Before she became the CEO of a global beauty brand with celebrity clients, Anastasia Soare needed a $500 credit card.
When she arrived in the US in 1989 as an immigrant, “nobody paid attention,” the founder of Anastasia Beverly Hills said. At the time, she was an aesthetician with zero credit history and limited English — and a bold idea that needed backing.
“I went to Wells Fargo and had to beg the manager to give me a $500 credit card,” she recalled. “Thirty-four years ago, they didn’t throw at you with credit cards like what they are doing right now.”
Soare made the comments on a panel at the 28th Milken Institute Global Conference on Wednesday. The conference, held in California this year, draws global leaders, tech executives, and experts to discuss finance, innovation, and global markets.
In 2000, Soare launched her first product line to bring her signature shaping techniques and tools to anyone who wanted beautiful brows. Since then, Anastasia Beverly Hills has become synonymous with eyebrows in the beauty world. The brand’s celebrity clients include the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Kendall Jenner, and Kim Kardashian. In May 2024, Forbes estimated Soare’s net worth at $900 million.
Soare shared the credit card anecdote as part of her pursuit of the American dream — one that started decades earlier in communist Romania.
At 15, her grandfather would take her into a small room, shut the windows and curtains, and tune into a banned radio station called “Voice of America.”
“He used to tell me that I did a big mistake coming to Romania. The communist regime took everything away from us,” she said.
“You should go to America,” Soare recounted her grandfather saying. “That is the American dream.”
Under the communist regime in Romania, entrepreneurship didn’t exist. “You worked only for the government, and that’s it. You couldn’t be an entrepreneur,” Soares said.
But Soare knew she wanted more. “I wanted first to show myself what I’m capable of doing,” she said.
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Chasing the American dream
When Soare arrived, she started working as an aesthetician — one of the few jobs that didn’t require “perfect English,” she said.
She noticed a gap in the beauty market — nobody paid attention to eyebrows. Believing in the potential of eyebrows as a business idea, she began doing clients’ brows for free, as it wasn’t “considered a service” then.
“My husband thought I am totally crazy,” she said. “You don’t know how to write a check, you don’t have a credit card, you barely speak the language, and you want to open a business. Not even American people born here own a business,” she recalled her husband saying.
But Soare went all in. “What do I have to lose?” she thought.
From that little room, she built a clientele. Then she opened a salon in Beverly Hills. “The rest is history,” she said.
“I am proud to say that I invented a category in the beauty industry that didn’t exist before,” she said at the panel.
