746 Matt Maroone: Co-Founder & CEO of Silver Mirror Facial Bar

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show.

0:45Kara Goldin:Today, I'm joined by Matt Marooney, who is the co-founder and CEO of an incredible brand that you may know and love called Silver Mirror. You might know them for the products or the facial bars. They're going on number 10, opening number 10 as we speak, but a modern skincare brand that is reimagining facials to fit seamlessly into busy lifestyles. And Silver Mirror is known for its fast, results-driven treatments that combine expert estheticians, clinical technology, and a welcoming vibe, and creating a space that's as much about education and empowerment as it is about glowing skin. So Matt's journey into beauty is anything but traditional, having spent time in the music space, business school, and then a leap into entrepreneurship with his good buddy and co-founder, Cindy.

1:47Kara Goldin:So I cannot wait to hear about his journey and really Silver Mirror and how they've expanded into number 10 location, but also the skincare line and just overall how he's manage the journey in scaling this incredible brand. So Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Kara. Happy to be here. Very, very excited. We connected about, we knew each other or knew of each other in the early days before Silver Mirror, before Hint. So it was a lot of fun reminiscing about that. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Range Rover Sport. You know that old saying, it's not what you say, it's how you say it.

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3:27Kara Goldin:And with a plug-in hybrid option offering up to 53 miles of electric range, it's all about performance and purpose. So if you're expecting the best, like I know you do, the Range Rover Sport is your perfect ride. Build your Range Rover Sport at RangeRoverSport.com slash US slash sport to configure your Range Rover Sport today. Again, that's RangeRover.com slash US slash sport. Trust me, you'll be glad you did. For someone new to the brand Silver Mirror, whether they know you for the products or the facial bar, how are you redefining the facial experience? Well, it's changed quite a bit, Karen, in the last nine years.

4:16So we founded or we launched in May of 2016. And at that time, the landscape for skincare was very different. It was a lot of traditional day spas, you know, services that people would get as treats, you know, here and there. But but skin care from a service standpoint was thought of in a very different standpoint. We hired dry bars architects. Josh Heitler is our lead architect and Allison Adderley joined in from him. They did every dry bar from one to one fifty. So at the time we would have said, you know, we're a dry bar for skin. And that's like, that was our first kind of like pitch and how we thought of ourselves and how we reworked it.

4:56Over the last nine years, we've morphed, we've continued to focus on the same things that we were founded on. But the landscape's changed. The day spas, the larger ones aren't really around anymore, whether it's the red doors or the blisses of the world. And there's also a lot of cheaper competitors that have come in on a different scale. And we've continued to reinvent ourselves and focus on what we do best. and that's premium skincare. And it's focusing on giving the best facial possible. Cosmo named us best facial in the United States last year or this year. And just focusing on that premium aspect and just continuing to elevate.

5:35And as you know, as a founder, you have to have a balance of focusing on, keeping the blinders on, doing what you do, and then occasionally seeing what's out there in the landscape and trying to find a healthy balance without being paranoid.

5:51Kara Goldin:So you started in the music industry, as we were sort of alluding to prior to actually jumping into the questions. But what lessons did you learn from the world of music that maybe carried into the building of a beauty brand? I mean, was there anything that as you think about not just the launch, but also the building. I mean, it's obviously been a ton of work, but you've had amazing experience. What lessons from one industry taking it into the other that are transferable? A lot. I mean, I think number one is people and not in the sense of, I mean, talent's obviously important, but working with people you like.

6:37You and I were talking about beforehand. I mean, I have a group chat with friends from the music industry that we haven't work together in a professional sense and i don't know almost 20 years in some or 15 plus years and we're still as close as ever um and we also worked on you know for a record label that was extremely successful and i think you know steve rifkin our founder of that label src which is a part of universal you know he had he put a lot of really interesting people together from different backgrounds and and you know we we were very close friends um and and you don't have to be best friends with everybody you work with but i think when person personalities uh go together and how obviously you want to have some kind of contrasting ideas and and have that that balance um but yeah i think i think the people were super important um i think a negative aspect from the music industry and one of the reasons i wanted to leave was the decline of the recorded music business.

7:35It was something I wanted to be in since I was a kid. And I was a part of it in the 2000s of watching it go from CDs to MP3s to downloads to eventually streaming right as I was leaving. And those revenues never bounce back. And being a part of a declining industry is not fun. That's not exactly why I got into skincare, but being a part of something that's continuously growing that I know is going to be there in 20 to 30 to 40 years is helpful. And yeah, I'd say those are two of the bigger things that pop out to me.

