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Courtney Claghorn turned a $500 side hustle into the nation’s leading sugaring and airbrush tanning brand. Sugared + Bronzed Courtney Claghorn was racing between her fintech job and her Santa Monica apartment, where—on her lunch break and after work—she maintained an airbrush tanning side hustle. It was 2010, and she’d converted her dining room into a makeshift salon using partitions. A few months earlier, she’d been complaining regularly to her then-boyfriend (now husband and cofounder) Sam Offit about how spray tans in Los Angeles cost three to four times more than they had in Boulder. Offit, who had "always had an entrepreneurial bug," suggested she start a business. The startup capital would be one thousand dollars, which gave Claghorn pause. "I was like, whoa, I just like, saved my first thousand dollars! Am I really just throwing it away?" she told me in our interview for The Failure Factor podcast. But Offit proposed splitting the cost—five hundred dollars each—which was an amount she could stomach. Offit built a website, and Claghorn learned how to work an airbrush tanning machine. Within thirty days, her moonlighting gig was profitable. Within a couple of months, she was regularly turning down paying clients to keep a day job that didn’t excite her. It was at that point she decided to leave the fintech startup and go all in on her airbrush tanning concept. Fifteen years later, Sugared + Bronzed has over forty locations across seven states and is on track to generate $50 million in revenue in 2025. The founder and president built her empire by doing three things that defy scaling culture: staying bootstrapped longer, hiring for character over credentials, and prioritizing presence over productivity. MORE FOR YOU From Bootstrapped to Howard Schultz-Backed Claghorn didn’t start with a detailed business plan—she simply responded to demand, opening her first retail location for about eight thousand dollars. The company—back then simply called “Bronzed”—was cashflow positive from day one. Sugared + Bronzed has evolved from a makeshift space to forty locations and an extensive product line. Sugared + Bronzed When I ask whether she and Offit considered raising money initially, Claghorn reveals that the idea never crossed their minds. "We didn't even know how to be adults yet," she laughs. "For us, I think bootstrapping was just such a key to growing that business and learning how to be profitable, because there are so many businesses that just raise and raise and raise, and they're never really profitable." Without outside capital, every dollar mattered. “We really had to have that discipline from early on,” she recalls. The transformation to "Sugared + Bronzed" happened organically. "It was actually clients for the first time, coming to my apartment telling me that they would go get sugared. And I was like, what is this?" she shares. When Claghorn learned about the ancient Egyptian hair removal technique, the timing was perfect: her first retail space was too big, so she looked for a sugaring practitioner to rent the extra room. When that tenant backed out, she decided to add the service herself—and "Sugared + Bronzed" was born. "See what happens" became her operating philosophy. After nine years of bootstrapping, the team had reached their self-imposed milestone: ten profitable locations. Now, it was time to accelerate. Main Post Partners—who’d been watching them for years—and Howard Schultz invested in 2019. From Hiring for Hype to Hiring for Humility With investment came pressure to grow, so Claghorn hired "experts" with impressive résumés for the corporate team. Yet the decision resulted in an erosion of internal trust that nearly proved catastrophic. The experts dismissed her input entirely. “They were like, you be quiet. You sit over there, watch us work,” she recalls. At first, Claghorn was receptive—after nine years of figuring things out on her own, she thought maybe they knew something she didn't. But their changes were disastrous. They removed all testing from training protocols because they believed “If you hired good people and you had good training, you didn't need to test anyone.” Claghorn was incredulous: “That sounds great, like in Utopia, but let's be real here. We're putting people on the floor with clients that are paying, that are usually getting naked. People need to be really good at their skill.” Every location remains corporate-owned, a deliberate choice to preserve quality and culture. Sugared + Bronzed The situation escalated when one leader began lying to their private equity firm. “They just wanted things their way and not our way," Claghorn says. She found herself “working twenty-four seven,” cleaning up the mess and trying to catch problems before they could damage the business during an already difficult pandemic recovery. Claghorn considers the experience a powerful lesson learned. "You have to listen to your intuition. And for so long, I tried to quiet my intuition and let these people run the show." "They really just had this mentality that they knew better than us," Claghorn explains, "And at the end of the day, no one knows your business better than you do." Now Claghorn looks for something different when hiring. She doesn’t lead with technical questions—she sits down to know them as a human first. "Is that person driven and are they humble?" she says. "Because those things can really mean a lot more than even IQ sometimes. Someone’s resume can look perfect, and they can not be the right person. Life is 3D, not 2D." She shared an example of her VP of Design and Development, who had never managed construction or worked in interior design professionally. Despite pushback from the rest of the team, Claghorn “had an intuition” and hired her. The instinct paid off. “She’s worked out better than I think anyone could have imagined because she came in being humble and willing to learn.” From Daily Grind To Daily Practice Claghorn had built a multi-million-dollar business, but her success had become entangled with chronic stress. “I was definitely addicted to cortisol,” she admits. "Your body becomes physically addicted to being stressed…I always had to be thinking about the next thing. Eventually, that comes to bite you in the ass." Then came a series of confronting crises: First, her father became paralyzed within forty-eight hours. In solidarity, she tried breathwork with him—and discovered it was transforming her own life. “I didn’t even realize how unpleasant I had been and how much better I could feel," she shares. Later, a difficult pregnancy and traumatic Caesarean section left her physically unable to maintain her workaholic pace. Built on intuition, authenticity, and hard-earned lessons, S+B embodies what happens when founders trust themselves. Sugared + Bronzed "I had to change my entire outlook because it just wasn’t serving me anymore," Claghorn explains. She took up meditation and cold plunging and began reading books and listening to podcasts in the self-improvement sphere. “I still love to work and I still want to grow our business, but you have to make time to have more of a life outside of that.” This personal transformation naturally spilled into her leadership style. Her presence practices allowed her to shift the company focus from hustle to ROI—which created what she describes as both "a better client experience and a better workplace." "I bring this whole hippie mentality into the workplace now," she chuckles while describing leading her 550-person team. "We talk about manifesting, we talk about how you really get back the signal that you put out.” And by all metrics, Claghorn is putting out a strong signal: Sugared + Bronzed has maintained fifty percent compound annual growth over the past five years, and is targeting to open twelve new stores annually. Fifteen years after converting her dining room into a salon—with Sugared + Bronzed’s fortieth location opening just shy of Claghorn’s fortieth birthday—the advice from the founder who once assumed she wasn’t investable isn’t about chasing credentials or capital; it’s about creating space to hear your own instincts: "Make time to meditate or do breathwork, which you might feel like you don’t have the time for as an aspiring or early entrepreneur,” she stresses. “You will be surprised if you set aside those twenty minutes, how much faster you will grow your business and the things that will come to you in life.” Listen to my full conversation with Courtney Claghorn on The Failure Factor podcast, available on Apple and Spotify. Megan Bruneau, M.A. Psych is a therapist, executive coach, and the founder of Off The Field Executive & Personal Coaching. She hosts The Failure Factor podcast featuring conversations with entrepreneurs about the setbacks that led to their success. 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