Zoë Foster Blake is showing me around her kitchen, an eclectically designed, stylishly mismatched, almost deliriously colourful space. Coffee and pastries are laid out, sparkling water in a jug. Fresh flowers are arranged in vases, coffee table books piled artfully. “I cleaned up for you,” she says.
“I wasn’t the kid with the lemonade stand,” she says. “I still think it’s hilarious that I’m in business . I’m a great testament to the idea that you don’t have to know business to be good at business. It’s learn as you go.” “I never wanted to talk down, saying, ‘you must do this, you must buy this’,” she says. “I just wanted to have fun.” Her conversational tone was the right fit for the times. There was, she says, “a wink in every sentence” she wrote. Her old boss at, Mia Freedman, says “there was a time when every young female writer was trying to write like her. Or be her.”
Foster Blake says she “cut out the middleman” of the beauty industry with her products, but that’s not quite right. She is, for her nearly 800,000 Instagram followers, the middleman, and one they’re happy to hear from. Personality has been key to Go-To’s success. Like any product-based start-up, logistics, supply chain and inventory forecasting were the biggest challenges. “They remain tricky to this day,” she says. She recalls being mildly terrified at the idea of ordering 10,000 tubes of lip balm. “Every start-up founder needs that bald faith of being OK if it fails – but you also have to believe in it. I’d invested all the money I’d saved up. I had earned people’s trust. I’ve been telling them what to buy and use for years.
By September 2022, BWX was suspended from trading on the ASX after the company’s auditors refused to sign off on its accounts. The media speculated that it would be bankrupted if Foster Blake exercised her put option, which she could have done from September 2024. That never came to pass; BWX instead went into liquidation in April 2023.
It was never true, anyway. There was evidence of early masterstrokes that could only have come from Foster Blake herself. Like when Go-To’s first products were launched: she sent them to beauty editors with a crisp $5 note to buy themselves a coffee, having been on the receiving end herself, for many years, of frequently useless, landfill-bound gifts with new products.
She refers obliquely to changes in management, such as Fenlon leaving as CEO in 2022, followed almost exactly a year later by his replacement, Rory Gration. She pivots quickly. “Our hearts went out to the staff because it would have been awful and confusing and disheartening.” Having “kept on trucking” despite BWX’s troubles, she then set to work looking for a new outside investor. It was draining and time-consuming, but also instructive.