My sister invited me and I think we should also double click on that one. It was one of the earliest referral invite programs that took the Internet by storm. I'm curious, where did the idea for Guilt get sparked from? I guess that attaches to your career previously from Guilt, where did sort of all of this it was sort of the perfect storm that came together. Where did all of that come from?