Ezra Firestone did not set out to build a cosmetics company. He had been selling online since 2007, starting with a wig business, when a friend and housemate handed him the idea that became BOOM.

That friend was Cindy Joseph, a makeup artist of 27 years who had been stopped on the street in her fifties and turned into one of the first silver-haired models working at scale. The pitch Firestone made to her was simple. Every cosmetics line in the world was selling women over 50 the same message: anti-age, anti-wrinkle, cover it up. Nobody was selling the opposite. They founded BOOM in 2010 around a word Joseph coined, pro-age, and a deliberately small line of skincare and colour sticks meant to be applied with your fingers instead of a full kit.

Then, commercially, almost nothing happened for years. Firestone has been blunt about that stretch. Asked about it later he said that for the first four years he barely made any money, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in revenue a year, that 2015 brought the first couple of million, and that 2016 was the year the brand did $20 million. His own explanation is a timing one. When BOOM launched, ecommerce visibility came from search, and nobody was typing pro-age cosmetics into Google. There was no query to buy. The brand only became reachable once Facebook made contextual targeting cheap and universal, because contextual targeting finds a woman based on who she is rather than what she typed.

A note on the clock used in this record. Firestone names 2010 as the founding year in his own writing, describing 2015 in a December 2015 blog post as five years after launching, so the clock here starts on 1 January 2010. He describes the first four years as a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year, which puts BOOM comfortably past $100,000 in annual revenue well inside that window. The $100k marker is therefore anchored conservatively to the end of that stretch, 31 December 2013, at 1,460 days. The real crossing came earlier and he has never dated it.

What he did publish, in unusual detail, is the machine that carried the brand from small to large. Between 1 January and 31 January 2016 the BOOM store generated $1,422,500.15 in revenue on $434,256.72 of advertising. He broke the spend down himself: $429,014.02 across Facebook and Instagram, of which only about $22,000 went to Instagram, plus $5,242.70 on Google and nothing at all on Pinterest, which was still producing traffic for free. Profit before ad spend was $810,825.08. After ad spend it was $376,568.

The funnel underneath those numbers was almost embarrassingly small. The ads pointed at one article, titled "5 Makeup Tips For Older Women By Makeup Artist Turned Super Model Cindy Joseph". It gave real advice about a real situation, then handed the reader off to the store. Firestone has said he spent about four years trying to beat that single page with some forty alternatives and never managed it, and that he eventually put roughly $20 million of media behind it. One good article and one good sales video, in his telling, is most of what a brand needs. Quantity of assets is not the constraint.

He was equally open about the leak in the system. Most of the traffic was cold, first-time visitors, and 99.5 percent of them left the presell page without buying or subscribing. Instead of redesigning the page, he added a second offer aimed only at people who were already on their way out: an exit-intent popup inviting them to join the pro-age movement, later paired with an ebook and a 10 percent coupon for the warmest visitors. Almost 40 percent of the people shown the coupon said yes. In the month he wrote up, that popup alone produced $249,000 in orders and 8,997 new subscribers, an 18.2 percent lift on a store already turning over $812,258 and more than 300 orders a day.

The rest of the playbook is unglamorous and he repeats it constantly. Expand the product line so repeat purchases carry a growing share of revenue, aiming for 30 to 40 percent. Treat email as a first-class channel rather than an afterthought, since roughly a third of BOOM's revenue came through it. Run cart abandonment sequences that use genuine stock shortages as an honest reason to come back. Add one-click post-purchase upsells, a mechanic he liked enough to turn into a separate Shopify app company, Zipify.

By January 2021 Firestone was writing that this one brand had done almost $100 million in revenue over the previous four and a half years on $27.7 million of ad spend, and that his three companies together had cleared about $140 million since 2016. Cindy Joseph died in July 2018. The brand still carries her name and now trades as BOOM Beauty.