My Kidneys Shut Down’—ILIA Beauty Founder’s Wake-Up Call After Scaling To $100 Million

In the same week Sasha Plavsic finalized the sale of ILIA Beauty—a brand she’d scaled from a late-night side hustle to a $100 million business—she was too sick to get out of bed. Years of chronic stress had weakened her immune system, leaving her vulnerable to a kidney infection so severe it nearly took her life.

"It could have killed me," Plavsic told me, reflecting on the 2021 health crisis that took two and a half years to recover from.