Courtney Claghorn never planned on running a national beauty chain—it started with a simple gripe in 2008.
Fresh out of college and living in Los Angeles, she realized spray tans were both expensive and shackled to UV‑bed salons.
When she vented to her boyfriend, Sam Offit, he challenged her to turn that annoyance into an opening.
“He was like, ‘If you feel this way, other women probably feel the same way… Maybe there’s a hole in the marketplace that you can fill,’” she tells Entrepreneur.
The idea clicked. Together they scraped up $1,000—$500 each—bought a basic spray‑tan machine and pushed the dining table against the wall of her Santa Monica apartment to make space for a pop‑up studio.
Friends signed up first, then friends of friends, and soon Claghorn’s evenings were booked solid with bronzing sessions while her days were still spent at a fintech desk.
The side hustle’s momentum forced her hand. Within months, she was making enough to gamble on herself, quitting the nine‑to‑five and leasing a tiny storefront a few blocks away.
When SUGARED + BRONZED officially opened its doors in 2010, the studio was little more than a reception desk and a treatment room, yet new customers kept arriving—and returning.
Every spare dollar went back into the company because Claghorn set a strict goal: she would bootstrap until ten profitable shops were running. That discipline shaped the culture, forcing lean operations and tight training standards long before outside investors appeared.
A coast‑to‑coast expansion might have seemed ambitious for a business built on $35 treatments, but word‑of‑mouth and Instagram selfies did the marketing for her.
By 2019, store number ten was cutting its ribbon, and Claghorn finally invited San Francisco–based Main Post Partners to take a stake and accelerate growth.
The champagne barely chilled before disaster struck. Covid‑19 shut every studio for almost a year, vaporizing revenue overnight. Instead of folding, Claghorn treated the pause like a reset. “[We had to grapple with] rehiring and retraining and getting back from zero to one before we could grow again,” she explains.
Teams were rebuilt, safety protocols tightened, and loyal customers rushed back the moment restrictions lifted. Today, SUGARED + BRONZED operates more than thirty‑five locations, employs roughly four hundred people and reported twenty‑percent year‑over‑year growth in 2024, with internal projections topping fifty million dollars in revenue for 2025.
Studios now stretch from Los Angeles and Austin to Miami, Philadelphia and New York, with Washington, D.C. slated to debut this spring.
Success hasn’t smoothed out the calendar’s bumps. The real windfall arrives every spring when festival season begins. From April through June, revenue jumps thirty to forty percent, then stays elevated until Labor Day. “It’s like overnight, the whole world needs a tan,” Claghorn laughs.
To keep pace, she spends the quiet winter months on a hiring blitz, putting every new technician through what amounts to a beauty boot camp so studios can handle the onslaught without sacrificing service or sanitation.
Service alone, however, only reaches customers within driving distance. Anticipating that limitation, the company quietly began R &D on a proprietary product line before the pandemic.
The first half—exfoliating scrubs, hydrating lotions and a feather‑light tanning mousse—hit shelves at the end of 2024; the second half rolls out this year. Claghorn says the line is “different from anything that’s on the market [and] complements our services, both sugaring and tanning, in terms of exfoliating [and] moisturizing,” while giving clients a way to deepen or extend color at home.
If the products catch on, they could uncap growth by adding e‑commerce margins to brick‑and‑mortar revenue.
Underneath the glossy branding sits a playbook any scrappy founder can study.
First, specialize: by focusing solely on sugaring and sunless tanning, Claghorn created a memorable identity in a crowded beauty sector and built unmatched expertise that justifies premium pricing.
Second, earn before you spend: nine years of bootstrapping forced operational discipline that became a selling point when Main Post Partners came knocking—proof the concept worked in multiple markets.
Third, diversify smartly: launching products lets the brand stay top‑of‑mind between appointments and monetizes customers who live too far from a studio.
Finally, embrace discomfort. Claghorn insists analysis paralysis is the death of good ideas. “Find a way to make that first dollar, get your first sale,” she advises. “As soon as you’re finding yourself just making decks, spreadsheets, projections and plans, that all of a sudden becomes your job—that’s not being an entrepreneur… Be comfortable in the uncomfortable.”
Her journey also underscores trends shaping the wider beauty industry. Private‑equity funds now hunt for niche concepts with franchisable processes and strong unit economics; UV‑free tanning appeals to wellness‑focused consumers wary of skin‑damage risks; and service brands are racing to become product brands, blurring the line between salon and home routine.
Most important, SUGARED + BRONZED’s pandemic rebound shows that experiential beauty—services delivered by human hands—still holds power in an age of online everything when the offering is focused, safe and shareable.
What began as a $1,000 experiment in a cramped dining room has grown into a coast‑to‑coast business on track for eight‑figure sales. Claghorn did not invent spray tanning, but she spotted what everyone else missed: customers who wanted the glow without the bed, the burn or the boutique price tag.
By solving her own irritation, she solved it for thousands, turned a side hustle into a career and created a case study in how quickly a small, well‑aimed idea can scale when the founder keeps moving.
The next time an everyday frustration makes you roll your eyes, remember the entrepreneur who traded her dining table for a spray gun—and ask yourself what opportunity might be hiding in plain sight.
