Meet Louise Bencard, CEO & Co-founder at Beauty Boosters, an organization that offers professional beauty treatments directly to the customer’s door – whether it is at home, in the office, the hotel room, or onset.
Louise Bencard is a high-paced entrepreneur who is building her business, Beauty Boosters in Copenhagen. She is eager, impatient, and passionate about everything she puts her mind to. Growing up on a farm in Southern Zealand in Denmark, she and her brother were very much involved in the family business. From chicken farming to feeding, slaughter, and selling, she learned valuable life lessons from all her tasks.
While in her master’s in MSc Business Administration and psychology, Bencard worked in a large pharmaceutical company and realized it’s harder to optimize changes and implement strategies in large companies in comparison to the smaller ones. Later, she was hired as a COO in a Nordic startup in L. A, where she was thrilled to work even 24/7 if it ever came to it. She had the freedom to complete the work whenever wherever it suited her. Living in the city, she met a Danish girl and her now co-founder, Maria Refsgaard, who was enrolled in a master’s program in Special Effects and Beauty Makeup. They talked about her industry and planted the seeds of their current organization, but nothing was concrete until they were back in Copenhagen.
On a trip to Barcelona, they came up with a business plan and realized the time was finally right. Bencard quit her job as a head of operations in a recruitment firm and took up Beauty Boosters full time. Talking more about the company, she says, “Our organization consists of two founders, one administrative assistant, and 24 freelance beauticians. We aim to make it easier and more flexible to be both consumers and beauticians in the beauty industry. For the beauticians, we have created a community that aims to elevate, educate and create jobs. A community of co-workers instead of rivals. For the consumers, we create flexibility and convenience within beauty treatments that have not yet been seen before in Denmark. It caters to consumers who do not have the time or ability to go to a regular salon. This especially caters to the age group of 25-39-year-old women. The group consists of our target groups of 1) mothers with small or newborn children, who don’t have the ability to bring their child to a salon and therefore value the convenience, but also 2) professionals/career women who don’t have time to go to a salon and therefore value the flexibility of our work hours.”
As a professional, Louise has an unstoppable urge for optimizing and making improvements where she sees fit. Starting out in a large company, she found expense methods that could save millions for the firm but was told they couldn’t be implemented at the time. When they finally did, after two years, the results were impressive. This frustrated Bencard in a way and she decided never to work for larger companies where bureaucracy stood in the way of action and optimizations. This is why she switched to smaller companies and startups. Currently, at Beauty Boosters, she struggles with a lack of time. She works on administrative tasks, which leaves less time to innovate, grow, and optimize. Now, as they have hired an administrative assistant, allowing her time to focus on business development and Maria on creative development.
Bencard is elated by the positive response they have received from the customers. However, this new and unconventional way of treatment has taken time for people to become accustomed to. So, they focus on marketing techniques to spread awareness about it. The founders were acknowledged as the “Entrepreneur of the Month” at the Confederation of Danish Industry, and also participated in Accelerace Startup Programme 2020.
Louise says time flies working at Beauty Boosters. She works countless hours in a week without any kind of salary. It’s stressful, but she loves every second of it. It takes a lot of work to start a business from the ground up, and Lousie has it in her, which makes her happier than anything else. Leaving a short but inspiring message for her readers, she says, “You are your only limit. Get out of your own way and allow yourself to go for it.”