Standing tall in the beauty industry

Working with some of the biggest names in the trade helped hone her branding skills and now Michelle Feeney is one of the most powerful women in the beauty business, writes SUZANNE LYNCH

MICHELLE FEENEY is not a fake tan kind of woman. Glamorous, but understated, the head of St Tropez self-tan as chief executive of PZ Cussons Beauty is the essence of the English rose when we meet in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.

“I feel at home here,” smiles the person widely regarded as one of the most powerful women in the global beauty industry, as she looks out on the sunny Dublin street. Though born and raised in Birmingham, her parents were part of the wave of Irish emigrants who settled in England in the 1950s. Her upbringing was “hugely Irish-influenced” she said. “I did Irish dancing, played the accordion ... you know, all those kinds of things.”

Feeney’s Irish roots may not be the only thing that explains her affinity with Dublin. As even a passing glance onto the street reveals, Ireland has something of a love affair with fake tan. While the product may have lost something of its bronzed sheen, due to a combination of shifting beauty trends and dampened consumer spending, Irish consumers are still proportionately one of the world’s biggest purchasers of fake tan – though Ireland was recently eclipsed by the US as the number two purchaser of the product.

St Tropez is still the undisputed queen of the self-tanning product, its history providing an interesting insight into the business of beauty and branding. Its roots can be traced to Los Angeles, where Robyn and Tim Gibson developed St Tropez spray tan, its name a nod to the kind of aspirational jet-setting lifestyle epitomised by the exclusive French resort.

In 1994 the Gibsons struck a deal with entrepreneurs Judy Naaké and Norman Oley to distribute the product to salons and spas in the UK. Over the next decade, it became the market leader as the health dangers of tanning emerged and the self-tan category expanded.

It also received a boost from association with celebrities such as Victoria Beckham.

In March 2006 private equity firm LDC, a brand of Lloyds’ Banking Group, bought the business for £70 million, selling it four years later to PZ Cussons, the owner of Imperial Leather soap and Carex handwash for £62.5 million. There, it joined Sanctuary and Charles Worthington in the company’s portfolio of beauty products.

Feeney’s link with the company dates from 2007 when LDC brought her on board, charged with rejuvenating the brand.

“I had never had a self-tan in my life. I’d missed that decade when it had become really big in England. So I decided to go into Debenhams on Oxford Street and have a self- tan. I came out and I looked in the mirror, and I thought this was absolutely phenomenal.”

LDC’s decision to court Feeney – they approached her at least once before she decided to take the job – was unsurprising. By 2007, Feeney had made a name for herself as one of the most successful executives in the beauty industry.

Her career is one built on hard work and talent rather than connections or privilege. After finishing school, she attended a polytechnic in Newcastle.

“I wasn’t particularly academic,” she says, in her typically candid way. Unsure about what she wanted to do with her life, and with a vague interest in journalism, she followed some friends down to London.

“They were saying to me, come down to London. We think you’d be really good at this thing called PR. It was the 1980s so I decided to go for it, sleep on people’s floors and see how it went.”

Her first job was an unpaid position with a fashion PR company through which she met haircare guru Trevor Sorbie. She went to work in-house with him, helping to expand the Trevor Sorbie brand.

“We were the first professional haircare line to go into Boots – if you can imagine a time when Boots had only one professional haircare line. It was the first time I got interested in the commerce of beauty, how you make money out of beauty and fashion.”

A stint with PR legend Lynne Franks – believed to be the inspiration for Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders’s Absolutely Fabulous satire on the fashion and PR world of 1980s London – followed. Feeney helped to grow her beauty business, and then upped sticks and headed to New York, with her then boyfriend, who was a record producer.

It was here, over more than a decade, that Feeney’s career really took off. With no set job, and doing some writing for English magazines, she began taking on her own clients, working for Michael Gordon’s Bumble and Bumble, a Manhattan salon which developed a cult haircare product. She also worked for musician Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols manager.

“At this point I’d just had a baby and split up from my partner, and I was looking for a change in direction,” she says. She was contacted by Estée Lauder, and was hired to head up the Prescriptives brand.

It was the start of a relationship over more than a decade with one of the world’s biggest beauty companies. “I had 10 interviews before they hired me, including with Leonard Lauder. Yes, they were very thorough. Don’t forget this was before it was a listed company.” (Lauder went public in 1995.)

“Suddenly I was on the 42nd floor of the General Motors building, with a view of Central Park. It was the real start of so much of my professional career and my learning about product development.”

With Lauder, Feeney honed her skill as a branding master as she took control of the company’s most famous brands. One of her first big projects was the launch of a Tommy Hilfiger fragrance, one of the first ever celebrity perfumes. Feeney worked directly with Hilfiger himself.

“Tommy himself was amazing. One of his key strengths was his ability to take his brands and penetrate lots of different cultures in America – black America, urban America, southern America. And this was all pre-internet. I call it the Tommy Hilfiger effect. He was also good at accessing people, so I learned how important distribution channels are. For example, he was in Macy’s, which was much more blue-collar than the more premium places perhaps we’d been before in Lauder.”

