Trinny Woodall: How She Went From Drug Addict To Building A $300m Business Empire!

Age is bulls**t! From ‘What Not To Wear’ to a skincare and make-up empire, Trinny proves energy is everything. In this new episode, Steven sits down with fashion guru and CEO, Trinny Woodall. Trinny became a household name in 2001 as co-host for the makeover TV series ‘What Not To Wear’. This continued for 5 seasons and earned a Royal Television Society Award. In 2017, Trinny launched her direct-to-consumer beauty brand, Trinny London, this has been recognised as one of the fastest-growing brands in Europe. You can purchase Trinny's new book, 'Fearless' here: https://amzn.to/40ENwSn You can purchase all of Trinny London’s products here: https://bit.ly/3LhIc0G Follow Trinny: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3PtZ1rY Twitter: https://bit.ly/3PwB6YX YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RcvF2o Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I look at your skin and I'm going to come over now.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  Oh no.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Then I go round here.

• 0:05Steven Bartlett?

  Trinny Woodall. Beauty queen of the screen. Founder and CEO of Trinny London.

• 0:09Speaker 02

  From 10 to 134 employees in just three years. Have a great day.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  I went through phases in my early twenties of not knowing who I was and turning to drugs. I went to rehab.

• 0:20Steven Bartlett?

  I heard that you'd been kicked out the first time for playing a porn video.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it backfired. Rehab was a huge beginning of the change in my life and I went into a whole new world. Following a 20-year career in media.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Trinny took a left turn in the makeup industry.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Here we are, 250 million dollars later. Welcome to Trinny London.

• 0:38Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people have this stigma that you can't start a business at 53.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Crap, age is just a number, but you need energy, passion, perseverance. I sold my house hardly earning any money, but I thought I'm never going to give up. Ask yourself, how much do you want to be successful? What are you prepared to give up?

• 0:55Steven Bartlett?

  You strike me as someone that's incredibly driven. What's the cost?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Very big question, probably oddly.

• 1:02Steven Bartlett?

  You had a partner who was unwell.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the thing you think will never happen, happens.

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  He died by suicide.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Where do you get to in your brain when you are so worried about your children? That you can convince yourself that the best thing is that you're not in their life anymore?

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

  How does that change things in your life?

• 1:35Steven Bartlett?

  Trinny, you've got a very distinct personality.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41Steven Bartlett?

  And you know that, you're well aware of that, right?

• 1:45Speaker 00

  I know who I am.

• 1:48Steven Bartlett?

  But your personality is very, you're very straightforward.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54Steven Bartlett?

  And all of these sort of defining traits of your personality. And I'm wondering if that was when that personality was formed or when it started to emerge?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Things happen in your life that, that begin to, you know, fine tune and define who you're going to be. And I went definitely through phases, you know, I went through phases in my late teens, early twenties of, of turning to drugs just to not being happy with who I was, not, not feeling, not knowing who I was. Sometimes people turn to drugs because they just don't know who they are and they want to.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  You know, they have an inner lack of confidence and I definitely had an inner lack of confidence and outwardly, when I talked to people and I look back at the time, they might say, you just were this very mesmerizing person and I just remember that internal sense of feeling so lost, so profoundly lost. And so when I got clean at twenty six, twenty seven, that was a huge beginning of the change in my life. I was so relieved that my twenties were over, so relieved because it, you know, it was like, that was the beginning of that, that's, whoa, wash that away. And that was a big

• 3:08Speaker 00

  moment for me to begin to work out who I was. That was the first moment, probably.

• 3:14Steven Bartlett?

  You, you're using drugs at sixteen, I presume was quite a recreational thing?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:19Steven Bartlett?

  I think we all dabbled.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:21Steven Bartlett?

  At that age. When did it, when did you realise that it wasn't a recreational thing anymore and that it was an addiction?

• 3:28Speaker 00

  I think I was about twenty two and I felt my life didn't have direction and my, my family were very frustrated with me. They felt I'd changed. And like any family where they have a child who has addiction, they, they can, if they don't know, they just see change and they think, why is my child changing? You know? So I think they saw that and it was a relief to say, you know, I, I use drugs. And I remember my dad said, well, now you've told me, you can stop. And I remember my brother saying, I think

• 4:06Speaker 00

  it might be harder than that. So I went to rehab and I then left the rehab after a period of time and.

