Trinny London has appointed a new executive, The Business of Beauty can confirm.
Michelle Marks, a former global director of digital brands at Charlotte Tilbury, quietly joined Trinny London in June as chief marketing officer, with a remit to refine storytelling efforts and increase awareness as the UK label expands into the US. Marks succeeds Shira Feuer, who departed Trinny London last year before joining Marcia Kilgore’s DTC brand Beauty Pie as CMO in February.
“[Marks] is in the head of our consumer, and she’s brand first. We’ve never actually had somebody who’s brand first,” founder and chief executive Trinny Woodall told The Business of Beauty.
In September, the brand will unveil a series of campaigns focused on its popular online personalisation tool, “Match2Me,” which assesses users’ skin types and devises custom beauty routines. The ads will feature women older than 30, its core age demographic, explaining the benefits of the service in a range of settings, said Woodall.
“She understood that we buy and make decisions based on emotive feelings, and it’s how you generate in a consumer base and in a follower base, the emotive connection,” Woodall added.
Marks joins the eight-year-old beauty startup at a new peak in its revenue. Sales jumped 25 percent year over year to $94 million in its fiscal 2024 that ended in March, buoyed by an ongoing retail expansion. The brand’s prestige makeup and skincare products, like its $52 matte-finish foundation or $92 peptide serum, are typically sold on its e-commerce site and at department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Fenwick. But last September, it opened a 1,216-square-foot flagship on London’s Kings Road and debuted a pop-up in New York’s SoHo neighborhood last November. Later in August, Trinny London will open a six-month pop-up in Boston; Massachusetts is one of the brand’s biggest markets in the US, following New York, Woodall said.
In April, Women’s Wear Daily reported that Trinny London had hired bankers to pursue funding options for its US expansion. But Woodall says the brand is not actively raising any money since it’s profitable on the basis of earnings before interests, taxes, depreciation and amortisation and can fund its own expansion — the forthcoming Boston pop-up, for example, only costs $45,000 to open, she said.
“We should stay in our own lane in terms of what we want to develop as products, where we think we’re heading and what our identity is,” Woodall said.
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