Marcia Kilgore was born to be an entrepreneur.  "I found it very difficult to take direction from other people, … and I always found it difficult to work in places where the standards of the person who was running the place were, from my perspective, mediocre; it would frustrate me to no end," she said on the latest episode of the Glossy Podcast.   Plus, her personality traits are befitting a successful entrepreneur, she said. Among them: "being super curious, being solution-oriented, loving to experiment, having solutions for any kind of hurdles or roadblocks that come along, and being tough enough to never give in." Based on her track record, she's used that to her advantage. Kilgore sold her first business, Bliss Spa, to LVMH in 1999. That was before starting the "masstige" beauty brand Soap & Glory, which she sold to Walgreens Boots Alliance in 2011. In the years since, she's launched Soaper Duper, Beauty Pie and FitFlop, the latter of which she described as a groundbreaker among footwear brands.  "I had this idea for a shoe that would align your body when you walked in it and give you energy [by] rebounding the energy from the ground up," she said. "Shoes had always just been drawn [by designers]. No one was thinking about how the shoe affects the person walking in it. … [FitFlop] is really an engineering company." Kilgore said her entry into the footwear category, after building her career in beauty, made sense given that she’d been "very into reflexology" while running her spa business. As a one-time personal trainer, she was also into wellness. The shoe "connected the dots," in terms of her experience, she said.  Since first launching through the retailer Sweaty Betty — through which one customer email sold 8,000 pairs of its shoes — FitFlop has taken off internationally. Now, having opened the brand's first U.S. store, in SoHo in April, Kilgore is charting its stateside growth.  Related reads: Sarah Flint and CEO Mary Beech: ‘2020 was the year we built the foundation to really scale’ Are heels over? What the footwear market will look like post-coronavirus

LoveShackFancy's tenth year in business has been a busy one. This month alone, the fashion brand has launched a product collaboration with Gap and announced an expansion to the beauty category. Its first fragrance will hit Sephora stores on September 6, six days before its New York Fashion Week presentation-slash-party.  It's safe to say that LoveShackFancy's feminine, flirty, vintage-inspired look has caught on. And steering its popularity is founder and creative director Rebecca Hessel Cohen. As she describes on this week's episode of the Glossy Podcast, her growth strategy for the brand includes "taking its iconic prints, colors and sensibility, and bringing it to life in different categories, price points and markets."  Before Gap, LoveShackFancy's brand collaborators included Target, American Girl, Bogner and Ford Bronco, among others. And, following fragrance, there's no telling what categories the brand will tackle next. "Our customers want [LoveShackFancy] wine, champagne, and even hotels and restaurants," Hessel Cohen said, referencing a recent social media poll by the brand. "So, you never know. It's just all exciting and fun — and sometimes, the more unexpected, the better."