• 4:17Steven Bartlett?

  You left the rehab or you kicked out?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  No, I was kicked out of personal rehab, but I then went to meetings. And this one thing about recovery is that when you first get in recovery, you, you need to let go of your old friends who you've been with, who are using, and you're about to make new friends. So that moment is.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Loneliness can take you back to old habits. After about, I don't know, maybe six months, I missed my old friends and I hadn't made enough new ones. And I saw them and then, you know, I relapsed. And then I went back to meetings and then you're in this horrible little in-between place. When you know about recovery and you continue to use, it's not so, there's that something about an ignorance of recovery. You know, there's a kind of sense that you don't know there's another way. So you don't feel guilty every time you do. And so what it brings is it brings guilt every single time.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I had three really, really good friends and we were all using one night. And we, I said, let's all make a pact. We'll go to rehab tomorrow. And two of them had been and one of them had never been, but we made this pact.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Late night, you know, that thing, we're going to do this. We're going to conquer the world and we're going to go to rehab. So then the next morning I woke up and I still had that feeling, which is rare. So I called a therapist that I knew and I said, I need to go, but I have a window of opportunity which is so small. I need to go literally in the next two hours because I am scared of myself that I'll change my mind. So he got me in somewhere and stayed there for five months. And I sold what I had to pay for it. Some very tragic thing happens in that time and one of the people died and then.

• 6:18Steven Bartlett?

  One of the people that said they were going to go to rehab with you?

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then I went to a halfway house in Western Super Mayor for seven months, where you kind of live off eight to 10 pounds a week, which pays for your fags. And I worked at an old people's home. And then I came back to London, a very different person. And then in that following year, another one died. And then by the end of two years, they'd all died. So I think I always had this feeling, whatever I might do, you know, I might do many things again, but I will not take drugs again. And you do that in recovery, you do it a day at a time. And since that day, I have never taken a drug again.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  And that was that big, that's probably that biggest shift I had at that age, to really think, now I have this second chance. What do I actually want to do with my life? You know, what, not what I feel other people expect me to do.

• 7:20Steven Bartlett?

  If I was a flower on the wall in your life, at your, when the addiction had you the most, what would I have seen?

• 7:27Speaker 00

  You wouldn't have seen anything that I was feeling inside. Cause that's what I was very good at. So outwardly, you would kind of think, you know, I worked in the city. I was trading commodities. I was, I held down a job, you know? You would see this person who seemed to be running around, doing a lot of stuff. You would see that. Yeah. So mine wasn't jacking up in the streets, not being able to function on a daily basis. But it was one where appearances were so important compared to, you know? So that matching your inside to your outside is probably my biggest journey.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  You know, of how can I, what I feel inside is how I share with you now. And, you know, I am 59 and that's where I've got to. I have a lot more to do, but I, it took me a journey to get to a place where I feel very comfortable in that feeling and in that belief.

• 8:32Steven Bartlett?

  Matching the inside with the outside. So the outside, I would have seen someone who was very busy and apparently, you know, professionally successful in the city.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Not feeling it, but sort of acting it. You know that, I mean, my God, we know that one. Fake the CV, act it, you know, be kind of, big up the job that was actually smaller than it was. All of that shit.

• 8:51Steven Bartlett?

  And then on the inside?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Feeling, feeling.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  You know, I hate to say the word because I hate, I hate labels. Impostor syndrome is the worst. Can I just say it's the worst label? It's the worst label ever because it, what it denotes is that you are an impostor. For how it's used for now. So to me, impostor syndrome is more that you haven't yet learned enough. And if you learn something, you won't feel so much of an impostor. This is what impostor syndrome is. What I'm referring to. It's that feeling where you are so different on the inside from what you project on the outside. That you are an impostor inside your own body. And that to me is what I think impostor syndrome is.

• 9:38Steven Bartlett?

  What's the, what's the cost of, of that?

