How Zoë Foster Blake went from a country girl to a multi-millionaire

Zoë Foster Blake is one of Australia’s most successful female entrepreneurs with an estimated fortune of $36million – but she didn’t always live the high-life. 

The businesswoman, who lives in a $9million mansion with her family, had an ‘alternative’ upbringing in the country with seven siblings before moving to Sydney and working for years as a beauty journalist to gain the tools she needed to build her skincare line. 

Here, Daily Mail Australia looks at Zoë’s journey to success – and how she became a multi-millionaire before the age of 40 thanks to her Go-To beauty empire.

Early life and career

Zoë grew up as the youngest of eight children in a blended family in Bundanoon, in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. 

According to the AFR, the family grew up without a TV, and her fight for attention among her siblings ‘sparked her drive’ to do things at a fast pace.

Her father, novelist David Foster, played drums in a jazz band in Canberra. He was married with three kids, but fell in love with the band’s singer Gerda Busch, who had two of her own children.

The couple moved to the Southern Highlands in 1974, where they married and had three more children; Antigone, Levi, and their youngest daughter, Zoë.

But it wasn’t easy for the family. They lived a humble existence on funds from David’s writing grants, and Gerda’s career as a drug and alcohol worker at a men’s prison.

‘I had a free-range childhood, We lived in town but with a cow, chooks, bees and multiple vegie gardens so we could live self-sufficiently,’ Zoë told Elle magazine.

‘Mum and Dad sacrificed a lot to give us a healthy, alternative upbringing.’ 

While Zoë said she thought her father was ‘a bit terrifying’ at the time, she later told the Sydney Morning Herald she understood he was trying to follow his passion of writing with ‘kids everywhere’.

‘We were just jerks. We were loud, we fought constantly. I get it now,’ she said.

Zoë moved to Sydney when she was 17, and completed a degree in media and communications. At the age of 22, she began a career in journalism, which shaped her passion for beauty and skincare.

In her early career, she worked at magazines such as Mania and Smash Hits. She later became a beauty editor at Cosmopolitan, a beauty director at Harper’s Bazaar and editor in chief of beauty website Primped.com.au.

Not content with the amount of writing she was doing, in 2006 Zoe started her own blog, at a time when they were not nearly as popular as they are today, called fruitybeauty.

‘I was writing blogs before work, then I was writing at work, and then I started writing books on the weekend because you just have that sort of energy in your twenties, it’s wonderful,’ she told the ABC in 2016.

In 2015, her blog merged with her website, zotheysay.com.

Zoë also began writing a string of successful books – and now has 10 under her belt – with the first being Air Kisses back in 2009. 

Her novel The Wrong Girl was adapted into a television series by Channel 10 in 2015.

Relationship with Craig Wing   

Zoë dated NRL star Craig Wing for over nine years before the high-profile couple ended their relationship among a flurry of headlines in 2009.

When the pair met, Zoë told Mamamia she was 18, ‘dead broke,’ had deferred university and moved to Sydney, where she was working as as a promotional girl for Bensons & Hedges cigarettes.  

She recounted the night the pair met:  ‘One of those nights where I was doing the 12am to 4am shift, where you’d have glow sticks on your tray and walk through clubs – and he was there. Minding all the coats for his friends, sober and bored. And we just got chatting.’ 

The professional rugby league and rugby union player, who was around 19 or 20 at the time, was well known for his time in the South Sydney Rabbitohs and Sydney Roosters. 

The couple went on to date for nine years, but Zoë says she never saw herself as a WAG and struggled with Craig’s fame.  

‘We were just a couple of dags. We were really young and took it all in our stride, but I think as he became more successful and famous and the attention was on him a lot – and he would get a lot of attention from women. I definitely struggled with that,’ she admitted. 

The pair had an on-off relationship, and it was during one of the ‘off’ periods that Zoë began her illustrious career in women’s magazines.

‘We split, and that’s when I started at Cosmo, and that was my butterfly moment,’ she told Mamamia. 

They spent a year apart before Zoë took him back after he’d sent her a barrage of flowers and pleas for a reunion. 

The couple finally split for good when the author was 29 –  though she admits she did believe, for a time, they the would marry. 

‘I was just assuming that would be the way it would roll, even though I think I knew in my heart that I probably wouldn’t have been that happy,’ she said. 

Founding Go-To

With years of beauty and editorial experience under her belt, Zoe decided in 2012 she wanted to create her own skincare line. 

After hearing what readers really wanted in skincare over the years, Zoë believed she had what it took to create products for everyone to enjoy.

The idea of the company was hatched after she completed a beauty column for Mamamia that same year, closing the book on her full-time writing career and opening a completely new one.

She launched Go-To two years later, in 2014.

‘I just wanted it to be simple and uncomplicated, clean, trustworthy products that you wouldn’t be wasting money on and would know which ingredients actually worked,’ she told The New York Times in 2014.

Almost seven years later, Go-To now sells one unit of Transformazing Face Masks every 90 seconds, and has sold more than 200,000 bottles of Face Hero face oil in the last year.

In 2018, Go-To was stocked in 400 Sephora stores in the United States, and about 120 stores in Australia.

Zoë previously told the Business Chicks blog: ‘I believe that the universe rewards momentum. Just keep going forward like you know what you’re doing – and that is totally what I’ve done with my whole career.’

Go-To has had a boom in sales during the Covid-19 pandemic, which helped secure Zoe’s place on the Australian Financial Review Young Rich List in November.

Wealth

In December, Zoe and her husband, comedian Hamish Blake, bought a five-bedroom, six-bathroom home in the upmarket Sydney suburb of Vaucluse for $8,925,000.

They had previously lived in Melbourne for years.

The five-bedroom, six-bathroom estate measures 885 square metres and features two sets of garages.

While the four-level home does not have ocean views, it is considered architecturally noteworthy and was featured on Grand Designs Australia in 2013.

The property is just a short drive from Go-To’s head office in Surry Hills. 

The couple recently put their home in Melbourne’s Richmond up for sale.

While the asking price is unknown, they had purchased the property for $4.25million back in 2015.

When it comes to fast cars, Zoë is seen regularly driving around in her Tesla Model X 90D, which can cost up to $130,000.

The Blakes aren’t shy when it comes to spending their wealth on lavish getaways either, and recently holidayed at a $6,600-a-night resort on Lord Howe Island.

Family

Zoë met Hamish Blake, a successful comedian, radio presenter and host of Nine’s Lego Masters, at a media event when they were both in their early twenties.

They didn’t start dating for a while but remained friends while they saw other people. They even penned a dating book together, Textbook Romance, in 2009.

They both found themselves single in 2010 and quickly became more than just friends.

‘You know, we’d both had partners and I’d been single for a year, out of a relationship for a few months, and it was quite organic I think,’ Zoe told Show and Tell in 2013.

The couple married in December 2012 in front of friends and family at the Wolgan Valley resort in the Blue Mountains. 

Zoe and Hamish share two children together, Sonny, six, and Rudy, three. They are now joint ambassadors for Tourism Australia’s ‘Holiday Here This Year’ campaign.