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

Episode 746

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Matt Maroone, Co-Founder and CEO of Silver Mirror Facial Bar — the fast-growing skincare brand redefining what facials look like in today’s busy world. Silver Mirror delivers results-driven treatments designed to fit seamlessly into modern lifestyles, blending expert estheticians, clinical technology, and a welcoming environment that’s as educational as it is empowering.
In our conversation, Matt shares his journey from the music industry to beauty entrepreneurship, the leap of faith in bootstrapping Silver Mirror’s first location, and how he and co-founder Cindy Kim carved out a new space between luxury spas and clinical dermatology. We talk about shifting consumer perception to make facials a consistent routine, building a membership model that drives loyalty, and the challenges of scaling into new markets like NYC, DC, and Miami. Matt also opens up about his leadership philosophy, the risks he’s taken along the way, and his vision for where Silver Mirror will be ten years from now.
Whether you’re passionate about skincare, fascinated by entrepreneurship, or curious about how to build a service brand in a crowded category, this episode is full of insights you won’t want to miss. Now live on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up, that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. 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, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control, 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. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show today. I’m joined by Matt Maroone, 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. 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 managed the journey and scaling this incredible brand. So Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Maroone 2:09
Thanks for having me. Kara, happy to be here. Very, very

Kara Goldin 2:12
excited. We connected about we knew each other, or knew of each other, and the early days before, before, Silver Mirror beforehand. So it was a lot of fun reminiscing about that 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?

Matt Maroone 2:40
Well, it’s changed quite a bit Kara in the last nine years. So we found it in 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 skincare, from a service standpoint, was thought of in a very different standpoint. We hired dry bars architects. Josh Heitler was our lead architect, and Allison Adderley joined in from him. They did every dry bar from one to 150 so at the time, we would have said, you know, we’re a dry bar for skin. That’s like, that was our first kind of like pitch, and how we thought of ourselves and how we reworked it. Over the last nine years, we’ve morphed. We’ve continued to focus on the same things that we were founded on, but the landscapes changed, the day spas, the larger ones aren’t really around anymore, whether it’s the red doors or the blisses of the worlds. And there’s also a lot of cheaper competitors that have come in on a different scale, and 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, that premium aspect, and just continuing to elevate and you know, as, you know, as a founder, do you have to have a balance of focusing on, you know, 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?

Kara Goldin 4:17
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

Matt Maroone 4:53
a lot? I mean, I think number one is people, and not in the sense of, I mean. Talents, obviously important. But working with people you like, you know, you and I were talking about this beforehand. I mean, I have a group chat with with friends from the music industry that we haven’t worked together in a professional sense, and I don’t know, almost 20 years and some or 15 plus years, and we’re still as close as ever. 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, you know, we were very close friends. And you don’t have to be best friends with everybody you work with. But I think when person that personal personalities go together and have, obviously, you want to have some kind of contrasting ideas and and have that, that balance. But, yeah, I think, I think the people were super important. 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. It 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, you know, CDs to MP threes to downloads to eventually streaming right as I was leaving. And those, those revenues never, 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.

Kara Goldin 6:36
So do you remember the exact moment when you decided, Okay, I’m gonna 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.

Matt Maroone 6:53
So I knew that I was always gonna be an entrepreneur. I mean, I’m a third generation entrepreneur, and it’s definitely ingrained in the blood, for sure. You know, 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 and Lily, which has been extremely successful and import. First, they were importing Korean and Japanese beauty care products, and now they’re on the product side of things and and when Cindy was working on peach Lily at that time, and I saw 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, you know, seeing people every day, working with people every day. And I wanted that. And we were working on 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 in helping us formulate what that was. And we knew that we were 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 is a nurse practitioner, and I saw what, 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. And 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 into, over to the states. And you know, that was the defining mold of all the ideas we were working on that that got them down the very

Kara Goldin 8:52
pathway. So there was, it. Was a the first part of Silver Mirror. Now you you’re doing more than this, but was a destination, right? And where was that destination?

Matt Maroone 9:05
It was on the Upper East Side. We wanted, 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 of and the burn rate of of rent in New York we 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 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, you know, as East 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. Through that you can, you know, a be what works the best. And 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. And we definitely see ourselves as a New York brand, no doubt about it.

Kara Goldin 10:17
I remember when, 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 he’s like, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. So he’s like, we gotta go slow. 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 was expensive. It’s like it, you know, we never really realized that. I mean, how many little grocery stores there are New York City, and how many spas are out there? And how do you differentiate? 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?

