Beauty ‘N’ Boots: Meet The Unsinkable Marsha Martin, A Bona Fide Arkansas Success Story

For someone who does not do a lot of interviews, Marsha Martin is getting a lot of attention these days. Thanks to a flamboyant sense of style and some strategically placed courtside seats at Razorback basketball games, Martin is recognized nearly everywhere she goes.

While no shrinking violet, she is constantly surprised by the recognition.

“It’s pretty interesting,” she said. “When we were in Portland at the basketball games last year, people from California, everywhere, came up to me and went, ‘You’re the Blonde in Boots!’ I’m like, ‘What?’

“We just went to the Bahamas to the ball games, and we were laughing about it. People came up to me, and they were like, ‘Can we get our picture made with you, please, please?’ I’m like, ‘Of course you can.’ I’m thinking, ‘I’m just an ordinary person, right? I’m no different than they are — except I’m the Blonde in Boots now.’”

There are many adjectives by which one may try, futilely, to describe Martin to the outside world. Subtle is not one of them. The Missouri native makes a statement wherever she goes, favoring bright colors and flashy footwear in her attire, crowned by a 24-carat smile and all tied up with a bow of signature blonde tresses.

Yet what speaks louder than all of that is her presence, a sonic boom of confidence and personality that lays waste to anything within her field of vision, especially negatively, excuses or a hint of the idea that she is being underestimated. A self-made phenomenon, hers is the kind of entrepreneurial success story all dream of writing, but few have the sand to jot the first sentence.

In a word, whenever Martin walks into a room, success follows.

“Growing up, I was in Girl Scouts, and I stayed in Girl Scouts all the way through high school,” she said. “Selling those cookies, I was really competitive. I wanted to sell the most cookies because if you sold a certain amount of cookies, you got to go to camp, and I wanted to go to that two-week camp. At that point, I learned you’ve got to get out, you’ve got to meet people, you’ve got to give them a sales pitch, and you’ve got to earn your way.

“My parents encouraged us. If we wanted to try it, they were happy to let us try it. My dad would take me down to the courthouse, drop me off, and I’d go around and sell Girl Scout Cookies. I learned really early on that your success depended on what you put into something.”

Martin’s parents not only encouraged these qualities in their seven children, of which she falls squarely in the middle; they lived lives that quashed most excuses their brood might have otherwise hid behind rather than succeed.

“Both of my parents were very strong. There was nothing they couldn’t do,” she said. “My dad had one arm. He lost his arm in a sawmill when he was 14 years old, and he played baseball with Mickey Mantle and went to the Boston Red Sox training camp, which is where he got his money to go to college. He later became a politician.

“My mother was equally strong willed. She had seven children, was married to a politician, and she worked full time for 40 years at a job. When my grandparents had their 50th wedding anniversary, they’re putting it all together, and my mother’s like, ‘Well, those cakes are just too expensive for us to buy,’ so she made this massive cake, like a wedding cake, and all the sheet cakes that went with it. She just sat down and learned how to make the frosting roses that go on the cake — never did it before, just figured it out. After that, people started calling her to make wedding cakes, and so my mother’s now in the cake business.”

Martin’s upbringing invested in her a certain confidence and expectation for success that was not always given to girls of her generation. Small wonder, then, that she walked right off the high school graduation stage and straight south across the Missouri border to the door of a promising retail operation in Arkansas called Walmart.

“I was going to go to Kilgore, Texas, and be a Kilgore Rangerette, and the plans changed,” she said. “My dad said, ‘Just sit out, and you can go to the University of Missouri next semester,’ My business teacher called me when she found out and said, ‘Why don’t you go to Walmart’s corporate office and see my husband? He runs HR there.’ I went to see him, and he put me to work in the buying office.

“It was a really small place back then. That was in 1977, and I don’t even remember the store count. It was small, nothing like it is today, but anyway, I went to work there, and I fell in love with retail, and I ended up staying.”

Of course, the job did more than pay the bills and feed her soul; it also put her in direct contact with one of the greatest business minds the world had ever known, founder Sam Walton. Asked what it was like to have such unfettered access to the man himself, Martin shrugged, saying she remembered him as more Sam than Sam Walton.

‘He was just an ordinary guy,” she said. “He ate in the same cafeteria we all ate in, and when I say cafeteria, that room was not more than probably 12 feet wide by 20 feet long where we went to eat a lunch that we brought from home. You know, he wasn’t Sam Walton, the icon that we know today. He drove an old pickup truck. He talked to everybody and was encouraging to everyone.

“The thing I remember most is he was passionate about the business, and that passion really spilled over into everyone who worked for him. You had to be accountable. The store associates were important, and everything was about helping those store associates because, ultimately, they were selling the merchandise, so it was about making sure you took care of all of your associates no matter what their job was.”

