In 2010, an entrepreneur started a beauty side hustle from her apartment with $1,000; 16 years later, Sugared + Bronzed had nearly 50 locations across the US

A beauty business that now has nearly 50 locations across the U.S. began with a much smaller setup: an apartment, basic tanning equipment and $1,000. In 2010, Courtney Claghorn was working in fintech when she started offering spray tans on the side. The idea came from a problem she knew as a customer. Los Angeles spray tans could be costly, and the results were not always consistent.

Claghorn and her then-boyfriend, Sam Offit, each put in $500. She bought the equipment and began taking appointments around her regular job. Some clients came during her lunch break. Others came after work. There was no large launch or outside funding behind the first version of the business. She was testing whether a simple beauty service could become something people would return to.

The early business gave Claghorn something money could not buy: a close look at what customers actually wanted. She practiced the tanning process, learned through tutorials and worked with friends before trying to build a service around consistency. The apartment was not meant to be the final destination. It was a low-cost place to work out the details.


A beauty service depends on the person delivering it. If the experience changes from one appointment to the next, customers notice quickly. Claghorn's early work was therefore less about building a flashy brand and more about making the service reliable enough to repeat.

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The first SUGARED + BRONZED storefront opened on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica in 2012. The company eventually expanded beyond tanning, adding sugaring, a hair-removal method that uses a sugar-based paste. The two services became the foundation of the business and gave the brand a clearer identity than the original apartment operation had.

The unusual part of the growth was how long it stayed small

SUGARED + BRONZED did not immediately pursue a national expansion. The company says it remained largely bootstrapped for nine years and reached 10 locations before outside investment arrived in 2019. That timeline matters because the business had already developed a working retail model before it had access to larger pools of capital.

Growth then required a different kind of discipline. The company had to make services that once depended heavily on Claghorn work across many locations and employees. It developed in-house training for technicians who perform sugaring and airbrush tanning. The company says its teams have carried out more than one million services during the past two years.

What 50 locations says about the business she actually built

In August 2026, SUGARED + BRONZED announced its 50th location, giving the company a presence across 10 U.S. markets. It also says the business has created employment opportunities for more than 600 women. The numbers show the distance from that first $1,000 investment, but they do not fully explain the growth.

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The harder part of scaling a service business is keeping the experience recognizable as the store count rises. What worked when Claghorn could oversee much of the operation herself had to become a system that other people could follow. That shift turned a personal side hustle into an operating business.

The most revealing number may still be the first one. $1,000 was enough to test the idea, but it was not what built 50 locations. The larger achievement was finding a service customers would repeatedly pay for, refining it over time and creating a model that could eventually work far beyond the apartment where it began.