8:10Kara Goldin:So do you remember the exact moment when you decided, okay, I'm going to go and start Silver Mirror? I mean, what was it? I know you have a co-founder in the company too. Was it, where did the idea come from and how did you decide, yeah, let's go do this? So I knew that I was always going to be an entrepreneur. I mean, I'm a third-generation entrepreneur, and it's definitely ingrained in the blood for sure. This impetus for this venture, I was working on a couple of small tech startups right after business school. Cindy dropped out with a semester left to found a company called Peach & Lily, which has been extremely successful.

8:51First, they were importing Korean and Japanese beauty care products, and now they're on the product side of things. And when Cindy was working on Peach Lily at that time, I knew that I wanted to do something where we were working with services, helping people, interacting with people on a daily basis. I was a little disillusioned by the tech world and the tech side of things of kind of just seeing people behind a screen or not seeing them at all, right? And it felt very old school. And I grew up, my grandfather and my dad were both car dealers. I grew up going to a car dealership. seeing people every day, working with people every day.

9:28And I wanted that. And we were working on a, my friend, another friend and I were working on a skincare venture. We knew we wanted to do four wall and Cindy was super helpful in helping us formulate what that was. And we knew that we were looking at lasers. We were looking at different kinds of things. We wanted something that we could scale and do successfully, but obviously something that was different than what was out there already. And as we talked about, day spas had their own issues. My wife is a nurse practitioner and I saw what folks in the medical world were getting paid. And there was just a bunch of different things brewing that came together that brought this together.

10:07And Cindy was the final cherry on top. And she was saying, hey, there's this thing going on in Korea where people are getting facials every week, every month. It's a regular thing. And we should bring this over to the States. And that was the defining mold of all of the ideas we were working on that got them down the very pathway.

10:28Kara Goldin:So it was the first part of Silver Mirror. Now you're doing more than this, but was a destination, right? And where was that destination? It was on the Upper East Side. We wanted to make sure that real estate wasn't the reason we failed. And nine out of 10 people we talked to thought opening up in New York for our first location was insane. Due to the run rate and the burn rate of rent in New York, I'm in Miami now, my hometown where we've expanded to as our third city. This was originally our primary focus for Silver Mirror for a bunch of different reasons. and uh you know right as we were looking at at signing leases down here we pivoted back to new york we just we just knew like that's the epicenter of culture and uh you know as these coasters were very biased to that but like you know we felt it was the epicenter of culture and if we're going to start a brand and we're going to build something a you're going to get the best estheticians there b you're going to have enough people coming through that you can you know a b what works the best.

11:37And, uh, you know, if you can make it in New York, you can, you can expand it elsewhere, but it's different. It's difficult bringing that from a different city to a New York. Um, and we definitely see ourselves as a New York brand, no doubt about it.

11:52Kara Goldin:I remember when, uh, when we launched our brand hint in New York, we had started it originally in San Francisco and my husband's a New Yorker. And to your point, you just reminded me of this. he's like, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. So he's like, we got to go. As I was saying, I was like, oh, what a cliche. Yeah. Right. And we got to go. And so we went out there and we always tell entrepreneurs that that was like our Vietnam. I mean, we stayed, but it was expensive. It's like, you know, we never really realized that, I mean, how many little grocery stores there are in New York City And how many spas are out there and how do you differentiate?

12:34Kara Goldin:And it's not just, it's like that white space between clinical offices and luxury spas that you're trying to sell. So what was the hardest part of really getting the idea off the ground? I think the idea itself, right, it's ideas are a dime a dozen. And it's so much harder to execute it once you get there. I think for us, we were starting with a very blank slate. Not that we're these, you know, incredible innovators, but there was really nothing like it at the time. We had one competitor that opened up a couple of months before us. I've still never received a treatment there. I like him a lot.

13:15but there was just no one to copy. There was literally no one to copy. We built our original comp system on a car dealer comp system in terms of how we were paying our employees. And we modified it over the years, but we made up everything as we went along. And we've brought on a few folks, including our current COO, Rachel, who has a tremendous experience at very large, you know, spa chains. But she joined four years ago and, you know, five years into it. And she's amazing and has done amazing things for us. But the first couple of years were extremely hard just figuring out how we did everything.