Unbeknownst to her at the time, the lessons she learned during her Walmart days were staking down the skills that would prove essential to her as-yet unrealized career turn as an entrepreneur. That chapter opened when her husband, Marty, came home one day from his job at a beauty distributorship.

“He said there was a gentleman who came to the office and he wanted to sell his product to Walmart and other retailers, but he didn’t know how,” Martin said. “He also needed help with packaging because he sold to salons, and it was, like, things you just pick up in the beauty supply store that didn’t peg on the wall. He said, ‘Would you help the guy?’ and I said, ‘Sure,’ so I started working with a local graphic designer, helping the gentleman with his packaging, then took it to Walmart and got 4 feet of product in.”

All seemed poised for success until the man called Martin to say he did not have the money for raw materials and therefore could not meet the production schedule to fill the space she had secured.

“I was like, ‘Oh, no, no. You have to ship. We have a reputation there. We’re not going to let you ruin it,’” she said. “I called our attorney, Sam Hilburn, and said, ‘We have a situation.’”

Martin and her attorney, now deceased, caught a plane to the West Coast to iron out the matter in person, only to discover they had just scraped the tip of the iceberg.

“We get there, and the IRS is padlocking his doors,” she said. “Sam, being the good ol’ boy from Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, talks the IRS agent into giving us 120 days because we had the Walmart orders, and we promised that we would try to get them paid if we could make a deal, whereas if they locked the guy up, they were going to get nothing. So now we’ve got past the IRS, we got into the building, and we’re going to negotiate with the guy.”

At that, Martin pumped the brakes on what was undoubtedly the most colorful part of the story. Suffice it to say, the Arkies played hardball.

“I really can’t tell you what happened,” she said, “but when we departed three days later, I owned a nail care company. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Guided by her own retail instincts and a bone-deep commitment to succeed, Martin drove Onyx Brands into an unqualified success story. She had spent nine months at cosmetology school while pregnant with her eldest child, and that orientation gave her the ability to speak the language of the beauty consumer, as well as ask questions that helped her learn what she did not know. The rest of it just came down to plain and simple grit.

“I had to give myself permission to succeed from the very start because the beauty industry was predominantly controlled by men,” she said. “My husband worked with me in the business, and I will tell you, there were men at times who would call my husband, and he would say, ‘You need to talk to her.’ Really early on in the business, I had to fight my way through.

“I had these big companies in New York, and they had their attorneys who were like, ‘This is just a little girl in Arkansas. We’ll knock her product off, and she’ll be gone,’ so I realized, as a female, I really had to push to be taken seriously and earn respect. I was fortunate that Sam [Hilburn] was right there. He was a fighter for me, but if you’re trying to build a business, it’s about you. The days are long, and you’ve got to be strong.”

By the time Martin sold a majority stake in the company in 2021, Onyx Brands had become a leading supplier of branded beauty and personal care products sold through Target, Meijer, Dollar General, TJ Maxx and, of course, Walmart. Success has rewarded Marsha and Marty handsomely, and they, in turn, have given back to numerous charitable causes, as well as the athletics program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

In 2023, they donated $5 million, an unrestricted gift that had coaches throughout the department scrambling over it, which ultimately secured naming rights to the University of Arkansas Basketball Performance Center.

That brings the story back to the Blonde in Boots, a character that grew out of head basketball coach John Calipari calling with a proposition.

Marsha and Marty Martin courtside in Bud Walton Arena. (Arkansas Athletics)

“Coach Cal called me up and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to do these courtside seats, and they’re going to be different than the courtside seats you have on the other side,’” she said. “I was like, ‘Coach, I like the seats I have. There’s nothing wrong with them.’ He was like, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re going to be right on the court, and you’re going to sit next to the opposing coach, and I want you to intimidate them.’ I was like, ‘Got it.’

“Well, I wore boots because I like boots, and once I got on camera, that’s where the Blonde in Boots got started. Marty laughs about it. He says ‘She’s so famous, we need to get her her own security.’”

Martin’s courtside experience further demonstrates the very different world in which she circulates, one largely of her own creation, built on a refusal to be just one of the herd. Be it managing her real estate portfolio, her latest career venture, or needling opposing coaches, she proves there is no hill too tall to climb, provided one has the right shoes for it.

“It’s been interesting down there, courtside,” she said. “I will say, you get to hear everything the players are saying and the coaches are saying. You’re literally in the game. It’s a great place to be.

“One time, I won’t say which coach, but a coach asked me, ‘What’s in your cup?’ and I said, ‘Champagne.’ He said, ‘Can you get me a Scotch?’ After halftime, we were beating them significantly, and he said, ‘Can you make it a double?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. Let me ask.’ It’s been a lot of fun.”

(Feature photo by Jane Colclasure)