Matt Maroone 11:13
I think the idea itself, right? It’s ideas are a dime a dozen, and it’s, 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 liked him a lot, but there was just no when there was no one to copy, there was literally no one to copy. There was a we built our original, original comp system on a car dealer comp system in terms of how we were paying our employees. And, you know, we modified it over the years, but we, we just, we made up everything as we went along. And we’ve, you know, we’ve brought on a few folks, including our current CEO, Rachel, who has a tremendous experience at very large, you know, spa chains, but she joined four years ago and 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 our, how we how we did everything. I 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, 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, your own investment, which I highly recommend to people, if you can, which we can, we can get into, you know, you have to be very disciplined. And, yeah, every dollar counts, and so we couldn’t afford managers.

Kara Goldin 13:09
Yeah, definitely. So what was one thing that you didn’t anticipate about how people approached facials? I mean, you talked a bit about, you know, 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 the over lying, sort of aha moment that maybe you had, out of some of these consumers,

Matt Maroone 13:35
how much people cared? I know it’s like, you know, again, this was a newer vertical when we 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 the number of members we have now is, is, is a little bit. It’s three fourths of of everybody that we see. And the the number of people who had became into their their their regular routine, which is awesome, and it’s they’re committed and they love it. But if you mess with that routine a little bit, whether it’s like the wrong est, you know, whether their aesthetician calls out and they weren’t informed, and they get there and it’s the wrong, you know, there’s all these like 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 dialog with guests all the time of saying I messed up, I’m sorry about it. Here’s how I’m gonna 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 wanna make you happy. My goal is to make you the customer happy, and doing that, it’s much easier. Said that done, and it’s exhausting at times too, because not everybody 99.9999% of people are amazing. And it’s that tiny sliver occasionally that that can wear you down, but it’s the other gazillion people that are incredible that make

Kara Goldin 15:16
it worth it. Yeah, no, I can only imagine. I mean, it’s a 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, it’s 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 what they’re looking for. So, so how did you decide to move from one location to, you know, your second location and beyond? And how did you figure out, you know 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 to your own brand of products. Like, when did that come about?

Matt Maroone 16:32
Yeah, I think we definitely wanted to always do multiple but again, as we started, it was 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, 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. And then our DC location was three years after we opened up our first location. So those were two additional test models for us. You know, we knew that the that the first one was working within the first six months, if we knew sooner, but like, we were cash flow positive in that first you know that that range filling figuring things out, figuring out, pricing, marketing, etc, 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 flat iron 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. We 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, and we found a great lease there. Opened up there that was really difficult to manage and expand to a new location. It was, it was very, very difficult. My wife was going through a difficult first pregnancy that summer got actually got stranded in Miami. I was in DC alone. It was a crazy time. And, and then, of course, right as we’re getting our getting profitability going in a really heavy direction, it’s February 2020, you know, we get everything all together. We’re like, All right, let’s make, make that next big leap. Thank God we didn’t sign any leases. You know, that was an extremely difficult time. But basically, set us back about two plus years, if that, if not more, in our growth and, and from there, we recovered from covid, went from three to nine locations, and, and, yeah. I mean, we continue to grow. We see, we see more and more happening and, and your question about the product line, I mean, that was always a desire from day one, and we started formulating four years ago, got our products on the shelves. Three years ago, we launched with our first 3s took all custom, formulated, all proprietary, and and then 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? We want 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 2020, Six, and we have about 20 more products in development, so we feel really good about where that, that part of the business is going. And it’s exciting. It’s a whole different 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. It’s Yeah, it’s awesome.

Kara Goldin 20:21
That’s awesome. Yeah, still, Silver Mirror products are incredible, and the 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?

Matt Maroone 20:45
Yeah. Well, the first year, we just did packages, traditional spa 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, it’s, for a lot of people, it’s breaking payments up, or it’s a payment pro, you know, partial payments, as opposed to, you know, a commitment to something. And we even made a big change last year where we have no minimum commitment. We you can cancel anytime, to kind of break that psychological barrier for fear of commitment or or I forgot what the, what the business school term is, but the, you know, fear of returns, whatever that that principle is, but it was really, it was really important to us to to obviously build in that reoccurring revenue from a business standpoint, and it’s worth it To make that, that that give that discount and that guarantee to a customer, it’s building up our aesthetician books. I mean, the 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. But you know, you’re you’re guaranteeing more books to your estheticians. Sure you’re taking cut on on what you’re paying, but people are more dedicated. They’re more likely to tip higher. They’re more likely to, you know, spend more on products, more on add ons. 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 you have to think about those different cohorts in different in different ways. And 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, much harder without being invasive with with privacy, and you know, that kind of stuff. It’s tough.