13:57I mean, we're still open to this day, 14 hours a day, Monday through Friday. Yeah, 10 hours on Saturdays and eight hours on Sundays. So, So, you know, this was pre-kids, just about to get married. So my personal commitments were not as strong. But, you know, both Cindy and I worked six plus days a week for the first year, at least. At least one of us was there every hour. And we didn't hire a manager until 2020. So four years into it. So, you know, when you're growing via your own investment, which I highly recommend to people if you can, which we can get into. You have to be very disciplined and every dollar counts.

14:41And so we couldn't afford managers.

14:43Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. So what was one thing that you didn't anticipate about how people approached facials? I mean, you talked a bit about people went every once in a while for a facial, but was there anything like once you started, I guess hearing from a lot of your regulars. What was kind of the overlying sort of aha moment that maybe you had out of some of these consumers? How much people cared? Again, this was a newer vertical when we opened up, and it took off relatively quickly. And the degree for both positive and negative, how much people care, and it became a part of people's routines very quickly, especially once we rolled out memberships in our second year in 2017.

15:37the number of members we have now is a little bit, it's three-fourths of everybody that we see. And the number of people who it became into their regular routine, which is awesome, and they're committed and they love it. But if you mess with that routine a little bit, whether it's like the wrong, whether their esthetician calls out and they weren't informed and they get there and it's the wrong, there's all these little protocols when you've never done it before that you don't think about. And those are the things that you learn on the hard way along the way. Right. And I think just having that open dialogue with guests all the time of saying, I messed up.

16:16I'm sorry about it. Here's how I'm going to fix it. That fixes things 99 out of 100 times. But it's really difficult to do that. And to admit, I'm wrong. Hey, I want to make you happy. My goal is to make you the customer happy. and doing that. It's much easier said than done. And it's exhausting at times too because not everybody, 99.9999 % of people are measing and it's that tiny sliver occasionally that can wear you down. But it's the other gazillion people that are incredible that make it worth it.

16:51Kara Goldin:Yeah, no, I can only imagine. I mean, it's a service business, right? And you're dealing with people who are like, you know, take care of me, right? It's, I don't care about these, these other people. And I think it's, it's, you know, you learn probably a lot about, about dealing with whenever you're dealing with the public, dealing with the public. I always tell people that it's, you know, getting on the customer service lines and hearing about what people would, would talk about. And, you know, is just, it's so interesting, right? That it might not be something that you would pick up on, but you gain a lot of information about your brand, but also about who and what they're looking for.

17:40Kara Goldin:So how did you decide to move from one location to your second location and beyond? And how did you figure out how big this was going to be? And was your plan always to have multiple locations beyond the one? And then you also went into your own brand of products. Like, when did that come about? Yeah, I think we definitely wanted to always do multiple. But again, as we started, there was no playbook to this. So we're building the playbook as we go along. And we're still, you know, continuously building that playbook. and you know being self-funded we didn't know if we created this one incredible location in one of the most one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the in the world um you know on lexington avenue was that the reason why we were successful and so we did two we wanted to do two tests after that but it's important to note that we didn't open those tests till our second location in new york in the Flatiron District was two and a half years later after we opened up.

18:47And then our DC location was three years after we opened up our first location. So those were two additional test models for us. We knew that the first one was working within the first six months. We knew sooner, but we were cashflow positive in that first range, figuring things out, figuring out pricing, marketing, et cetera. And then the next two were, okay, is this a one-off on this, you know, a lucky break in the Upper East Side? Let's try another location in New York. That was the Flatiron location. And that one was a hit right off the go. And then we wanted to try another city. And for us, it was between DC and Boston.

19:28We wanted something that either Cindy and I could run back and forth and travel to regularly. I think that's something that multi-unit folks don't think enough about when they're expanding it to new locations and new cities. It's very difficult to get on a plane and fly to San Francisco. Last minute, you know, three-hour time difference to California is different. You know, all of those little intricacies. And DC made a lot of sense for us. And we found a great lease there, opened up there. That was really difficult to manage and expand to a new location. It was very, very difficult. My wife was going through a difficult first pregnancy that summer, actually got stranded in Miami.

20:09I was in D.C. alone. It was a crazy time. And then, of course, right as we're getting profitability going in a really heavy direction, it's February 2020. We get everything all together. We're like, all right, let's make that next big leap. Thank God we didn't sign any leases. uh, you know, that was an extremely difficult time, but basically set us back about two plus years, if that, if not more, um, in our growth. And, um, and from there we, we recovered from COVID went from three to nine locations and, um, and yeah, I mean, we continue to, to grow. We see, we see more and more happening and, and, uh, your question about the product line, I mean, that was always a desire from day one.

