CoCo Meers (Equilibria) & Starr Marcello

Coco Meers’ career has centered on helping women look and feel their best. When she caught the entrepreneurship bug and looked for a pain point to solve in that space, she kept remembering a long flight delay she had when traveling between Paris and New York and how she wished she could spend the time getting an eyebrow wax in town – if only she knew what salons were good, nearby, and available.

Her idea for PrettyQuick was to offer a marketplace for booking beauty services much like OpenTable does for restaurant reservations. She chose to attend Chicago Booth so she could take the idea through the New Venture Challenge, where in 2011 she tied for third place and received $10,000.

She recalls presenting to the panel of judges, which at the time was overwhelmingly male, and feeling that they couldn’t quite identify with the problem.

“With the emergency of eyebrow and bikini wax booking, I didn’t get a lot of confirmatory nods at the time,” Meers, MBA ’14, laughed.

Meers, who sold PrettyQuick to Groupon in 2015, has since committed to helping improve gender diversity among startup founders and investors. She launched Rebelle Collective, an angel fund that invests in women-owned companies, and through that platform cofounded Equilibria, a premium CBD company targeting women.

In conversation with Starr Marcello, deputy dean for MBA programs at Chicago Booth and former executive director of the Polsky Center, Meers discusses the times PrettyQuick nearly failed, why marketplaces are so difficult, and why she made the tough choice to sell to Groupon.