Dec 23, 2020
Career As An Elite Fashion Advisor and New York
Bestseller Author
Welcome to another episode of
Action & Ambition with your host, Phillip Lanos.
Trinny Woodall, founder and CEO
of the disruptive beauty brand Trinny London has had a successful
twenty-year career in the media. She established herself as a
fashion advisor, initially as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph,
and later as a co-host for What Not to Wear and The Trinny and
Susannah makeover shows, filmed across 20 countries. Trinny has
spent her career helping people find their most flattering styles,
the best skincare, and perfectly matched, foolproof makeup. In
2017, equipped with her unique idea of portable stackable premium
makeup, she founded the highly successful beauty brand Trinny
London.
You’re going to love this
episode. Let’s get to it!
What can someone do to draft a potential workshop or
webpage of what they could be? How do they set themselves apart
from the rest? (3:12)
- For
Trinny, it is easy to think back retrospectively and think what the
consistent thing that always brought her joy was. Looking back now,
she knows that when she was much younger, she went to boarding
school.
- She
stayed at boarding school a lot of the weekends with a few of the
other girls, so she had a kind of connection to them, and she loved
giving her friends makeovers. She loved the feeling of
it.
- She
lived in Germany at the time, and her boarding school was in
France. She would bring back slightly unusual clothing that wasn’t
in England then, and she liked doing that. As a child, she found it
hard to form friendships, and this was the language she had learned
that allowed her to make somebody else think.
- Trinny is happy to see training because she had
thought a lot about the imposter syndrome where you feel there is
an element you don’t believe you are good enough in. She has been
through that personally where she did not think she was good enough
in terms of addiction and recovery.
- She
has been through that whole journey. When she was much younger,
before starting that war and certainty manifested in partying too
much, she did have a sort of joy she felt while giving her friends
makeovers.
- Trinny is the youngest of six kids. Her father
was a banker, and there was a part of her that thought she should
be in finance, but she was not smart enough to go to college. She
had had a dream of going to Harvard, but her imposter syndrome had
kicked in and made her believe she was not good enough to even go
to university. And so Trinny became entrepreneurial. She started
her first business in high school.
How does Trinny manage her time? (9:15)
- It
did not happen overnight for Trinny. At the very beginning, she
went from doing a whole bunch of mixed jobs to burning out. In 2016
she realized what she wanted to do was help women, so by a lucky
break, she got a column in a paper similar to the New York Times,
and she did that for seven years.
- That
position gave her access to about 2 million people who choose to
read her column, so it was a platform. She found a platform similar
to today’s social media following platforms. She built up her
audience.
- She
achieved a fantastic career. She sold 3 million books from the 11
that she wrote, and she even had an interview about one of her
books on the Oprah Show, where it went on to become a New York
Bestseller.
- She
had an incredible ten years of significant growth and success. She
then scaled out, and she got overheads, and there was no apathy in
the market she was in, and lots of people started to pop up who was
doing the same thing she was, so she was forced to reinvent herself
and expand what she was doing.
- Thinking back on the last 15 years and what she
had been doing, Trinn y felt a pull towards business. She tried to
do online business in 1999, and she raised $7 million in three
months from Whitney and Atlanta’s ventures that gave her an early B
fund.
- She
went to the market with the concept, which was partial to women to
get personalization, but it was not for a path of profit. There was
no way that Trinny could commercialize that. It always went back to
the high street or shopping mall, so it felt like it would never
work.
- Trinny had amassed by that time information on
200,000 women, which was an unbelievable data capture for that
time, and she always had a sense of personalization. When Trinny
did makeup shows, all the women would notice the makeup first, and
Trinny loved makeup, but she had never been a professional makeup
artist. She decided to give it a try.
What is next for Trinny? (30:14)
- Trinny is moving into the American market. At
least 10% of their customers are in the US, while 59% are in the UK
and about 17% in Australia, and the rest are scattered across the
world.
- She
would like to get her US market up to 25%, so that is her goal that
is coming up. They have about seven to eight months to complete it,
and they have bought a PR company onboard that thinks differently
to help them achieve this goal.
- Trinny wants to gently transition into using
Facebook ads and other means of advertisement, and she believes
there is an art to advertising like this. It needs to capture your
audience’s attention while being subtle enough to think it is
someone they are already following that caused them to receive the
ad.
- They
have used a lot of subtlety while building the brand, and she
states that 52% of it is organic, and 48% of it is paid. It is an
essential ratio to distinguish for Trinny. A few years ago, many
brands were doing the blitzkrieg method of growth, and they have
seen a few of these companies succeed.
- Trinny always felt something strange about that
way of growth because of its quick, sound development. You suddenly
have a massive amount of customers, and you don’t know where else
to go. You end up being a one-trick pony, and these companies do
not survive because they do not have adaptability in the long
run.
Trinny London
Trinny London is the ultimately comfortable, modern,
do-it-everywhere, premium beauty brand. Cream-based, versatile
products are personalized to you.
Resources
Connect with Trinny:
LinkedIn
Trinny London: Website
Connect with Phil:
LinkedIn