As a false eyelash enthusiast who never left home without popping on a pair, Ann McFerran couldn’t help but notice the lack of easy-to-apply lashes on the market. Old school glue-on lashes demanded superhuman dexterity, gained through lots of practice—but newer magnetic lashes were unwieldy too. “This is a really cool idea, but the execution is off,” she thought.
McFerran felt called to execute a better solution. In July 2019, she and Kevin Gould, CEO of the brand building firm Kombo Ventures, co-founded Glamnetic, which swiftly earned a reputation for user-friendly, natural-looking magnetic lashes. What began as a scrappy operation out of McFerran’s Koreatown, Los Angeles apartment has since grown into a global, multimillion dollar business, with their lashes and press-on nails carried in Sephora, Ulta, Kohl’s, and more.
To scale as much as they have in less than four years, Glamnetic needed to simplify their finances. With BILL Accounts Payable and BILL Spend & Expense, they streamlined their accounts payable (AP) process and gained more control over their cash flow, letting them focus on long-term expansion.
McFerran is no stranger to starting from scratch. Born in Bangkok, Thailand, she emigrated with her single mother to the US at age 7 and studied psychobiology at UCLA, her sights set on medical school. Although artistically inclined, she didn’t know how to turn art into a career—until she sold a painting for thousands of dollars. Post-grad, she pivoted to pursuing art full-time for four years.
Since many of her clients were business owners, she got curious about entrepreneurship. It was around then that she began trying to improve on magnetic lashes, which, back then, consisted of two lash strips that sandwiched wearers’ natural lashes. After a “one-year product development deep dive,” as she put it, she emerged with samples, held in place with magnetic liquid eyeliner.
McFerran started a Glamnetic Instagram account, taught herself photography and photo editing, photographed models in her apartment living room, and filmed ads of herself applying her lashes on her phone. Her hustle paid off: Glamnetic made $50 million in revenue in a year, with zero outside funding.
If Glamnetic wanted to evolve beyond a small, scrappy startup, though, they needed to streamline their ad-hoc AP process. “In the early days, before BILL, the business was growing so quickly that we initially sent payments via PayPal and bank wires,” Gould said. He and McFerran could manage their payment runs with text and email approvals at first—but a few months in, they needed a solution that could match the scale of their payment volume.
Gould had heard about BILL through the entrepreneur grapevine and had already implemented it at INH. In October 2019, he did the same at Glamnetic.
Since adopting BILL, Glamnetic has enjoyed a much easier, more efficient AP process. “With BILL, it’s been super great to just have all our customers’ invoices in one location,” said Mayra Jimenez, Assistant Controller at Kombo Ventures. BILL lets her and other team members import invoices with little to no manual entry and automatically routes them to the appropriate approval process based on Glamnetic’s workflows. They can then pay the invoices in just a few clicks.
And because BILL uses the same, simple process for both domestic and international payments, paying their global network of consultants, content creators, and other vendors doesn’t take more than a few clicks, either. “BILL has definitely made the payment process for our overseas team much smoother and more efficient, compared to paying each person via PayPal,” Jimenez explained.
BILL has also streamlined Glamnetic’s approval process. “It’s so much easier to have everything in one location instead of having approvals go through email, Slack, or text, and then they get lost,” Jimenez remarked. “Having the approval process in BILL keeps it way more organized.”
What’s more, BILL syncs seamlessly with QuickBooks Online, Glamnetic’s accounting software. “As soon as an invoice is entered into BILL, and I want to see it right away on QuickBooks Online, I just hit that ‘sync’ button, and it’s readily available,” Jimenez explained.
BILL is now among the most essential technology solutions Glamnetic uses. “As a business owner, from an accounting tech stack perspective, I’d say BILL and QuickBooks are essential,” Gould said. “You need one to track accounting, and you need BILL to pay everyone.”
The cash flow visibility and control that BILL Spend & Expense provides has also proven invaluable to Glamnetic’s growth, especially as a bootstrapped business with millions of dollars constantly tied up in inventory and accounts receivable, as Gould explained.
Since adopting BILL Spend & Expense in April 2022, the Glamnetic finance team knows exactly how much the company has spent and how much they have available to spend, Jimenez said. “[BILL Spend & Expense] also tells us when our payments are coming up, which we can plug into our cash flow model,” she added. Plus, the option to set credit limits on employees’ BILL virtual cards and create budgets for departments lets them easily control their spend based on BILL Spend & Expense’s insights.
“Being able to track your spend, create budgets for departments or team members, get instant notifications about expenses and transactions, and upload receipts all on BILL Spend & Expense keeps things really organized,” Jimenez said. “It just really makes for an organized cash-spending platform.”
Looking back at the success of Glamnetic feels surreal for McFerran. “It’s such an incredible high, realizing that wow, what we’re doing is actually working,” she said. At the same time, she and her team refuse to be complacent. “You have to make sure you never just rest on your past success and that you always try to work towards something in the future,” she said.
That’s especially true in the beauty industry, where trends can change at the bat of a lash. In the past year alone, McFerran has noticed consumers ditching full glam for more minimalism. In response, Glamnetic has broadened their offerings to include more au natural lashes and nails.
Ever-adaptable, McFerran sees this challenge as an opportunity. So does Gould, who points to Glamnetic’s ability to pivot faster than many legacy beauty brands. With BILL helping them simplify their payables and cash flow management, Glamnetic now has the bandwidth to keep pace with shifting consumer demand and pursue their long-term plans to expand into new categories and retailers. Their future looks bright—and dare we say, beautiful.