• 9:41Speaker 00

  That at some stage, you can't keep doing it and you have, something has to give.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  And something always has to give and, and it's whether you, it's which path you're going to take. You know?

• 9:54Steven Bartlett?

  Because there'll be a lot of people listening now that are in a job or a situation where they, they have that feeling, that niggling feeling that they're in the wrong place.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:03Steven Bartlett?

  They might be held there by social groups or expectation from their parents or whatever it might be. But something's holding them there.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:11Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe fear of uncertainty.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  I would say if somebody is listening to this and they're thinking, do I have little bits? Just ask yourself, you know, do you love what you do? The job you're in, if we're talking about work, do you love what you do? Do you like this environment of where you work? Do you feel people make a better contribution than you? You know? Is that's what's making you feel insecure? If so, what do you feel when people have meetings that you don't know? Go and fucking learn it. Go and learn it. Go and listen to podcasts. Go and read some books. Just learn it because knowledge is, is powerful. And when you have knowledge and you walk in a room, you automatically think I have so much more to contribute.

• 10:55Steven Bartlett?

  If, if I answer one of those, I challenge myself and I go, I don't like where I'm working and I don't like it.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:00Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm, you know, a commodities trader in the city, for example, and I just, I hate it.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Leave it, but have a plan, but leave it like if you hate what you do. We spent sixteen hours a day between commuting or if you're in a higher position, thinking about the company, working, we spend much more of a day working than sleeping. So you've got to love it, you've got to love it. You know, I was like in my early twenties, I was one woman, sixty four men on a trading floor and I hated it and I dressed in men's clothing and I went to Rossetti and got the men's shoes and I got the tailor to make me a suit. All the men would drop their trousers in the, on the trading floor, but I'd go in the ladies' room and get, you know, I'd pretend to have a deep voice. So I was on the phone selling Anglo American funds. So my clients thought I was a man. I mean, you know, I did all this stuff.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  I hated so much Stephen and I would go, I would take the tube to Tower Hill. We were at the World Trade Center in London. I'd have the Financial Times on the outside and the Daily Mail on the inside. That was my full extent of who I was.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  And, you know, I loved it.

• 12:08Steven Bartlett?

  Were you an attention seeker more generally in life? Cause when I heard that you'd been kicked out of rehab the first time for playing a porn video.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:16Steven Bartlett?

  I thought.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  That, that was, that was a, a funny one, but not funny in the end.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  It was a terrible rehab. I was with somebody.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  To last night in New York and we were going to this funeral of this friend of mine who was like forty three years sober. And I discovered I'd been to the same place with her and.

• 12:46Steven Bartlett?

  Rehab, same rehab.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, but at different times. And she just said, you know, it was the most fundamentally shaming place ever. You know, rehab now are very different, but it was a very, very shaming place. And it would be closed down now. It wasn't, it didn't have a good way of dealing with things. So in that whole scenario.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  There was definitely that feeling that you're thrown in with people you don't know and you reveal your life. And it was a time when

• 13:23Speaker 00

  you would write down your life story. And then in rehabs nowadays, because I visit friends in them or whatever, you would kind of, people help you navigate why you did things in your life. But in this one, they did the stuff where they would get 20 people to critique how bad your life had been in a room. And, and judge you for it. And it was, I mean, just like, looking back on it now, at the time, that was the only way recovery worked in rehabs in the UK. But it was just, it was kind of fucking appalling. And she reminded me last night. So when you bring up this thing of that, of that porno film, and I think it was that sense of, let me just do something that people will find funny because we're having such a shitty time here.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  And it backfired. And it was just, you know, I was choked out.

• 14:11Steven Bartlett?

  What I haven't been able to pinpoint is the, because at least from the outside looking in, your life was, you know, you had a great job. You had this addiction, which didn't seem to interfere with your work. So, you know, when I sit here with someone like Macklemore or Russell Brand, or even I remember speaking to Steve O, they talk about their addictions and, you know, he was, he was on a, I don't know, four or five day heroin binge. And he drove a car, he said he was gonna, I think he drove a car through a house and then was threatening to jump out the window when, you know, he ultimately ended up in rehab. But it didn't seem, I can't identify the symptoms that drove you to go, I can't do this anymore.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  I think we have. Everyone has a different story.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Externally of, I did this and I did this. And there's a bit of I did even more than you, you know, there's, there's this whole thing in, in that, you know, addicts maximize their using and alcoholics minimize their drinking. All right. And that's why alcoholics can take longer to get into sobriety and, and addicts can take shorter because also drugs can kill you quicker.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  So there are, there's that kind of, you know, and I think also

• 15:24Speaker 00

  I don't know, it's, it's, it's different, but

• 15:28Speaker 00

  maybe I don't talk so much about the crazy things I did.

