Adam Borowski: From Bills To Business

Adam Borowski is Polish-American 2016 Master In Finance graduate and successful entrepreneur, having taken the men’s grooming market by storm in Poland and abroad with his two Warsaw-based start-ups.

Equipped with an MSc in International Finance and three years of prior experience at a trading and then venture capital firm, it’s safe to say that Adam’s path to entrepreneurship was atypical. “I set my sights on working in hedge funds from quite early on, but I soon realized that it wasn’t the right career choice for me”, says Adam. Once his time at HEC was over, he had put enough hours into jobs and classes to know that it was time to close the door on Finance – to round up the valuable skills he cultivated during his program and take them elsewhere. 

So in Summer 2016, he packed his bags for Warsaw, having landed a job in Marketing at Google Poland. “Being creative, I thought Marketing could be a good fit for me “, he says.

Venturing New Terrain
A few months in, he met Konrad: a like-minded friend that had a desire – and an idea – to make it on his own. “I found Google too structured; I’ve always been someone that needs to go and figure things out myself, rather than being told how to do it. So when I met Konrad and he started talking about his business idea, it was really exciting”, Adam remembers. “He wanted to start a burger shop initially, but I quickly noticed a gap in the Warsaw market: there was nowhere that offered a 360° men’s grooming experience – somewhere you can go to get a beard trim, haircut, massage and manicure at the same time. I missed the concept from NYC, since it's pretty popular over there. And so, Konrad suggested we fill that gap”.

The conversations started as a light-hearted way to pass the time, but they soon morphed into a respectable business plan; and Badger Men’s Grooming Club was born. “We designed a 360° grooming experience in a stylish setting, offering all kinds of treatments but also luxurious products available for purchase – like liquor, for example”, says Adam. “We wanted to provide the highest quality cosmetics from all over the world, so we started importing goods from the US among other countries”. Eventually partnering up with a multitude of international brands, Badger was well supplied – stocking brands from the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Italy. 

A year or so into Badger, Adam had a realization. “As a by-product, I’d created a valuable international supply chain network – an asset that isn’t always easy to obtain. So it made sense to sell this network as a product to European buyers and international sellers, acting as an import/distribution business. And so my second business was born, off the back of Badger Grooming Men’s Club: Kovas Supreme Stuff, a European distributor and importer of men's premium cosmetics from around the world. It’s now a year old and doing really well”.  

With wide-ranging expertise in business and venture capital, Adam is now also offering his know-how to ShareSpace – a Warsaw-based prop-tech startup matching businesses with workspaces to suit their needs – as a Board Advisor, helping them to raise funds and expand abroad. 

HEC: Where It All Began
Adam may not have utilized his Master’s degree to pursue a thriving Finance career, but he maintains that it guided him to his entrepreneurial success. “HEC doesn’t just teach you your chosen discipline; it teaches you how to be successful, whatever you want to do”, Adam says. “It taught me how to successfully interact with people and get them on your side, even if you don’t fully understand the subject matter at hand – you really learn how to be a businessman. It also couldn’t have prepared me better for an international career: because of the sheer amount of nationalities at HEC, I was very used to interacting with different types of people and building relationships across diverging languages and cultures. It’s helped me enormously in my import business”.