Seventeen years ago, there was no Blushington. There was just a bathroom.
Stephi Cohen and Nicki Maron's family was getting ready for a bat mitzvah — their mom, their grandma, their aunts, their cousins, all of them packed into their mom's bathroom at once. Half the family half-dressed while they did their makeup, because there simply wasn't time or space to do it any other way. It was chaos, the kind you can only really laugh at once you're in the middle of it, because laughing was the only thing left to do. And underneath the laughing was something quieter: there wasn't a single place, anywhere, where their whole family could have sat down together and actually gotten ready properly. Not rushed. Not borrowed. Just done right, together.
So two sisters decided to build that place themselves.
It took two years for the idea to become real. Not because the idea wasn't good enough — because building something that didn't exist yet takes time, and courage, and a hundred small decisions that have nothing to do with the original spark and everything to do with actually getting it done. On December 10, 2011, Stephi and Nicki opened the first Blushington in West Hollywood, right along the Sunset Strip, with nothing but a plan and a lot of hope. The motto they chose still says everything: Feeling Pretty Is Priceless.
We Weren't Filling a Gap. We Were Naming One.
Here's the part that's easy to forget now, fifteen years and a whole industry category later: in 2011, a dedicated lounge built entirely around professional makeup artistry simply didn't exist. Department stores had counters. High-end salons treated makeup as an afterthought to hair. Freelancers worked one client at a time, at a price most families couldn't justify for an ordinary Tuesday, let alone a whole family getting ready together. Nowhere had built a real destination around the idea that getting ready — really getting ready, together, without rushing or borrowing or half-dressing in a crowded bathroom — deserved its own space. Stephi and Nicki found that white space because they'd been standing in the middle of it, unable to find what their own family needed. Blushington didn't just open in an underserved market. It gave a name to a problem an entire industry hadn't noticed yet.
We Grew Because Our Guests Told Us What They Needed
We didn't map out five years of expansion on a whiteboard. We listened, appointment by appointment — and when we added something, we did it differently than everyone else in the category. We launched our dry hair styling service in partnership with OUAI, because guests kept asking where else they could take their hair once their makeup was done, and we wanted the brand behind that service to be as considered as the artistry delivering it. We launched skincare with BeautyRx, Dr. Neal Schultz's own line, because a beautifully made-up face deserves skin underneath it that's been cared for just as well — and because we wanted a name behind the treatment, not just a generic peel. One service became three — blowouts, makeup, and skincare, all under one roof — not because it looked good in a pitch deck, but because that's what the women already walking through our doors, again and again, actually needed from us.
We were just as deliberate about what we didn't do. From the beginning, we refused to stock every SKU of every brand just to fill shelf space. We curated — a handful of products we genuinely believed in, chosen the way a friend recommends something rather than the way a retailer moves inventory. That was one of the earliest ways Blushington stood apart: we understood, before most of the industry caught up to it, that discovery itself is a form of luxury. Walking into a space that's been edited down to what's actually worth your time feels different than walking into one that's simply trying to sell you everything at once. We built Blushington around that feeling on purpose.
What We Learned From That Bathroom, We Never Forgot
The thing about that crowded bathroom, seventeen years ago, wasn't really the lipstick or the curling iron. It was that getting ready together, before something that mattered, is its own kind of moment — one worth doing right. Every service we've ever added, every lounge we've ever opened, has been in service of that same feeling: not just looking good, but the particular kind of confidence that comes from being genuinely taken care of, in a room built for exactly that.
COVID Asked Us to Rebuild From Nothing
When we closed every Blushington location in the early days of the pandemic, we could have simply reopened the same way once things settled and called it a win. Instead, we asked ourselves a harder question: if we were starting over, what should Blushington actually be? The answer we landed on was franchising — not as a growth hack, but as a real bet on the people who already understood, in their bones, what it means to hand someone back an hour of their day and a version of themselves they like a little more. That decision reshaped the entire company. It's the reason a bathroom full of borrowed lipstick, seventeen years ago, is now a beauty destination across three cities.
Fifteen Years Later, the Reason Hasn't Changed
We built Blushington because a problem we personally felt turned out to be a problem so many other families were quietly living with too. Fifteen years on, as we celebrate everything this company has become, that's still the truest answer we have to why we built it in the first place: not a five-year plan, not a market gap on a spreadsheet, just two sisters who wanted somewhere real to get ready — and the family, artists, franchisees, and clients who've spent a decade and a half building that somewhere real alongside us.
Book your next appointment and be part of the story we're still writing.