Botox queen settles dispute
THE Gold Coast’s Queen of Botox says she regrets a merger which ended in a nasty legal spat and the sale of a business she built up from one clinic into Australia’s second-largest chain of cosmetic clinics. Kenya-born Deborah Farnworth-Wood has settled out of court with her former business partners and Hairhouse Warehouse founders Tony and Joseph Lattouf and Gavin Nixon after a 2016 merger with her Australian Skin Clinics business went sour. The Lattoufs and Mr Nixon bought into ASC in 2016 as part of a plan to have a greater focus on the lucrative Botox, lip-filler and laser treatments market and convert their Ella Rouge salons to the ASC brand. However, when Ms Farnworth-Wood was removed as managing director she sued the Lattouf brothers and Mr Nixon and a fourth director for $7.2 million, claiming they had misled her and broken pre-merger promises. Her former colleagues in turn accused her in court documents of bugging the office of the company’s chief execuKATHMANDU tive with a secret recording device and bullying staff. Ms Farnworth-Wood said yesterday she has settled the court case for an undisclosed sum and had sold her share of the business to the Lattoufs and Mr Nixon. Company records show Ms Farnworth-Wood ceased being a director of the operating company – ASC Master Franchise Pty Ltd – on December 15 last year and two days later Justice David Jackson in the Brisbane Supreme Court filed an order dismissing the case by consent of all the parties. Ms Farnworth-Wood said she believed both parties had the same goals in mind going into the merger, which involved a plan, that later stalled, to convert the Lattoufs’ Ella Rouge salons into Australian Skin Clinics. “But that turned out not to be the case. There was a court case and eventually I got to the point where I decided it was best to leave the business,” she said. “If I knew then what I know now I would never have done it.” She will retain the original Ashmore clinic, which will be rebranded to Ultimate Skin and Body as part of the settlement. Ms Farnworth-Wood, who has lived in the UK and Hong Kong, came to Australia in 2007 and bought the Australian Skin Clinic in Ashmore. “We bought it just to get a visa really because the easiest way to get into Australia is to buy a business.” She had a stressful experience running a similar clinic in the UK and decided after putting in a manager in Ashmore, she would retire. However, she soon changed her mind and became involved in the business, soon discovering it was a complicated operation that ran a full range of beauty and cosmetic services from Botox to eyelash extensions. “As a clinic in itself it was great, but to try and scale that was too difficult in that format,” she said. “That was why we then looked at what were the most requested services and looked at how we could roll those services out across multiple franchises.” She ditched the spa treatments that could be found at any salon, such as massages, and opted instead for Botox, medi-aesthetic peels and laser hair removal. The franchise model took two years to develop and then it was another 18 months before she opened an outlet in a shopping mall. “Back then there were not many people doing it in volume. “When I told people I was going to go to shopping centres they laughed at me. They said no one would want to do that.” She finally opened her first franchise, in a joint venture with a staff member, in 2011 and the next franchise followed quickly. “We opened at 9am and at 10am I got a phone call from Robina Town Centre saying they would like to give us a site too.” By 2014 she took her staff to Bali for a holiday after they reached their target of opening seven franchises in one year.
Two years later, prior to the merger, there were 24.
Ms Farnworth-Wood said the model worked because franchisees received extensive training prior to opening a store.
She said she is now looking at buying another franchise business, not involved in the same medi-aesthetics industry, and is also about to join the board of a company.
“It was not my desired outcome (to sell ASC),” she said.
“But life is short. I think you have to move on and I have.
“I don’t lay awake worrying about it.”
Joseph Lattouf declined to comment when contacted.