But unarguably her biggest career coup, in the eyes of those in the industry, was as the branding brains behind Crème de la Mer, still one of the world’s most exclusive and expensive skincare products. Lauder bought the low-key cream, which had been invented by a Nasa scientist in the 1960s, in 2004. “I was literally given this pot of cream and asked, will you do something with it, and it was Crème de la Mer.”

Feeney launched it at $150 – at the time a phenomenal price for a pot of moisturiser. “It completely changed the pricing point of cosmetics,” she says. Price tags of up to $1,500 were to follow.

Key to succeeding with the pricing point was distribution, she says. “Again I’d learned the importance of distribution channels from Tommy Hilfiger. In terms of pitching it, we decided to launch it in only a few places, places you wouldn’t normally know about.

“So we advertised in Town Country, and launched in stores in places like Dallas, places with huge wealth.”

The cream took off, with Feeney launching a range of ancillary products. She also worked on the MAC portfolio. Following Estée Lauder’s acquisition of the Toronto-based make-up brand in 1998 (it had held a majority equity interest in 1994) she was part of the senior management team which integrated the company into Lauder and launched MAC into 40 new countries, building it from a $65 million to a $1 billion brand.

According to Feeney, the success of MAC, the make-up artists’ make-up which famously did not invest in advertising in its early days, was down to branding. “There was no advertising as such, just cult branding. Taking one product and knowing where to hit it, what touchstones to reach to build the brand.”

Feeney also played a central role in MAC’s work for Aids charity. “They made $100,000 through the sale of a lipstick called Viva Glam and all the money went to Aids. I convinced Lauder we should keep this charity.”

Feeney signed up celebrities such as Mary J Blige and Elton John in support of the MAC AIDS Fund, and personally liaised with the UN. She still cites her involvement with the charity as the highlight of her career.

By the mid-2000s, she had moved back to London, from where she launched MAC into markets such as India and China. “Then, at 41 I had my second child, and took a step back from things.”

In late 2006, LCD approached Feeney to head up St Tropez. “It was an interesting time for the category. St Tropez had a great reputation as a product and a brand, but the whole tanning scene had become associated with the WAG culture. It was a change for me. I’d come from premium beauty.”

The challenge of working for a private equity company also attracted her.

“At the time the brand was not doing very well and they’d paid a lot, too much money for it. Like lots of private equity ventures, it had too much debt, and people tend to put it in the hands of a business person, or their mate who’s been a chairman of such and such a company. They don’t give it to an expert to run. The US part of the business was losing money. It was £1.5 million in the red. It needed consolidation.”

“I think I scared them,” she smiles. “Mainly because they knew I didn’t need a job. I just wanted a challenge.”

Feeney set her sights on targeting the US market that she knew well. She was also instrumental in rebranding St Tropez through new packaging, emphasising its “natural” attributes, and adding a number of new products to the range.

With the acquisition by PZ Cussons she stayed on, taking charge of Sanctuary and Charles Worthington, after PZ Cussons Beauty split into a separate division of the company.

In January, the company acquired Australian hair brand Fudge, a measure of its plans for Feeney’s beauty division.

Having linked celebrities with St Tropez in advertising campaigns, Feeney is adopting a similar approach with the Sanctuary line and plans to bring the products to market in Ireland.

She has just shot a campaign for Sanctuary with ballerina Darcey Bussell, neatly tapping into the brand’s origins. The first Sanctuary Spa was originally set up in London’s Covent Garden as a place for the female dancers at the Royal Opera House to relax.

Revamping Charles Worthington haircare is her next focus.

“The dynamics of haircare have changed very dramatically over the last 10 years, due to supermarkets and the commodisation of what we would have called professional haircare products. Previously ‘premium’ haircare products were available for a few pounds at the local supermarket. So we’ve got to be better and different.”

Feeney believes the decision to establish PZ Cussons Beauty as a separate division works. “It offsets for shareholders some of the uncertainty you get dealing in Nigeria or Indonesia for example.”

The multi-faced listed company, which counts a joint operation with Glanbia in Nigeria as one of its many interests, has seen its performance in recent months impacted by social unrest in Nigeria, its biggest single market.

She is also enjoying the challenge of working once again for a listed company. “My task is to add enough profitability to get us to FTSE 100. If we can make a significant contribution to the overall company in this regard, then I’ve achieved my goal.”

FRIDAY INTERVIEW

Name: Michelle Feeney

Age: 48

Title: Chief executive of PZ Cussons Beauty

Lives: London with her husband and two children.

Best beauty tip: "It depends on your age. I think if you're that bit older, a great haircut is essential. Good high-performing skincare is also a must. Things perform well for you at different ages."

Something that won't surprise you:She calls celebrities like Tommy Hilfiger and Leonard Lauder by their first name.

Something that might surprise you: Though born in England she isn't wedded to a particular country, which she puts down to strong Irish influences growing up. "It makes you open to different perspectives, a different way of thinking. The way I see it, I've a global career, and I'm a global career woman. I just happen to live in London right now."