by The reckoning
If Bodnar is cagey about specific details, it’s because she has faced controversy. There is the plaintiff who sued Prosper in 2018, claiming that the company was not donating to charities in the way it claimed. (The lawsuit resulted in a “stipulated” termination; Ms. Bodnar signed a non-disparagement agreement that prevents her from speaking on the matter.) There are the trolls who harassed her on social media when Forbes added her, in 2019, to its “ Richest Women List.
“It was actually pretty scary when that list came out,” said Bodnar, who splits his time between Seattle and Los Angeles, where Thrive is based.
Ms. Bodnar grew up in rural Washington state. “We went to church every Sunday, but Allure was my bible,” she said. She worked at Sephora to put herself through community college, which led to a job in the Seattle office of Clarisonic, a maker of a mechanical facial brush that L’Oréal acquired in 2011.
“Among all these men on the team, she was very impressive,” recalled Carol Hamilton, president of acquisitions for L’Oréal USA. “She wanted to understand the ‘why’ of work, how big companies operate.”
In 2013, Bodnar’s close friend Kristy LeMond, who had been working in the nonprofit sector, died of soft tissue sarcoma, a rare cancer. Mrs. Bodnar was held accountable. She left L’Oréal. She bought a lot of makeup. She wrote a business plan in the Notes app on her iPhone: vegan makeup with a business model that mimicked Toms and Warby Parker, the pioneers of the buy-one, give-one model.
She got a day job at Bulletproof, the supplement company, to fund her after-hours innovations, such as false eyelashes that “work whether you have eyelashes or not,” Bodnar said. “A lot of what I heard early on was, ‘If a woman is going through cancer, we tell her not to wear makeup.’ I thought, ‘That’s not an acceptable answer.'”
