‘THERE’S DEFINITELY A GLASS CEILING FOR WOMEN IN BUSINESS’
... but tan supremo Marissa Carter has smashed it and is hoping to help other women fight past it too. Here she talks Kardashians, following her gut feeling and why she couldn’t take her children away from their grannies
JUST a few months ago, the boxes were packed and the Carter clan were getting ready to say their goodbyes to family and friends on foot of their move to start a new life in New York. But on a gut instinct, at the last minute, tanning queen Marissa Carter had a change of heart. Now, as Christmas approaches and little Belle and Charlie scribble their letters to Santa, while the smell of mince pies and pavlovas fill her new ‘doer-upper’ home in the snowy-peaked Dublin Mountains, Marissa’s certain herself and husband Ronan made the right move. ‘We decided at the last minute that it just wouldn’t be the right move for the kids,’ explains Marissa, CEO of tanning empire Cocoa Brown. After conquering Ireland and Europe, Marissa’s launch in New York went at a juggernaut pace. After managing to get her shocking pink goodies into the hands of no less than Khloe Kardashian and Kylie Jenner last year, this year she went one better, when she got to hang out and talk beauty with Kim Kardashian on the set of her make-up masterclass and photoshoot in New York, beamed via the internet into the homes of millions of the A-lister’s fans around the world. But the Kardashian hattrick coup was no accident, but rather a direct result of Marissa’s canny move to sign up Khloe’s make-up artist Joyce Bonnelli as brand ambassador for Cocoa Brown.
With Kim and Khloe on speed-dial and her products now stocked in 30 stores in New York, and the vast US market to tap into, herself and Ronan decided it would make perfect business sense to relocate to where she anticipates most of her market action over the next few years. That’s ➤
what their heads said, at least – but their hearts won out in the end.
‘We wanted to relocate before they settled into schools and a life in Ireland but then we thought, you know, America is a very funny place at the moment. There’s so much anger there and there’s a lot of hardness in people – you just don’t have that here in Ireland. There’s such a real sense of community here.
‘Our families are here, we’ve great neighbours, the education system is so good. We had been out there in New York and we’d looked at houses but in the end we realised we couldn’t take them away from their grannies. The closer the move came in August, the more we got cold feet.
‘We decided, no we love it here the kids are so happy. We’re all happy. I don’t have any regrets and as soon as we made the decision, we knew it was the right one. I’ve always listened to my gut and it hasn’t led me too far astray.’
She can say that again. In just five years of business, from humble beginnings, Marissa – who left her family home in her late teens, after she dropped out of college – has become one of Ireland’s most successful businesswomen, and is now holding her own, competing on the world stage with the biggest brands on the planet. Marissa taught beauty therapy for two years before opening her own beauty salon, Carter Beauty, in January 2006, before she launched Cocoa Brown.
Five years on, a bottle of Cocoa Brown is sold every 15 seconds and is stocked in more than 800 Superdrug stores in Britain, as well as Penneys and Tesco in Ireland and a host of independent stockists. Not one to sit on her laurels, earlier this year she launched a shampoo and conditioner as an experiment to see whether her loyal customer base would be keen to buy more than just tan. It proved a sellout and now she’s full steam ahead, in the thick of developing a whole new make-up line called Cocoa Brown Beauty.
‘I always knew there’s more to this brand than just tanning. People said I was mad going into hair products but it worked and now they’re our top sellers – I knew then we could do anything.’
Business is going so well, her husband Ronan – who she met 15 years ago when she went knocking on his door asking could she rent a room after her parents kicked her out – left his banking career to join the fold a year ago. He oversees the business development and financial side of things, while Marissa concentrates on new product development, digital marketing and PR.
‘When Ronan first started in the business we did a few trips together and realised it wasn’t really fair on the kids so now we take it in turns,’ she says. ‘In our Dun Laoghaire office, we’ve pink carpets in all the rooms so I said I’d change the carpet in his office and put down a plain grey wooden floor – I thought he’d like that. But a few weeks afterwards I noticed he was spending more time in my office so I asked him, “what’s the craic?” He said it was a bit dull in his room and he didn’t really like the floor.’
So how do they rub along together nowadays spending all their time together? Marissa smiles: ‘Ah, it’s grand, he just knows I’m the boss. Ronan is brilliant and has always been a huge support. We’re like any couple that spends a lot of time together but it’s funny as we’d been together 13 years before we started working together and I’m learning new things about him all the time.
‘Before I’d have said I’m the chatty one and he’s the quiet one but when we started travelling to work together in the car, I relaised for the first time how much he talks in the morning. He’s up and at ’em whereas I can’t have a conversation and it takes me a while to get going until I decompress and have a cup of tea but he’s straight out of the traps.’
But she says they were always a great partnership, right from when they first got together two weeks after Ronan offered her the room to rent. She laughs recounting the story of how they got together.
