96. Global “LookBooker” Puts Beauty and Grooming a Click Away

Sick of trying to book a bikini wax from the middle of an iron ore mine, Giorgia co-created an entrepreneurial solution. Leaving a budding career as a management consultant in Australia, she and her business partner launched LookBooker in Singapore, where it is Southeast Asia’s top hair and beauty aggregator, then took on New York.

Living in Sydney, Australia, but barely touching ground there because of her high-powered management consulting job at McKinsey, Giorgia and her future business partner developed the kernel idea of LookBooker. They could easily book flights, cars, hotels and meals, but finding and booking personal grooming appointments was impossible.

“To truly master something, I believe you have to be comfortable committing to it for a decade. For millennials, this can be a hard concept. To start a successful venture, you need to feel that your whole life can be oriented around it and committed to it.”

An avid reader since 5th grade, Giorgia does not concentrate on business books. She often reads for pleasure and escape. Currently, she is reading:

Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell. It features colorful characters Mitchell wrote about in The New Yorker in the 1940s.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz

“We now manage our business in Singapore over the internet. We found our first employee on the internet. In Australia we wanted to launch in Singapore as a test market. We posted to Singapore’s equivalent of Craig’s List, filtered dozens of applications and found our first employee. The internet is truly the way barriers between countries, cities and people have been broken down. For us it meant we could launch a business in two different countries.”