Brains Behind The Beauty

The success is also due to her intellectual property (IP)–how ideas are developed, tested, and organised. "We have a well-structured product development lifecycle, which is a bit of IP that I created for our business. And it puts the products and their innovations through a snakes and ladders-style process where we check off all the different tools needed to bring a product to market. Instead of going through a lot of red tape, we cut a lot of that by being able to make decisions quickly. So that's to do with safety, quality, whether anybody has [the product], the marketing and PR—we look at our product concept before we go any further, in all aspects, to see if it’s going to fit."

Her role as CEO within the company is two-fold. As well as running the company, she also keeps herself quite involved in a number of departments. "I’m very much involved in the research and development department, and I also work quite closely with retail and marketing.

"Running a modelling agency, you’re looking after so many people, you’re multi-tasking and wearing six different hats at once. You’re a salesperson, you’re negotiating, you’re marketing, and the qualities I was using day-to-day in that business were brought forward to what I’m doing now."

Thanks to her past life as a model agent, she is able to get close to modelling companies and makeup artists, to get the brand in front of them. She is also able to get honest feedback from a bevy of willing volunteers, and respects their criticisms and comments. Plus, the multitude of samples for some of the famous faces that have heaped praise on the various products is another big marketing tool.

As well as the organisational skills Barrett picked up while running her modelling agency, she was also able to take savings from that business to fund the startup of ModelCo. And as she proudly boasts, all growth has been organically funded by the business since then.

"All of the money globally that comes into the business is put back into research and development.

"We’ve grown to where we are because we have our point of difference and women look to us now for innovation. So when we go about creating a product, I think about where they fit within the product category, and then we think about what other cosmetics brands are doing, and we make sure we launch the right products at the right time and that we fit in with what’s going on in fashion.

"I’m a big believer in getting out there and giving things a try, because you can do all the university degrees and college courses but hitting the ground running and learning from your mistakes is the best learning of all."

Barrett admits she has made plenty of mistakes along the way, partly due to the fast growth. "We grew so quickly and it was all ‘sell, sell, sell’, and all this money was coming in the door but then it became about knowing how much to spend again. We didn’t make huge mistakes, but we could have done things a little bit better, smarter and quicker if we’d had better systems in place."

Now, with the business evolving over the last few years, Barrett gives more attention to getting the systems and procedures in place, complete with a five-year plan that she reviews on a regular basis. "We make sure we’ve got the right people in the right roles, that everyone’s got proper job descriptions with key performance indicators and everyone’s delivering on everything, which is the ultimate goal."

Though thoughts beyond the business are in the back of her mind, she does have a succession plan. "I think any smart businessperson always looks at the exit strategy, and when we painted our five-year-plan we came up with a few possible exit strategies. If you run your business efficiently and you’re not too attached emotionally to it, then you understand that a business is something you are ultimately going to leave, and you can start to build the ‘data room’. From the very beginning we’ve been very strong with our agreements, with our IP. In some ways we’re a very small company but we run it like a public company.

"I knew that people weren’t going to be just buying the products, they were going to be buying the brand behind it, so we’ve been very savvy when it comes to the intellectual property side of the business."