How Trinny Woodall built a £180m beauty empire

It’s a Thursday afternoon on King’s Road in Chelsea and Trinny Woodall is rubbing her fingers over my face, her eyes squeezed shut with concentration.
“Yep, your skin’s a combination,” she says, opening her icy, grey-blue eyes to scrutinise every one of my pores. “There’s some dryness but you’ve got congestion here too,” she adds, jabbing the two spots on my jawline with her index finger.
The 60-year-old TV presenter turned beauty mogul is giving me a personal tour of the first Trinny London store, which opened last week. Launching online in 2017, with make-up targeted at women over 35, followed by skincare in 2022, Woodall’s brand has become a quite remarkable success. It is valued at £180 million with a customer base of 1.2 million people around the world.
The new shop is flashy, shiny and overstimulating, not unlike Woodall herself. I struggle to keep up with her as she whizzes between staff wearing sequined silver jackets, helping women dabbing on blusher and concealer from tester pots while Disturbia by Rihanna pumps loudly from a speaker. “It’s like the decor in a f***ing hotel in Dubai or something, but I f***ing love it,” Woodall says, with her absorbing combination of bossiness, warmth and foul-mouthed humour.
The path to her current success hasn’t been straightforward. When she first dreamed up the business, Woodall was still reeling from the death of her ex-husband Johnny Elichaoff, who took his own life in 2014. The pair were divorced at the time but remained on good terms, sharing a daughter Lyla, now 20. Woodall’s TV career, including What Not To Wear, the BBC makeover show she presented alongside Susannah Constantine, had come to an end. It was a time of personal and financial strain.
“Once I stopped doing television, I couldn’t afford the life I had created,” Woodall says. “I wanted to start this business but I wasn’t getting the salary I’d been on.”
She began selling her clothes — a valuable collection after two decades of working in the fashion industry — amassing £60,000 to fund what would become her most successful venture. The toughest sacrifice though, was selling the four-bedroom “dream home” she shared with her daughter in Notting Hill, west London, reported to be worth almost £5 million.
“I worked hard for ten years on TV and saved up to buy that house, I put my all into it,” she says. “I spent months thinking, do I really have to sell it? I knew I wasn’t going to be able to repay the mortgage and I couldn’t start a business in heavy debt. The hardest thing was getting to the stage of making that decision.”
Eventually, she took the plunge and put the house on the market in November 2017 and the decision paid off. Trinny London predicts sales to grow 38 per cent year on year, and Woodall expects the flagship shop will recoup the costs of its opening within three months.
Last year, she split from her partner of a decade, the art collector Charles Saatchi, 81. She has remained tight-lipped about the break-up, referring to it as “the big life change” in an Instagram video.
A year later, she appears in good spirits. “This is the decade I’m enjoying the most,” she says. “My teens and twenties were shit, I was f***ed, I was a user,” she says, referring to an addiction to cocaine and pills that resulted in two stints in rehab in her twenties. “Outwardly I was pretending to be confident, but inside I was a shambles, I had butterflies churning in my stomach for 80 per cent of the day.”
A huge part of her brand’s success is Woodall’s down-to-earth, slap and dash approach of demonstrating the products in videos to her 1.4 million Instagram followers. In the shop, there are mothers and daughters, groups of middle-aged female friends and a few lost-looking men in suits. Even my hard-to-please 64-year-old mother, who shuns celebrity beauty brands and has bought the same Maybelline blusher for decades, is an avowed fan.
“Any woman aged 35 plus can, at some stage, feel overwhelmed and lost,” says Woodall. “I built what I thought was fitting a need for women who maybe felt they were being ignored.”
She spends six days a week working on her business and her approach is hands-on. She chats with customers, helping them to choose the right shade of lipstick or explaining what sort of cleanser they should be using. “I don’t have a work-life balance, because I don’t compartmentalise them,” she says. “If I go to check how the store is doing at the weekend, I enjoy it. If women come up to me, I enjoy it. It energises me.”
Trinny of course believes good skincare can work wonders, but she’s also open about its limitations — and her propensity for Botox. “I’m not going to say, ‘oh my goodness, I have no lines because I use a retinoid’,” she says. “I have no lines because I have a skincare routine and from 35, I’ve had Botox.”
As she approaches 61, has she thought about slowing down at all? “No, I think it’s crap, we shouldn’t behave like that,” she says. “Maybe I’ll think about it when I’m 80.”