e new vertical already accounting for 30 per cent of its annual revenue, said to be in excess of £50 million ($89 million). And that’s only the beginning.  Woodall told Inside Retail that she ultimately plans for the business to have five verticals, and that she can achieve this without raising any additional capital externally.  “We could do it without fundraising because we have positive EBITDA, but it’s about how quickly you want to grow,” the chief executive said.  So far, Trinny London has raised £7.5 million ($13.5 million), a fraction of the amount that many other direct-to-consumer businesses have raised to achieve a similar annual revenue. Woodall is candid about the knockbacks she received when she was initially pitching investors on her idea.  “Maybe it’s a boys’ market, and they just don’t understand girls’ things,” she theorised.  But that may have been a blessing in disguise, since it forced the business to be creative with its advertising spend – the brand’s first television campaign in the UK cost £10,000 ($18,000) to make and ran on secondary channels – and resulted in an uncharacteristically low churn rate for an online retailer.  “I think companies that scale very quickly, especially online, spend a lot of money acquiring customers, and then they have to suddenly switch and pivot to how they retain them, and that churn of the customer can be quite high,” Woodall said.  “We did it the other way around. We had that retention of the customer, then we started doing ads, so we have a churn that is quite low compared to a younger brand that is always looking for that next, younger customer.” Personalisation is key Having spent nearly 20 years advising women on how to dress for their body shape as the co-host of the BBC series, What Not to Wear, Woodall is a firm believer in personalised product recommendations, and she has placed this principle at the heart of the Trinny London brand.  Online shoppers are invited to fill out a short questionnaire about their hair and eye colour and skin tone, and they are matched with the makeup shades that will suit them best.  Woodall sees this as an improvement over the traditional beauty counter in a department store, where a customer might encounter hundreds of different red lipsticks, and struggle to choose the “right” one.  “There’s that person on the other side of the counter, and they might be older than you, they might be younger than you, they might wear a lot of makeup, they might hardly wear any makeup, so there’s this difficulty,” she said.  Social media has also helped in this regard, enabling the brand to showcase “real women”, rather than models, of all different ages and skin tones, using its products without any filters or PhotoShop. It’s a stark departure from the way many mainstream beauty brands are marketed.  “It’s difficult for women in their late 30s and 40s and 50s to see people their own age putting on makeup because [there’s a sense] that it’s not aspirational. But we’ve gone down a path where [we believe] reality is important because there’s so much filtering in life going on,” Woodall said.  “When we show women putting makeup on, the lighting isn’t always perfect, and it’s that imperfection, which is important to then translate to how we promote the brand and how we do ads.”   It’s not surprising that customers have responded positively to this approach, given how important values like authenticity and inclusivity are in today’s market. More than 71,000 people have joined the brand’s community group, known as the Trinny Tribe, which is run through local chapters around the world.  Scaling the business Shipping to more than 200 countries worldwide, Trinny London has recently started to launch localised e-commerce sites in some of its key overseas markets to improve the customer experience.  So far, it has rolled them out in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and Sweden, and now, it’s looking to localise distribution. It has already done so in Australia, its second biggest market after the UK, and next up is the US.  “We just did localised warehousing, building a backend ERP system, so our stock talks to each other. That was a big deal for us to do,” Woodall said. “You need to understand data to have successful always-in-stock moments.” Eventually, she would like to localise Trinny London’s manufacturing to reduce the lead-time required to ship products to warehouses in different parts of the world.  And after five years of rapid growth online, she is also turning her attention to bricks-and-mortar retail. While the brand has experimented with pop-ups and department store concessions since 2018, things are starting to ramp up.  In June, Trinny London launched in Saks in New York City and Harvey Nichols in London, and in September, it opened kiosks in Westfield Bondi Junction in Sydney and Westfield Doncaster in Melbourne.  “We’ve had an unbelievable response to these two stores,” Woodall said. “We will probably make them permanent. In six months, I’ll take a view.”  One day, she expects physical retail to represent about 20 per cent of the brand’s revenue. It currently represents about 10 per cent of its revenue. But it’s not simply a case of taking Trinny London into the likes of Sephora or Mecca.  “At the moment, it doesn’t appeal to me,” she said. “It gives you tremendous scale. It could add £20-30 million ($36-54 million) immediately to your annual revenue, but you risk getting lost in the noise.”  Woodall believes that scaling a brand from £50-100 million ($89-180 million) is much harder than scaling a brand from £0-50 million.  “To get to over £100 million is where you really know how to build a business or not. We have to very carefully think strategically about how we’re going to do that,” she said. For now, she is firmly focused on building Trinny London’s credibility with customers and growing its global fan base.