FITFLOP

Marcia Kilgore, the FITFLOP boss, has known what women want for twenty years already.
"It's easy,’ quips Kilgore, ‘If I don't want to buy it, I don't want to sell it."
The 41-year old married mother of two is regularly referred to as a serial entrepreneur, but claims she's more savvy with zeitgeist shifts than spreadsheets.

Born in Canada, in the tiny farming town of Outlook, Saskatchewan (pop. 2000), Kilgore finished high school in a neighbouring city - Saskatoon - and moved to New York City in 1987 with $300 in her pocket. She worked as a personal trainer to make money for University tuition, opting for a summer crash-course in facials when her celebrity clients headed off for the Hamptons.

She started her beauty business from a one-room office downtown in New York City's Soho, and is credited with kick-starting the day spa boom in the mid 1990's by opening BLISS SPAS in New York City and LONDON. Her more recent bargain cosmetics collection - Soap & Glory - has prompted a designer to high street beauty blitz. Soap & Glory's credo? You shouldn't have to spend an arm and a leg to moisturise one.

In 2005, with one booming business under her belt, one in the works, and with time with her kids taking priority over time on the treadmill, Kilgore realised that there must be thousands of women like her who were looking for the ‘cliff-notes’¹ version of toning. Two years, and several rounds of R&D later, she launched FITFLOP.

Kilgore's knack for delivering ‘what women want’ has made FitFlop™ (like Soap & Glory and Bliss before it) a huge success. She currently lives in London with husband Thierry and her sons Raphael (3½) and Louis (5), and commutes to work on the tube, where she's obsessed with what people are wearing on their feet.

¹ CliffNotes (formerly Cliffs Notes, originally Cliff's Notes and often, erroneously, CliffNotes) are a series of student study guides available primarily in the United States. The guides present and explain literary and other works in pamphlet form or online. Detractors of the study guides claim they let students bypass reading the assigned literature. In contrast, the company claims to promote the reading of the original work, and does not view the study guides as a substitute to the reading.