Founder Profile: Amy Errett, Founder/CEO Madison Reed

WAFFA
2 min readSep 7, 2022
Amy Errett, Founder of Madison Reed

MEET AMY ERRETT — FOUR-TIME ENTREPRENEUR, VENTURE CAPITALIST, SOCIAL-MISSION VISIONARY

Join WAFFA on Thursday September 15th at 11am-1pm PT (2pm-4pm ET) for our Fireside Chat with Amy Errett, Founder and CEO of Madison Reed. For more info and to sign up, click here.

Amy Errett founded Madison Reed with over 30 years of business and operating expertise as a four-time entrepreneur, venture capitalist and social-mission visionary. She created Madison Reed with a strong belief that women deserve more — not just in their hair color — but in their lives. She believes this so firmly that she named the company after her daughter, Madison Reed.

Prior to founding Madison Reed, Amy was a general partner at Maveron, a venture capital firm co-founded by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, focused on investments in consumer facing companies. She also previously served as Chief Asset Gathering Officer at E*TRADE, where she ran a $200 million business. She has been featured on Fast Company’s first ever Queer 50 list of LGBTQ women and nonbinary innovators in business and tech in 2020, 2021 and 2022, along with Inc. Magazine’s 2021 Female Founders 100 list, and was recently named an Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2022 Bay Area Award winner by Ernst & Young. Today, in addition to being the Founder + CEO of Madison Reed, Amy is also a Venture Partner at True Ventures, focusing on investments in direct-to-consumer startups.

Amy disrupted an industry that lacked innovation for decades when she founded Madison Reed in 2013. She understood that for years, women had to choose between traditional boxed color or hours and hundreds of dollars in the salon and set out to change the industry forever. Her mission was to provide an empowering new option: gorgeous, high-quality, Smart 8-Free, Leaping Bunny Certified hair color with ingredients you can feel good about. Under Amy’s leadership, Madison Reed has changed the typical trajectory for hair colorists in an industry where they historically have not been set up for financial success. In doing so, Madison Reed Colorists can earn up to 3x industry average, plus full-time benefits and opportunities for career growth within the company. Madison Reed is an omnichannel business, serving customers via Amazon, Ulta, Target, Madison-Reed.com, or at one of our 65+ Hair Color Bars across the U.S. The company has raised approximately $220M in venture capital funding from leading venture capital firms including Marcy Ventures, Sandbridge Capital, True Ventures, and more.

Amy holds a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Liberal Arts from the University of Connecticut. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Clare, and their daughter, Madison Reed.

Read more about Madison Reed here and follow Amy Errett here.

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