"We all need to take a critical look at our business from the perspectives of our clients."
Welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview with Marlo Kravetsky, the CEO of Thrivo.
Marlo and her team are shaking up the traditional salon industry with their innovative tech platform that allows customers to get custom and high-quality hair color from their favorite local salon, either in-salon or at home.
Not only does Thrivo meet a consumer need that was previously unaddressed, but it also prioritizes environmental sustainability by offering 100% recycled or biodegradable packaging.
In this interview, Marlo shares her insights on how her team achieved 20% month over month growth, the importance of company virtues, and the metrics that keep her team focused and informed.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Marlo Kravetsky: At Thrivo we are passionate about disrupting traditional industries with paradigm-shifting tech.
For us, the salon business model was the perfect place to start because salons were unable to capture the full market of hair color consumers. Being able to service the needs of customers outside of the salon is a game changer.
138 Million people color their hair in the US and Canada alone, at least 4 times a year,but only 20% do so in salon only Salon revenue market size in Canada and the US alone is $53B growing at 8%CAGR, $200B globally. Thrivo’s patent pending platform preserves and seals custom salon hair color for use later, something that was never before possible.
The consumer need is met- finally custom and high quality hair color is available from the consumers favorite local salon- for use in-salon or at home!
We are also passionate about the environment. At-home hair color packaging is full of single use plastics. By switching to the at-home color provided by salons on our platform, the consumer is switching out all those plastics for 100% recycled or biodegradable packaging.
In the past year, what is the greatest business achievement you’d like to celebrate with your team? Please share the details of that success.
Marlo Kravetsky: 20% month over month growth is a huge achievement that I would celebrate with the team. This is a lean team, each with expertise in a different core area of focus.
Some of us are mechanical engineers who can turn innovative visions into a real life product. Others can build applications that delight and inspire users. And those of us non-engineers- we focus on business strategy, fundraising and sales and marketing.
We all aspire to 5 virtues that govern us on a daily basis. In his book, “What You Do is Who You Are,” Ben Horowitz explains that corporate values may be worthless because they emphasize beliefs instead of actions, but virtues are key to building a sustainable culture, articulated as a set of action items. For us, our virtues are:
- Direct communication & acknowledgement
- Respect
- Growth mindset meaning constant execution and improvement
- Lead & follow, and
- The pursuit of excellence.
Through these virtues our company was able to pivot during the pandemic and develop a product for our salon clients that could generate revenue even when their bricks and mortar salons were closed. And after the pandemic, the actions we took after listening to client feedback allowed us to iterate on both the functionality of the product and the business model..
Turning customers into fans, achieving product market fit and meeting aggressive growth metrics would not be possible without the strength of the team, our convictions around the business problem, and our ability to solve that problem with a tech platform that allows all participants to reap the benefits of the tremendous upside of a huge market.
What advice do you wish you received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Marlo Kravetsky: The advice I wish I had received was to dig deep into your numbers because what is measured is what gets done. By being highly attentive to the information coming out of these data points, it keeps the team focused and allows information based decision making to improve results.
Examples of this include understanding your inventory turns and diving into your cash flow. For us, it was monitoring salon use of our platform so that we could train up salons who seemed to be trending downwards in usage and also to immediately address a sudden change in usage which could have meant a platform issue. In some cases we were even ahead of our clients in noticing a problem.
I wish we had had those metrics from day 1 and prioritized that build because it really went a long way in achieving satisfaction and stickiness with our customer base. In the next few quarters we are doubling down on our metrics and the connection between our client activities on the platform and our capabilities to elicit key insights for us and the user.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Marlo Kravetsky: Thrivo’s Omni patent pending hardware preserves and seals custom salon hair color for use later, something that was never before possible.
Our NotBoxHairColor packaging is used by the salon for delivery of the hair color to the client. Seamlessly a salon goes overnight from being strictly bricks and mortar to omnichannel. Clients can now receive their hair color online, or in-salon, whatever their preference.
This was a breakthrough innovation in the salon space because while 138 Million people color their hair in the US and Canada alone,only 20% of them are coloring in-salon only. Salons are potentially missing out on 80% of the hair color client market, and at risk for client attrition to online color.
Additionally the main competitor to our clients are D2C companies like Madison Reed who have moved their ecommerce strategy to an omnichannel one To implement its omnichannel strategy, Madison Reed is expanding to bricks and mortar salons which it now has to build, train staff and run as a going concern.
Conversely, by leveraging existing salon infrastructure and implementing seamless conversion with our easy to use tech platform, salons can now also operate an omnichannel strategy and capture the entire market of hair color spend. Our decentralized salon network is a competitive advantage to Madison Reeds’ net new build and run salon strategy and so I see this gaining significant momentum this year.
To capitalize on this, we are spending more time getting the message out there, whether through social media and industry events so that salons know we are here.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Marlo Kravetsky: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
Ryan Holiday has written extensively about how we interpret the events in our lives, and highlights that our perspective is the framework for our forthcoming response.
Whatever the obstacle, the key is to find the opportunity within that challenge, developing strength, wisdom, and perspective from the experience. THE challenge we face today is a contracting funding ecosystem and more expensive capital. Because of that we are pushing ourselves to find process improvements and profitable ways to grow.
2020, 2021, 2022 threw a lot of curve balls into businesses on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past years, how can businesses thrive in 2023? What lessons have you learned and what advice would you share?
Marlo Kravetsky: For businesses to thrive in 2023 they are going to need to be a “painkiller” not a “vitamin” for their clients. We all need to take a critical look at our business from the perspectives of our clients.
Product or services are something clients actually need today to help solve a big pain points is a must have feature. In a tough market it is important to show our clients that there is a realistic and quick ROI on the investment in our product and services.
What does “success” in the year to come mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Marlo Kravetsky: Thrivo is passionate about enabling salons to meet customer needs through first generation technological advancements, empowering local salons to sustain and grow local, often female jobs and contribute to their communities, and offering sustainable alternatives to plastics in the hair color industry.
Success for us is transforming the salon business model to unlock billions of dollars in hair color sales through new technology driven business models, the creation of unique customer experiences and the smart use of data.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Marlo Kravetsky for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Marlo Kravetsky or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
