W
ife, mother of three
and CEO and found-
er of multi-million
dollar clothing brand, Courtney
Brown has always used fash-
ion as her creative outlet. For her
10th birthday, she used the mon-
ey she received as a gift from
her grandmother and bought her
first blossom-style dress in all
its early-nineties glory, includ-
ing the signature hat, at the mall.
After the first couple years, she re-
alized the business plan she creat-
ed was not scalable. They’d grown
to 40 stylists around the Wasatch
Front. Courtney was adamant that
Cents of Style was not a traditional
direct sales model, but it was more
a “Boutique in Your Home” where
the company fronted the cost for
the inventory, not the stylists.
In 2011, she needed to make a
huge decision — to either walk
away or to start again complete-
ly with a new model. So, she
took the year to recalibrate and
by the end, Cents of Style was
a completely online retail shop.
The change in business model
didn’t change the underlying mo-
tivation for the business. Empow-
ering women to lead bold and full
lives was still the driving force
After adopting her eldest child in
2005, she was looking for some-
thing more. “I started looking...
for a creative outlet — something
I could put my name on and do
outside of motherhood, outside
of the home, something that I felt
like I was contributing really to
myself but to the world to a larger
degree. And, I think every wom-
an looks for that is a sort of way.”
After contemplating what her out-
let could be for more than a year,
she recognized a need in the mar-
ket for women to find a trusted
friend who you could ask for ac-
cessible affordable fashion ad-
vice. Courtney created Cents of
Style to teach women that when
you look good, you feel good and
you can go do good in their lives.
The birth of Cents of Style was
much different than what it is to-
day. In fact, they didn’t begin with
a ecommerce business model at
all. Because she was bootstrap-
ping and didn’t have much cash
to purchase inventory, Courtney
was focused on the fastest and
most cost efficient way to get the
products in front of the custom-
ers, so they began with a direct-
sales-trunk-show model where
stylists came to the consumer
to have parties in their homes.
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