20:57Um, and we started formulating four years ago, uh, got our products on the shelves three years ago. Uh, we launched with our first three SKUs, took all custom formulated, all proprietary. And, um, and then our, our, our last one was our mask and it's a signature mask. It's our signature facial mask. And the idea is how do we bring our facial into someone's house? This incredible facial. Um, we won a ton of awards right out of the gate, allure and style. Everyone, it's just been an amazing process. And we have about six more products launching in Q1 of 2026. And we have about 20 more products in development.

21:37So we feel really good about where that part of the business is going. And it's exciting. It's a whole different beast, as you know, the product world. All kinds of different But it's fun. It's nice to switch my brain from service to product. Yeah, it's awesome.

21:54Kara Goldin:That's awesome. Yeah, Silver Mirror products are incredible. And the facial product is so, so good. So your membership model has been a big differentiator. How has it shaped consumer loyalty and, I guess, brand identity? Maybe explain like the model and sort of talk to people about how you guys have thought about it. Yeah. Well, the first year we just did packages, traditional spot packages, right? By X percent, you get this and that. And we just found that the upfront cost for people was prohibitive, right? And the membership, I think it's for a lot of people, it's breaking payments up or it's a payment.

22:42partial payments as opposed to a commitment to something. And we even made a big change last year where we have no minimum commitment. You can cancel any time to kind of break that psychological barrier for fear of commitment or I forgot what the business school term is, but fear of returns, whatever that principle is. But it was really important to us to obviously build in that reoccurring revenue from a business standpoint. And it's worth it to make that, give that discount and that guarantee to a customer. It's building up our esthetician books. I mean, the retention rates we have out of our estheticians are by far the best I've ever seen in our industry, which is a bunch of different factors.

23:28But you're guaranteeing more books to your estheticians. Sure, you're taking a cut on what you're paying, but people are more dedicated. They're more likely to tip higher. They're more likely to, uh, you know, spend more on products, more on add-ons. Um, and I think obviously you're going to have your core that really, really care and they take pride in the bit than the brand and they're wearing silver mirror hats and this and that. And then there's going to be a large percentage that don't care. They just, they're just there for the best facial they can get. And, um, you, you have to think about those different cohorts in different, in different ways.

24:04And it's very difficult to understand those cohorts because you can only do so many surveys. Only certain people are going to respond to surveys. You can only look at so much data. It's really difficult to understand your customers. It's much harder without being invasive with privacy and that kind of stuff. It's tough.

24:26Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. So is the membership model like what is the, I guess, the most popular membership that people are buying? So we just changed it. I mean, we just shifted it slightly last week because we rolled out a 90-minute facial. So it's 30-minute facials, 50-minute facials, and we have one 90-minute facial, which we just rolled out. And basically, your membership gets you one facial a month. That credit lasts for 90 days, so it can roll over. You get 20 % off Silver Mirror products. You get 20 % off add-ons, 20 % off additional facials if you want. And so we try to keep it really simple, not only our menu, but also the membership.

25:04So of, okay, you know what you're getting. Like our 30-minute membership is$99, so you know that you're getting a facial, you're getting all these other discounts. And then we try to give them a ton of other perks as well. And the last year alone, we've increased memberships by 25%, and we didn't add any new memberships. I'm sorry, we didn't add any new locations in almost two years. So it's just, I don't know, we're just focusing on giving these folks more and more to make them want to be members. you know, in terms of, hey, here's something, you know, we just rolled out something we're calling the unbirthday, which we took from Alice in Wonderland.

25:42And every six months, we're just reminding you, like, we love you. Here's an amazing gift. And boom. And obviously, we have people, we have members that have been there for nine years now, which is insane to even think. And they're getting bigger and bigger perks. It's not like the Pepsi days where you get like a fighter jet. You remember that Pepsi? Yeah. But they're still pretty good perks. I love it.

26:08Kara Goldin:So technology is everywhere and especially in skincare. How do you decide when to lean in to the next innovation versus relying on just a basic facial? that's a great question i mean i think look i think with with with the service itself i i leave a lot of that to our coo rachel she is the expert she's a licensed esthetician she's been in this industry for 20 plus years um i i definitely lean towards her to how are we making sure we're staying ahead of everybody else she just revamped our entire protocols a month ago and she didn't need to revamp our protocols, but they were amazing. Our numbers were incredible.