Sonya Lennon
It’s strictly business for the fashion designer, she tells Donal O’Donoghue
“Probably the best thing is that you’re less likely to become an asshole,” says Sonya Lennon and laughs like a drain. We’re talking about her career as a ‘classic late starter’, someone whose world changed at 40 when she got the opportunity to co-host, with Brendan Courtney, the RTÉ TV fashion show, O the Rails. “By that age your personality is fully-formed,” says the mother-of two, who can list broadcaster, stylist, fashion designer, entrepreneur and advocate (of the not for pro t organisation Dress to Success) in her portfolio. “By 50, you know who you are, you know what you stand for and you know what’s important and what is not important.”
We talk by phone. Sonya has just wrapped a Dress for Success meeting and is walking to her car where she plugs into the hands-free. Later I tell her that we may need a photograph so she promptly organises a shoot for the following day. In person, Sonya is as she is online, a dynamo in her faux fur coat, out-sized sunglasses and dangly pop earrings. “I’m here,” she says stepping out of her shiny car, the glamorous face and sharp mind of new TV series, Strictly Business. Pitched as a hybrid of Dragon’s Den and e Apprentice, this six-part series is more like At Your Service with Sonya in the role of expert-for-hire Francis Brennan, advising small businesses on how to unlock their potential and rethink their way to success.
“I know what that is like because I’ve done it myself,” she says of the small business route. Failure is part of that process, with Sonya’s line “I know how it is to fail” stitched into the opening sequence of Strictly Business. So what did she learn from those failed ventures? “Accepting failure is the biggest lesson as well as learning how to get back up a er failing,” she says. “In my case we built a platform with Lennon Courtney (her fashion line with Brendan Courtney) to sell women what they needed, but people don’t buy what they need, they buy what they want. Failure is a great thing to get comfortable with but most important is having the tenacity to get back up again.”
Tenacity is Lennon’s stock-in-trade. She comes armed with can-do phrases and aphorisms like a stylish version of Roy Keane. Like, “It’s very easy to get knocked, it’s what you do with it.” Or “you’re not a product of what life deals you; you’re a product of how you react to those knocks”. Each week on Strictly Business Sonya sets out her mission statement with a line that Alan Sugar or Donald Trump would kill for. “I’m getting to toughlove these companies all the way to success”. She laughs when I repeat it. “I’m comfortable claiming it because you can’t sugar-coat this, you have to tell people what you believe to be true and give them the best possible information. What they choose to do with it is their decision.”
In many interviews, Sonya has credited her mother, Deirdre, as a key in uence in instilling the economic independence that is “hardwired” into her. ‘Always have your running away money, don’t ever be in a situation where you can’t leave’ is the line her working mother gave her. “Maybe I’ve been a little bit unfair on my dad in that respect,” she says of doling out the credit. “When we were growing up he was a frustrated entrepreneur, someone who had all these great ideas but he worked full-time at the bank to support the family and couldn’t commit to the entrepreneurial lifestyle. So the entrepreneurship comes from him but the passion and independent forthrightness comes from her.”
Her mother, who is now living with dementia, has been unwell for a while. “She won’t get any better but she’s happy because my dad is her full-time carer and he is an amazing man. We are a very close-knit family.” I mention the powerful TV documentary, We Need To Talk About Dad, in which her colleague Brendan Courtney chronicled how he and his family cared for their father. “I watched it several times and was so proud of Brendan making that because it was a risk to let a documentary crew into your family, to show the warts-and-all as things unfolded. It also highlighted the importance of the carer, and particularly in the case of dementia, in our case, there is such a toll on the carer, much more so than the person being cared for.”
She lives with long-term partner, David Smith, and their 13-year-old twins, Evie and Finn, who have inherited the can-do spirit of their mother and grandmother. “ e two things we wanted to give our children were con dence and independence,” she says. “Now it’s not within my ability to gi them con dence, they have to take it and own it themselves but I will do whatever I can to support that.” Any tips for a edgling parent? “Don’t forget who’s driving the car because the baby can’t drive,” she says. “You have to drive the car and you have to set the agenda and whatever decisions you make now will create the adult that your child becomes.” Despite her achievements and impressive portfolio, Lennon has long argued that you can’t have it all. “You can have some of it some of the time but you can’t have it all, all of the time,” she says. “Unless you’re part of a super-rich elite who can pay for everything to be solved, but that brings its own problems. I think that life is a series of problems to be solved and the best that you can do is to understand which ones you enjoy solving. In my case, I love unpicking business problems, getting under the hood and doing it. I didn’t go to college, I just wanted to go straight to work and get stuck in. And that’s always how I am.”
Sonya Lennon grew up in north Dublin in the urban ‘village’ of Malahide. By the age of 15, she was doing window displays for local shops. “It was all about having my own money to spend and being responsible for that,” she says. When she decided to leave full-time education a er her Leaving Certi cate her parents were not happy. “I had been o ered a place at UCD to study arts but I just was not interested and was not for turning. I can be pretty pigheaded when I have to be.” Years later, she did go to college, to study public relations at Rathmines, a communications foundation course, as well as ‘pattern cutting’ at night in NCAD. “ ey were all sorts of broad sweeping courses relevant to what made me tick.” From the beginning, that was fashion design. “I have sketch books at home of sexy alien costumes that I designed when I was 12,” she says. “But my parents didn’t want me to apply for fashion design as they considered it a precarious career and they were absolutely right. If I had gone into it then I would probably have sank like a stone. e reason Lennon-Courtney is successful now is that we understand the women we dress and I wouldn’t have had that at 20 years of age.”
Lennon-Courtney’s beginnings were, Sonya has said, akin to childbirth. But it helped that she and Courtney had co-hosted a popular fashion TV show and were a brand that could be trusted. “We were regularly rated second a er Mary Kennedy for trust during our time in RTÉ,” says Sonya. “ at will probably go on my gravestone.” Brie y they considered using their rst names for the label (“ e name ‘Brendan’ wouldn’t work for a woman’s line”) and feared that Courtney-Lennon sounded too like a Valley Girl from LA. Eventually they plumped for the Beatles-like LennonCourtney. rough Lennon-Courtney, Sonya founded Dress for Success in 2010, “a charity that promotes the economic independence of women by providing career development tools and a support network.” Last year, Lennon said that “those who deny the gender pay gap are doing a huge disservice to both women and men” (according to the latest gures from Eurostat women are paid 14% less than men in Ireland) but she believes that things are changing. “Dress for Success has launched a group called Pay Pioneers, a cohort of companies coming together to address the invisible issues a ecting women in the workplace. A greater issue than pay, I believe, is the opportunity gap for women in work. How do we address that and make it better for men and women so that society can be fairer? I believe that a blended team of men and women making decisions together is much more e ective than just women or men making decisions on their own.”
Towards the end of 2018, Sonya celebrated her 50th birthday with a big bash. e classic glass half-full person zzes with health (she swears by the 16:8 diet) and is looking forward to a bright future. “It was so great to have 50 years experience behind you and to mark that and enjoy it,” she says. On the day of the party, her sister gave her 52 letters from her many friends, one missive for each of the 52 weeks of her birthday year. Of course Sonya being Sonya dived in, binging on a bunch every so o en. “ ose letters are beautiful, I love them,” she says. “I love a good celebration and from childhood would have taken any excuse to have a party. So I may be a late starter but the parties started a very long time ago.”
I know how it is to fail. Accepting failure is the biggest lesson as well as learning how to get back up