It’s two months since Áine Kennedy was named The Irish Times Future Leader 2026, an accolade she adds to a shelf’s worth that also includes Image PwC Businesswoman of the Year, EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year, as well as several others. Her beauty and haircare brand, The Smooth Company, has grown from strength to strength, recently expanding to department stores in the Netherlands.
Yet amid all of this, she still finds the time to make sure every customer of The Smooth Company receives a handwritten note thanking them for their purchase.
“I never want to get rid of that personal aspect,” Kennedy says. “They’ve tried to convince us to get it typed or get it printed and I’m like ‘no’.”
Kennedy’s story of launching her company in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic is one of resounding success, told many times but still worth repeating.
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Having always had an ambition to climb the corporate ladder and create something of her own, the pandemic presented a unique opportunity for Kennedy, unhappy in her job, to make the leap she had always had in the back of her mind.
“I had two other business ideas before that I never went ahead with, and I always regretted it,” she says. “I always said to myself, if you have another business idea, you need to go for it.”
Armed with €10,000 she had set aside for a deposit on a house and with no marketing resources other than her own social media presence, Kennedy launched The Smooth Company in 2022 with its flagship product The Smooth Stick. She says the inspiration came from seeing girls on social media “dipping their toothbrush into gel” to slick their hair back and thinking there must be an easier way.
While she says the early days of packing orders with her grandad Billy were terrifying, she had confidence in her product.
“I spent so long trying to perfect every single thing ... the formula, the packaging ... absolutely everything,” Kennedy says. “The website, I built that myself,” she adds proudly. She even paid a lot of attention to getting the wording right on her confirmation emails, “trying to perfect every single detail”.
One hundred and fifty million TikTok views later, The Smooth Company’s products are sold across 92 countries worldwide. However, when Forbes 30 under 30 came knocking at Kennedy’s door at the start of the year, she dismissed their email as a scam and almost didn’t apply.
“The Forbes thing had been on my vision board for the last two years and I never knew how you got on the Forbes list or anything like that. That was always my dream. Basically, I got an email, saying that I had been nominated for Forbes 30 under 30, with a link to apply,” Kennedy recalls, laughing.
“I said to my sister, ‘it’s definitely a scam’. You have to be so careful of the links you click.”
Luckily, her sister convinced her to apply, and a few months later, while holidaying in Vietnam, Kennedy found out she had been featured on the prestigious list.
“Rebekah, our marketing manager, sent the article into our work group chat that [said] I was on the list,” she says. “I hadn’t got any emails. I hadn’t got a phone call.”
Her first reaction was disbelief: “Are you sure this is me?”
Finally, official confirmation came.
“An hour or two later, I got an email from Forbes, congratulating me on getting on the list. It was so surreal.”
While the highs have certainly been high for The Smooth Company, Kennedy admits the firm has not been immune to the cost increases that have affected businesses across Ireland over the past few months.
“It’s something that we’re trying to manage as we grow. And obviously as we’re scaling we have to take on more costs as we hire more people,” she says. “We have to buy more stock as we expand internationally. On top of all the rising costs, it’s tough”.
Kennedy draws attention to the knock-on impact of geopolitical events on the day-to-day costs of running a business and all of its “moving parts”.
“I’m always, ‘right, how do we absorb this cost ourselves?’ Because if you put it on to the customer, then all of a sudden your shipping [charges are] too high. Then you’re going to lose so much because customers don’t want to pay that shipping.
“I don’t think people realise how much one thing can have such a domino effect on the business as a whole.”
But she is positive about what she calls the “incredible entrepreneurial ecosystem” in Ireland, and knows how generous people can be with their advice. She reflects on her experience in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2025.
“Having that EY network for me has just been invaluable,” says Kennedy, sharing an anecdote of how she still takes the supplements from one of the companies nominated alongside her that year.
“Being surrounded by people who’ve been there, done that, and who are years ahead of where I am in the business – to be able to learn from them is so helpful.”
This generosity with time is something which Kennedy says she aims to inject into her own “laissez-faire” leadership style.
“Half the team here are working mums, so I let them drop the kids to school, then come into work or work around when they have to do drop-offs or child-minding,” she says. “I think I get back so much from them because I trust them.”
She is conscious of the challenges facing bricks and mortar businesses in Ireland, but she says she doesn’t think physical retail is “dying”.
“I think you can’t beat an in-store experience or community experience; you’re meeting people first hand,” she says, adding she completely relates to sometimes just wanting “to go into the store and actually try the clothes on”.
As for the future plans of the business, Kennedy says she cannot reveal too much but emphasises that it is focused on international expansion and that “2027 is definitely going to be our biggest year yet”.
“Behind the scenes, we’re working on so many incredible new products”, she says, tantalisingly mentioning one is something customers have been asking for “since the start of the company launching”.
She also mentions that the business recorded growth of around 51 per cent from 2024 to 2025, although she says she is less focused on the numbers than on the quantity of customers returning after their initial purchase, which is also up this year.
While there is no question of The Smooth Company slowing down, Kennedy is proud to say that since getting their own office – affectionately called the “Smooth Dream House” by the team – she has noticed a change for the better in her own work-life balance.
“When you’re working from home and running a business,” she reflects, “there’s no separation. With the office, we can come in, we can work together. For me, as a business owner, I can schedule my day so much easier now. We can have meetings face to face, get stuff done really quickly, and then at 5.30, I can go home [or] go to the gym.”
Such a balance mentality is something Kennedy is keen to extend to customers of The Smooth Company, which is precisely what the business’s social club did on Bray beach during an early-morning yoga session last month.
“It was so nice to get out with our customers, meet them face to face and feel good for the day. It was just such a nice morning. And getting out there and moving your body and meeting people is the best.”
