We are weeks into the worst financial crisis to hit the world since the Great Depression — not the best time, you would think, to be persuading women to part with cash for new potions. But Marcia Kilgore is positively oozing optimism: “I think lots of people just launch things to launch them, but we don’t. We’ve worked hard to get this right.”

In case the name is not familiar, Kilgore, 40, is the American (now resident in London) who, in 1996, started the spa and cosmetics business Bliss. She sold her majority stake in 1999 (to LVMH for an estimated £17m) and since then has invented the FitFlop, as well as starting the bath and body range Soap & Glory, in 2006. It’s her new skincare range for Soap & Glory that has just launched.

Kilgore has been described as “the new Estée Lauder”, and is credited with single-handedly igniting the day-spa boom of the late 1990s. Oh, and best of all, for those of us who don’t worship at the altar of peptides and fruit acids, Kilgore has a no-nonsense, let’s-forget-the-science approach to business. “ ‘Twenty per cent of women saw an 85% reduction in . . .’ By the end of the sentence, who is concentrating any more?” she asks with a shrug.

Soap & Glory, as it happens, is as credit-crunch proof and right for the moment as can be. It is inexpensive (cleansing milk costs £5.99, a moisturiser £7.99), unpretentious and fun — and far from being sold at expensive spas, it’s in Boots. The packaging is 1950s tongue-in-cheek, with black-and-white shots of wholesome housewives and bathing-beauty pin-ups posing alongside product names such as The Greatest Scrub of All and Glow Job. “Humour works at a certain price point, where you’re not taking yourself too seriously and you just want a good product,” says Kilgore. “Women know that no cream is going to change their lives, but we want to go along for the ride. Soap & Glory is about happiness. We try really hard to entertain the customer.”

That said, she is evangelical about the properties of her range, and about one product in particular, a face serum. “You have to try Make Yourself Youthful. It’s just one of those magical combinations — you know, like a pasta dish: if you make it with just the right balance of ingredients, it can be better than caviar.”

The idea that expensive and elitist isn’t necessarily best is key to Kilgore’s beauty philosophy these days. Did she feel a shift in the zeitgeist? “Yes, I’ve been feeling it for years,” she says. “The overspending and the ostentation — you could sense that it was going to blow.”

She sold Bliss because, she says, “I was pregnant, and I am always 150% or nothing. If someone called in sick and I happened to be at the front desk, I would be doing leg waxes for the day”. Dig a little deeper, however, and she admits that she was missing something. “At the start, Bliss was quite affordable and everybody came in there — you would have the teenager with terrible acne who would come in with her mum, and then you’d have Madonna — and I liked that, because I’m quite democratic.”

As a facialist and personal trainer, Kilgore built up a loyal clientele before launching Bliss. “I did facials for years. I miss doing them; it’s so energising. I loved it.” Despite her skincare credentials, her biggest democratic success to date is the FitFlop, which has taken off to such an extent it makes her giggle, her bright eyes and a wide, mischievous grin bringing to mind Julia Roberts crossed with a naughty child. “FitFlops are huge, they’re in pretty much every country. I wanted them to be really cheap, but it turns out, because of the technology, it takes 12 minutes to cook one, so they can’t spin them off.”

The FitFlop, which is like a lighter, prettier cousin to the MBT trainer and retails at £36, was an idea that came to Kilgore when she was on a panel discussing methods of beating cellulite, but their benefits have surpassed her wildest fantasies. “We thought it was for leg toning, but almost every day people with terrible biomechanical problems tell us that FitFlops have changed their lives. There was a woman with Lyme disease who wrote to us” — tears suddenly begin to form in her eyes — “she said, ‘This is the first time I haven’t been in pain for 10 years.’ People are out there on morphine and FitFlops might change their lives. It is so inspiring.”

Skincare is still her first love, however: “I think it’s just what I know, although people see that I’m now in footwear and ask, ‘How did this outsider get into footwear?’ ” It’s no mystery to me.

soapandglorycosmetics.com

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