She Spent $500 To Stop Complaining About Spray Tans. Now Her Idea Makes $50 Million A Year

Courtney Claghorn was racing between her fintech job and Santa Monica apartment, where—on her lunch break and after work—she maintained an airbrush tanning side hustle. It was 2010, and she’d converted her dining room into a makeshift salon using partitions.

A few months earlier, she’d been complaining regularly to her then-boyfriend (now husband and cofounder) Sam Offit about how spray tans in Los Angeles cost three to four times more than they had in Boulder. Offit, who’d "always had an entrepreneurial bug," suggested she start a business.