‘When he showed me around the house I found on Daft I fancied the pants off him and threw the deposit at him. We were good housemates for the few weeks until we got together. On the night we hooked up, I swear to God, nobody believes me, but it was all because I’d had a spray tan. It was Friday night and I came down to the kitchen and wondered what food I’d make so I didn’t have to wash my hands. He was making one of those boil in the bag chicken curries out of a packet and ➤
“WE’RE LIKE ANY COUPLE THAT SPENDS A LOT OF TIME TOGETHER BUT IT’S FUNNY AS WE’D BEEN A COUPLE FOR 13 YEARS BEFORE WE STARTED WORKING TOGETHER AND I’M LEARNING NEW THINGS ABOUT HIM ALL THE TIME
offered me some. I thought, I’ve a keeper on my hands here.’
Marissa says Ronan and herself split all the business, house and childcare down the middle but as a woman in business, she’s aware many women aren’t in such a privileged position and is very outspoken and passionate about equality in the workplace for women.
‘For women my age there certainly is a glass ceiling,’ she says. ‘There’s huge difficulties and a lack of support structures for women who choose to have children but also want to maintain or accelerate growth in their career.
‘A lot of women feel they have to prove their family isn’t an obstruction in their job. We shouldn’t feel that way. We should be able to say, I have to leave at 5pm today.
‘It’s a patriarchal culture of working past dinner time but this wouldn’t have been built this way if women didn’t have to retire when they got married, not all that long ago in the late 1970s. It rears its head in the little things, for example distributors wanting to have evening meetings when I want to be at home for my children’s bedtime. Once I had a buyer request a meeting with me five weeks after I’d given birth. I told them I’d just given birth but they insisted on meeting me. If I was dealing with a female buyer this wouldn’t have happened.
‘There’s not enough consideration given to the fact that a lot of women who are successful businesswomen are also the primary caregiver in their families – these are the facts.
‘When these structures and the business culture becomes more female-friendly – and that will happen with the more female CEOs and women in management and leadership positions – then we’ll really see women become more confident about demanding more money, and bridging the pay gap and smashing that glass ceiling.’
The night before our interview, Marissa was up until 1am whittling down applicants who she will mentor once a week for the next six months, as part of the Going for Growth Programme, which was the brainchild of Paula Fitzimons and is supported by Enterprise Ireland.
Marissa herself benefitted hugely from the mentoring programme when she started out five years ago and she’s excited about the prospect of leading and inspiring some of Ireland’s most driven, ambitious and promising young female entrepreneurs. She says: ‘I think women are so bad at putting themselves forward and I want to show that you really do have to plug and push and put yourself out there.
‘I like to think when people meet me they think: “What’s so great about her? If she can do it, why can’t I?” I nominated myself for Image Businesswoman of the Year to try to get shortlisted for six years and I never got shortlisted but I kept going for it and in 2012 I was shortlisted and won.
‘You have to be vulnerable and be seen and allow yourself to be picked apart and know it’s ok to fail and get knocked down. I want other women and their daughters – and my daughter – to look at me me and realise it’s alright if things go wrong. All the stories I’ve read about huge brands like Starbucks and Nike and Jo Malone – the road wasn’t a straight one.
‘What I’ve learned is things go wrong all the time in everyone’s business. It really is resilience and the fighter instinct in you that will determine where you go afterwards and the confidence to say this will eventually work out for me. That’s the difference between success and not succeeding.’
She may come across as the perfect businesswoman but even Marissa has had disasters in her career. ‘We’ve had loads of things go wrong – last year we had 25,000 bottles of shampoo arrive into stores with conditioner written on them instead of shampoo. It was a straightforward graphic design error but we’d to get all the stock back and relabel it on the day of our launch. I went on Snapchat and said I’ve made this massive mistake, it’s a disaster but when you’re honest with your customers, they understand – thankfully the press didn’t murder me, either.’
But business will take a back seat for the forseeable as Marissa winds down for Christmas. Their new home was bought as a ‘fixer-upper’ but she’s happy to let the fixing up take a back seat, too. She laughs: ‘When we moved in we started doing work but then the kids started drawing on the walls and the wrecking the gaff so I’m happy to leave it that way for the time being. It’s our dream home but we haven’t really touched it yet and that’s fine by me.
‘I’m not one of those mums who has everything mad tidy. We do a lot of baking and the house looks like a bomb exploded in it a lot of the time but we’re having fun and enjoying it. I’m easygoing – we’ll get around to it eventually.’
Part of this laidback attitude might be the fact that the Carters are off to Disneyland on December 28 for two weeks. ‘I will be turning the email notifications off, decompressing and having a great time,’ she smiles.
But before that, she wants to put her feet up and enjoy as low-key a Christmas as possible with Ronan, the children, her mum and her 11-year-old sister, Blaithin.
‘Mum is cooking Christmas dinner and I’ll do dessert – a gingerbread trifle and a berry pavlova and another one. We are all very easygoing, it won’t be fussy. Once there’s Brussels sprouts and a bit of turkey, I’ll be happy. The kids will probably want fish fingers or cocktail sausages. After that, we’ll be packing.’
And that it’s not their entire life she’s packing up makes this Christmas a very happy one indeed for the Carters.
“THE HOUSE LOOKS LIKE A BOMB EXPLODED IN IT A LOT OF THE TIME BUT WE’RE HAVING FUN AND ENJOYING IT”