How Trinny Woodall built a beauty empire: ‘Money ran out after a year and a half — I was at crisis point’

“Let’s do this,” she says, fully clothed and chowing down on breakfast through the screen.

No weather chat, no small talk, has her sights set on Cork: This is a woman after my own heart.

The 60-year-old beauty mogul earned her chops as the straight-talking half of the styling duo Trinny and Susannah (Constantine) on the Noughties TV makeover show What Not To Wear where the pair stayed at the helm for 5 seasons. They’re still friends.

“I love Susannah, we speak at least once a week.”

As a fashion stylist, Trinny was known to ruffle a frizzy-haired Eton matron like a lost puppy but as a makeup entrepreneur, she uses a softer approach.

It took time, however, and an amicable yet conscious uncoupling from the work wife to get her beauty business up and running.

“It wasn’t until 20 years later that I did it. We’d stopped being flavour of the month in England and we’d gotten gigs in a few different countries, Israel, Germany, Scandinavia,” Trinny says.

“We’d have a makeup team there from different brands [Inglot in Poland, MAC in America] and they would always put on the look of the season on whoever. It didn’t matter what you looked like, they’d still put it on, and it didn’t suit everyone.”

The idea to create a personalised beauty brand went on the back burner for two decades as the Notting Hill-based mother of one continued to work in fashion.

Tragedy hit in 2014 when Johnny Elichaoff, Trinny’s ex-husband and 11-year-old daughter Lyla’s father, died by suicide. That became the catalyst for change.

“It’s always the hardest time in your life when you take the biggest risk. Susannah and I had come to the end of working together and I just thought; ‘This is the time to do it’.”

Now, the sole breadwinner, Trinny knew she had to reevaluate her income stream.

“I wasn’t earning any money. I’d just bought a big house. I had a huge mortgage that I couldn’t afford to pay.”

Friends and family suggested looking for a job. Well-meaning advice but where would she even start?

“I was thinking yeah but what fucking job could I get? I hadn’t had a proper job job for about 20 years.”

Trinny had to get creative, and she had to learn how to let go.

What made me realise how much I wanted to do it was how much I was willing to give up to do it.

The decision to do it, however, was “freeing”. With no formal education behind her, she knew she needed the proper investment to propel this business into the mainstream.

“I got really bad A-levels. I didn’t go to university. It’s amazing what you can do if you have a passion for it. I had not done a business plan before.”

HER OWN PATH

Rather than worry about her future as a single parent, she saw it as an opportunity to make her daughter Lyla proud and carve out her own path.

“I feel that if you’re happy in yourself, you will bring up a happier child. It’s a weirdly altruistic thing. When I’m going through a tough time, my daughter picks up on it. If I’m in a good place, it reverberates on her.”

That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult but she had help. Jenny was Lyla’s nanny and still is, Trinny says — despite Lyla being 20.

“My mother had Alzheimer’s so Jenny was like her grandmother. We were this unit so when Lyla’s dad died, she still had the love of two adults.”

With her daughter’s future in mind and in typical Trinny style, she kept approaching potential investors until she got a yes.

“A friend of mine at the school gate was going to invest £100,000 into this beer company but she said; ‘I want to put it in yours.’ Then Lyla’s godfather invested £50,000.”

With the initial funds raised, she set about creating prototypes.

“I started product development and I had two people who worked with me. The money ran out after a year-and-a-half and I was at crisis point.”

“I knew I was going to rent out the house at this stage and not live there anymore. I had to let go. I let go of the house of my dreams. Lyla walks past sometimes and says: ‘One day, we’ll buy it back.’”

With 25 years of working in fashion behind her, Trinny mined her resources and came upon a brainwave — her clothes were worth thousands.

“I did it through something called Emily’s List. I just didn’t give a fuck anymore. I had probably 1000 people around at my house — everyone knew where I lived anyway. I had four friends and my sister help me. That funded us for another six months.”

NO HOLDS BARRED

At the crux of Trinny London’s marketing strategy is her personal brand of “no holds barred, no bullshit” approach. 

Expect theatrics, props, and staring-down-the-barrel-of-the-camera addresses. With over 1.3m followers on her personal account and 536k on the brand account, she’s serving that content to a huge audience.

“It’s all about trust. I’m always thinking ‘how can we help people to trust us?’.

“We have lots of different ages of women [in our ads]. We don’t touch up our imagery, we have women who are not all professional models.”

Looking through her Instagram, there is a diverse range of skin tones represented and that representation is really important to her, she says, as is seeing women above the age of 35.

“I wanted people to see themselves more. There had been so many years of us being used to seeing pictures and images of people that weren’t totally like us and we were buying makeup and skin care with 20-year-olds in the advertising.”

Trinny’s social media videos still have a raw, unrehearsed feel — that’s deliberate.

“At the beginning, we had some very bad photographs. We’re spending the next six weeks reshooting everything. It’s a really big deal for us to do this but I want to make sure every single picture is not retouched and every video is as is. Looking at before and after shots, you can really see the difference.”

Trinny refers me to one of her promotional photos of a woman’s neck before and after the product. The results are gaspworthy.

“The women you use in your ads must have had work done though, no? Botox? Filler?” I ask.

“For our skincare, we generally try it on people who have not had work done,” Trinny says. “I think it’s very important that you need to know that their skin is just skin.”

“The woman’s neck was very bad. I was really hesitant to use [the photo] but then my lead editorial said to me; ‘Trinny, I love that before and after because if it does that for her, what’s it gonna do for me in my mid 30s?’

Trinny herself has never denied having tweakments, and it is one criticism that’s repeatedly brought against her.

“I started having Botox when I was 35 but skincare is different. It’s about feeding your skin — like how you look after a really good night’s sleep.”

Tweakments aside, Trinny’s social media videos still have a raw, unrehearsed feel — practically the antithesis to some of the contrived and curated Instagram content we see from her contemporaries.

It’s clearly something that’s working for consumers.

“We have a quite strong word-of-mouth element. People who are fans want to tell their friends. If we weren’t in a business with social media, it might take you 10 years to get to over 1m customers but it hasn’t because we have Facebook.”

Soon to launch at the Brown Thomas Cork store, it feels like she’s expanding her family, she says.

“We’re like a big Irish family. There is that feeling in it. I love the fact that there are Irish voices when I’m going into Ireland. We have John Corcoran who is our chief makeup artist, he’s been teaching me Irish slang.”

That family vibe extends beyond her staff and women who follow Trinny have their own community, namely the Trinny Tribe.

“It was started in England by a woman called Kelly. These communities on Facebook and Instagram started popping up. They tend to be women in the process of a lovely evolution so they might be posting a picture of themselves for the first time. We gave them a logo.”

We’re ready to say goodbye but not without learning some Cork lingo. I can now proudly say that Trinny Woodall has called me a “langer”, in the most endearing way possible.

• Trinny London launches in Brown Thomas Cork on Tuesday, July 30