Building a Beauty Empire
Kevin Fechtmeyer, host, interviews Mark Harshbarger, former COO of Philosophy Cosmetics. Hear Mark tell the story of the Company's journey from a $10 million struggling cosmetics maker to a $500 million market leader by the time of its sale to Carlyle Partners.
Mark Harshbarger
Mark is a Senior Corporate Executive with more than thirty three years of consumer products experience in finance, operations, and general business management. Mark was both the CFO and COO of Philosophy, a leading skin care company. In those roles, he was in charge of finance, accounting, legal, manufacturing, quality control, customer service, human resources, and warehousing. Mark’s leadership and visionary skills allowed him to successfully direct the organization through a rapid growth stage from less than $10 million in annual revenues to about $150 million in annual revenues by 2008. Philosophy excelled in delivering many new products each year and succeeded in several distribution channels. Philosophy won the coveted QVC vendor of the year under Mark’s watch and became a perennial QVC leading vendor ever since. Mark was a key player in the 2007 sale of Philosophy to the Carlyle Group for hundreds of millions of dollars.