More than 20 years ago, Trinny Woodall was famous for co-hosting her makeover TV series, What not to wear with her best friend, Susannah Constantine. Now the entrepreneur is at the helm of her own beauty brand, Trinny London, focused on making cosmetics easy to wear and accessible to everyone. We chat with Woodall about how her brand fills a gap in the beauty sector and connecting with customers through content. Even before the pandemic, the beauty sector was doing really well, but it’s al
also quite a crowded market. Why did you decide to launch a product in such a competitive market?
I think the biggest gap that Trinny London fills is the ability [to make] a woman to feel confident in choosing products that really suit her combination of skin, hair and eye [colour]. And you don’t really even get that at a counter unless you have an incredibly experienced makeup artist. A lot of the women who we want to become our customers are women who want quality products that feel really great on their skin, and are more than just makeup. As a brand, we are about offering the nicest textures and the best ingredients in our skin-based products and I felt there was a real gap for those kinds of crossover products as well.
Also the convenience of not carrying around a heavy makeup bag and the idea started with that — my makeup bag got heavier and heavier and I just wanted everything far more convenient for me to carry around.
During the pandemic, what really came out was the number of women who didn’t want to buy very much when they’re staying at home but they liked the idea of rethinking their makeup routine, working out what suited them, to have the time at home to play with makeup, and they came online to Trinny London.
Your customers buy your products online, but you’ve developed your Match 2 Me system to help people find the right product for them. Can you tell me about how it works and how you came up with the idea?
When we were developing Trinny London, we got 500 women in my bathroom, and we just tested all the products on them. We looked at their skin and hair and we were always thinking, ‘Does this suit them?’ And whenever we worked out what kind of suited them, we were looking at their skin, hair and eyes. For 10 years before that, I [worked with] many women and many makeup teams from many makeup brands. Many makeup artists didn’t necessarily treat each woman differently; they would put the red lip of the season on. So the idea was formed that it would be great to have a system where it would take your skin, hair, and eye [colour] and we put different attributes on each product, which enabled us to build an algorithm that can deliver back to you a curated selection of the colours that most suits you.
I can see that showing diversity at Trinny London is a real priority for the business and I love how you use normal, everyday women of different ages and backgrounds in the brand. Why is that diversity important for you?
Because no woman should ever feel excluded from something she falls in love with. We didn’t want any woman to feel she was excluded from us as a brand.
I can see that connecting with your customers through regular content is key for your business. Can you tell me about your content strategy and what it involves?
Our content strategy is divided between Trinny London on social media and my own feed on social media, and they have two slightly different points of view.
On Trinny London, it’s really important for us to show lots of women who people can identify with who are not in very touched-up pictures. We have a lot of videos on our feed, because the best way to show makeup is to show it in action on real women doing their own makeup. Many brands do beautiful makeup, but it’s often a makeup artist doing somebody’s makeup, and we don’t do that often. We generally have women doing their own makeup, and our own makeup artists doing their own makeup, because then you can identify more when you could do it yourself. And I think it’s really important in the age we live in that you empower women to feel that whatever they see on content, they can achieve at home.
On my [social media feed], it’s more about my relationship with everything. So when I put myself together, I’m always thinking, even when I choose an outfit, ‘What should my makeup be?’ And it’s introducing the idea that when you put on an outfit, it’s really important to integrate that makeup into your look. So my content will always come back to the makeup, even if I’m talking about a Zara shop. Even when I’m doing something like closet confessions, which is predominantly what’s in my wardrobe, and how I style clothes, I talk a lot about colour, and wearing colour, and I talk a lot about what makeup I should wear with those colours. So it gives inspiration to women when they’re looking at their outfit choices to also think about their makeup choices.
And another thing that we do is content for our Trinny Tribe, which is that core fan base group of our audience. We do special bits of content just on their Facebook pages, so they feel it’s content we’ve created just for them.
What are some of your plans for Trinny London in the APAC region in 2021?
Because Australia has closed borders, we unfortunately won’t be visiting this year, which is a great pity because my brother also lives there. But I’d like to feel in the next couple of years I’d be over again. One plan I would love to do when Australia has opened up is to somehow do a Trinny Tribe event and I can appear at that through a screen and just feel a part of that evening with them.