Judgment Calls

12

Tweezerman

Should We Take the Business to the Next Level of Growth?

IN THE LATE 1990s, the small but successful women's beauty products enterprise Tweezerman faced the dilemma that every entrepreneurial growth company eventually confronts: “How much bigger can we get—can we handle the risk, the scale, the exposure, and the demands on our capacity—if we now ‘really swing for the fences’?” The particular challenge the company faced was about selling its line of prestigious, professional beauty tools to chain drugstores—risking dilution of the brand, losing existing core customers, and taking on financial commitments way beyond anything it had known before. That everything built over years of blood and hustle might come crashing down was a nontrivial ...