Kara Goldin 22:51
Yeah, definitely. So is the membership model. Like, what? What is the, I guess, the most popular membership that people are buying.

Matt Maroone 22:58
So we just changed it. We just, 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 190 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 memberships 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. And 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 big, bigger and bigger perks. It’s not like the Pepsi days, where you get like a fighter jet. You remember that Pepsi? Yeah, yeah. But they’re still pretty good perks.

Kara Goldin 24:33
I love it. 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

Matt Maroone 24:49
that’s great question. I mean, I think, look, I think with with with the service itself, I leave a lot of that to our CEO, Rachel she i. Is the expert. She’s a licensed aesthetician. She’s been in this industry for 20 plus years. 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 you know, like they were amazing. We our numbers were incredible. It was just like, how do we, how do we continue to one up ourselves? And I always rely on her and our team to continue to do that. She’s led by our aestheticians. We’re an esthetician led business. We listen to all of our leads. They do all of our product testing. It’s just a that that’s a big pride in how we we push things forward. And then, from a technology standpoint, there’s always newer and interesting things that are that are about, that are happening in Korea. I’m sorry, in October, I went to Korea with Cindy, my co founder, and I picked up a ton of these machines from Korea, imported from there, where we’re scanning people’s face, and we are doing an AI analysis on them in real time, picturing out, okay, this is what’s going wrong here. It’s a, I think, a nine to 10 page different report that you’re reviewing with your aesthetician. Nobody else that I know is doing that at this moment. You know you just have to try and stay ahead of the game and kind of going to that, okay, how do we make ourselves better? What’s happening out in the marketplace, and continue to try and just stay on a straight path?

Kara Goldin 26:30
I love it. I love how you’ve continued to sort of tinker and and pivot, whatever you want to call it, along the way, to just make the Silver Mirror brand even better than it is when you think about, and this is the last question, when you think about success, like, what is success for for Silver Mirror? Like, when? When is Mac going to say, we’ve done it right? Like, it’s it, we’ve made it. I mean, what? What is it that says, you know, like, we’ve achieved what we set out to do.

Matt Maroone 27:11
I don’t that’s like, you know, that’s the American way, is that we can’t, you know, we don’t. We don’t know how good we had it until the end, right? I guess maybe that’s the human way. I don’t know. I mean, look, there’s so many things I’m proud of, from from the awards to the people to, I don’t know, without getting too corny or cliche, I think it’s, it’s, how are all of your stakeholders happy? Right? Are, are the returns good? Is your team, are all of your team, you know, feeling fulfilled professionally, making the kind of money they want, having that kind of career trajectory? Are your customers happy? Is retention, you know, is your is your churn rate super low? What are your metrics looking like from from a customer satisfaction standpoint, whether it’s reviews or obviously rebooking. There’s a ton of different metrics we’re looking at and people coming back. I think that look an end goal. I don’t know if you can ever have that right, because you have to continue to iterate and change. I don’t think we’ll ever definitely. I see us far, far bigger, far bigger than we are right now in five years, in a much different, bigger capacity, and we’re working on that right now. But I think that, yeah, I think if everybody’s satisfied in a bunch of different areas, there’s ways that you can quantify that, I guess, right. Yeah, what is happiness? But I think it’s, yeah. I think it’s if everybody is is achieving what they need to from an emotional, financial, spiritual, you know, fulfillment standpoint, and all of your different stakeholders, and what’s what’s not to be happy with?

Kara Goldin 28:58
Well, Matt Baroni, you’ve done an incredible job building Silver Mirror. Thank you so much for sharing the story, and from your leap out of the music industry to helping people get their best skin ever and inspiring vision and discipline and persistence definitely shows and everything that you’ve done with Silver Mirror, everyone needs to check out Silver [email protected] if you haven’t visited one of their locations. But also, as I mentioned, their products that you can order are killer. The the facial product in particular is really, really great. So definitely purchase, definitely go visit and Matt, thanks again for sharing your story, and thanks everyone for listening.

Matt Maroone 29:49
Thanks for having me, Kara, and thank you for everything you’re doing for entrepreneurs and giving us a voice. Appreciate it.

Kara Goldin 29:54
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel. Free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.

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