HOW TO BUILD A BEAUTY BUSINESS

Three entrepreneurs explain how they did it

TRINNY WOODALL, FOUNDER OF TRINNY LONDON

From a weekly style guide for the Daily Telegraph to co-presenting TV’S What Not To Wear, Trinny Woodall has built a hugely successful career in fashion. She has reinvented herself as a social media star and entrepreneur, selling stackable, portable, cream-based make-up on her Trinny London website, where an online tool makes choosing the right shades for your colouring engaging and easy.

I knew I would have my own brand one

day. When I was filming What Not To

Wear, I always had this stack of mushedtogether cream-based make-up in Muji boxes (the basic principle behind Trinny London) and women would ask, ‘Where can I buy it?’ Years later, someone I greatly respected said, ‘What are you going to do with that idea?’

Before Trinny London launched, I spent two years working on my Instagram and Facebook accounts, knowing that I needed to build up my social media profile, both for myself and to give the business the best opportunity. In the beginning, my daughter Lyla held the camera. Then, when I started doing Facebook Live and Youtube videos, I just put it on my bathroom window sill and got on with it. To grow your audience on social media, you have to engage people – if they are engaged, they tell their friends and then their friends tell others.

I don’t follow pretty pictures, I follow mad people, weird dogs and this entrepreneurial man called Gary

Vee, who takes no shit, kicks you up the ass and inspires you to get on with it. So, don’t be fussed by how pretty your Instagram looks; just get the content out there. If your business is ultimately you, you need to put yourself on it. Maybe you don’t need to be out front (we also do makeovers – showing before and after shots to engage people), but do really use the platform. Instagram has four ways of getting an audience – via the feed, stories, live video and a shop. Click to buy is coming soon. We always respond to comments on social media, too. I think it’s important to ask what else followers would like to know, so you’re not just telling and reacting.

Facebook is not the place to sell things. But it’s really good when you have a business based on a group with a passion. Some women in north west England started a page called Trinny Tribe North West. When they told us they were all meeting up, we sent them some lip products. Then we asked if other women wanted to start a Trinny Tribe, and we now have 17. We’re nurturing them to do skincare research.

Facebook also helped us realise that Dublin was our second biggest market, so we decided to do a three-day pop-up there, taking online bookings for makeovers, which got people visiting our website – their home for the future. To me, that’s a modern way to do business.

You don’t know what’s around the corner. There are days when things are fantastic, and then there are days when I think, ‘How the fuck am I going to move from A to B?’ That’s when I remind myself not to presume what lies ahead. It’s about taking a deep breath and keeping a sense of your vision.

‘TO GROW YOUR AUDIENCE, YOU HAVE TO ENGAGE PEOPLE’ ALEXIA INGE, CO-FOUNDER OF CULT BEAUTY

With a talent for identifying trends and covetable brands, Alexia launched her online beauty treasure trove back in 2008, having seen the widening gap between how consumers wanted to shop and the traditional bricks and mortar retail model. Cult Beauty not only sells a ‘hall of fame’ of products, but also demystifies marketing spiel, helping customers decide why, as well as what, to buy.

I was a passionate amateur with no retail or online experience. But as a beauty obsessive, I saw a gap in the

‘DON’T START YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY FOCUSED ON MAKING MONEY’

market between department stores that felt intimidating and online retailers that weren’t selling quality products or trying to engage with me. I’d also worked as a model, PR and journalist and saw the disconnect between what was used on shoots and what was presented on counters to achieve the looks. No one at the time was asking the industry experts what they really used and recommended. Jess, my co-founder, a management consultant, was reading a ‘best buys’ feature in a magazine and asked, ‘Why can’t I buy these all in one place?’ At that moment, we had the foundation of Cult Beauty. Seven years previously, I’d had a car accident and broke

my back. I had invested my £45,000 compensation, and put half of that into the business, keeping the rest for living expenses. We used Jess’s spare room as our office – our biggest expense was the website. I networked every night, asking people what they used and liked, while industry contacts, such as make-up artist Mary

Greenwell and hairdresser Charles Worthington, would email us with finds from their travels. One of the 20 brands we launched with was Escentric Molecules. Jess’s neighbour had smelt the fragrance on Naomi Campbell in a shop and asked her what it was! It hadn’t been launched yet, but we tracked it down via Companies House and asked if we could sell it. There was a seminal moment early on that helped me

to understand our business. The president of clothing company Free People was a customer and asked to meet us. Her first question was, ‘Why do you pretend to be bigger than you are?’ She then explained that people don’t want corporate, so we changed the way we spoke about everything on the website and made the connection with our customers the core of our business. Our passion shone through and the people who shopped with us forgave any mistakes that we made.

We romance our customers. The world has become dehumanised, and that includes most retailers. So, as an online business, you need to offer something different. Cult Beauty is a fun journey. Money indicates that you’re doing a good job, but I think it’s important not to start your entrepreneurial journey focused on making money – it colours your output. And besides, you probably won’t make any money for a while. It’s about what you build.

SUSIE MA, FOUNDER OF TROPIC SKINCARE

I was brought up on kitchen-made skincare in Australia. My mum, grandmother and I blended body scrubs using sea salt and oils, and moisturisers with shea butter. After my parents divorced, mum and I moved to England, but we struggled on her salary from the market stall she ran. To help pay the bills, I sold the scrub alongside her at

the market. She gave me £200 and I used it to buy 50 jam jars off ebay and raw ingredients. My first recipe was a blend of sea salt and macadamia oil cut with eucalyptus and lemon myrtle essential oils. It screams sunshine and home, so I called it Tropic. I printed labels at school and stuck them on with Pritt Stick.

People loved the idea it was freshly made. I’d ask, ‘Can I give you a hand scrub with this home-made product?’ and apply it with a tongue depressor I got from the GP’S surgery and rinse it with warm water. I think people felt sorry for me – I was 15 – but the scrub sold out on my first day, making £980. Today, we have more than 100 products in our range, which are freshly made every day.

I planned on becoming an investment banker. My goal was to buy mum a house. Throughout uni, I sold my products at markets and events, hiring friends and giving them commission on sales. By the time I got my job at Citigroup, I’d already bought the house and an investment property thanks to Tropic. I discovered I had no passion for investment banking! A friend sent me a link to The Apprentice auditions.

I didn’t win, but Lord Sugar invested £200,000 for half of my business anyway. The initial cash injection was great, because it allowed me to move to bigger premises, ramp up production and hire people for the first time. Now we meet once a month and he lets me get on with it.

Direct selling is an age-old industry. It made sense with Tropic because that’s what I’d done with friends in the markets and because if women like a product, they tell girlfriends, who buy it, too. Having a friend or family member share their experience is so much more appealing.

Lots of success stories start in the kitchen. It helps you appreciate profit margins. The early days were exhausting, but I loved it. What makes a real entrepreneur is that you don’t feel like you are working because you feel so passionately about what you are doing. Her passion for natural beauty was nurtured in childhood and, by the age of 15, Susie was selling kitchen-made body scrub in London’s Greenwich Market. That scrub is now a bestseller, Lord Sugar is her business partner and Tropic Skincare has helped 10,000 Tropic Ambassadors set up their own businesses via its social selling scheme.