• 15:32Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Because I think we all do crazy things.

• 15:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  We all do crazy things. And but I I feel that I have a daughter who's nineteen.

• 15:46Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  And I wouldn't talk about crazy things I did. Yeah.

• 15:49Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so we move on from that. And then the next sort of ten fifteen years of your life, you have this media career. How aligned were you of this chapter of your life?

• 15:56Speaker 00

  So when I did TV and writing, I really loved that. I think what was very nice is we developed this these women who found us a breath fresh air. I love the fact that people would say, oh, you know, I read your book and it's changed how I think about myself. Or, you know, and at the time when we look back at What Not To Wear, it's a very divisive show. At the time, it made a lot of women and women that I meet now, who watched the show at the time, tell me the impact it had on them to think about themselves differently. But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed travelling around England and making over women and having that journey.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  And over, you know, over a week, you saw the metamorphosis of a person you work with. And you saw them at the beginning and at the end. And then we kept in touch with many of the women. And then you would hear about their marriages and their babies and their life changing. And and you knew there was a tiny contribution you'd made to that switch in them, turning the switch on to feel different.

• 16:59Steven Bartlett?

  Why did it end, the show?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  We'd gone from doing a series with ITV a year and writing a book a year, to doing three or four shows. I took on average about fifty five flights a year. I left London on a Sunday night. I came back on a Friday. I had a seven year old daughter. And I had a partner who wasn't always well. So it was just at a stage where I thought, I need to readjust how my personal life is. And I need to think, what can I do now? Because this doesn't work.

• 17:34Steven Bartlett?

  I had a partner that wasn't always well. I remember reading a line in your book where you said ninety nine percent of the things we worry about don't happen, but that one percent happened to us.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  And he said it to me.

• 17:44Steven Bartlett?

  Is that what he said to you?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, he would always say it. I mean, I always remind Lila what did Dada say when she's worried about stuff.

• 17:53Steven Bartlett?

  And he said, he's the one that said the ninety nine percent of things we worry about don't actually happen.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:58Steven Bartlett?

  I had a partner who was unwell. Unwell in what way?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Addiction.

• 18:01Steven Bartlett?

  He was addicted to.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:05Steven Bartlett?

  And you you met him when you were thirty five.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  No, no, I met him when I got clean. I met him when I was twenty seven.

• 18:14Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, you got married when you were thirty five.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he was in recovery.

• 18:18Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay. So, okay, you met when you were younger, you went through recovery, he went through recovery as well, but then relapsed.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  He had a motorbike accident and he was very badly hurt and he took painkillers.

• 18:36Steven Bartlett?

  And got addicted to the painkillers.

• 18:40Steven Bartlett?

  What is what is what is that like? Because people think of painkillers that don't know addiction to painkillers and they think of paracetamol or something. My only experience with painkillers is taking a paracetamol maybe four years ago.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  I think when you're in a relationship with somebody who has a form of addiction,

• 18:58Speaker 00

  there's an unpredictability and an inconsistency in how they turn off every day.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  And I think in any times when it's not great,

• 19:16Speaker 00

  you end up,

• 19:19Speaker 00

  to an extent, having the crumbs off the table. It's like you're so holding on to those moments when everything's good that you try and ignore what isn't working.

• 19:32Steven Bartlett?

  And at the same time, I was thinking about, well, you got married in the year that you were starting your business, your tech company. It's a lot to deal with. If you've got a partner at home that you're married to that is struggling with addiction, you're starting a business.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they were well at that time.

• 19:45Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were well at that time. They had periods definitely through our marriage where they were well, really well.

• 19:53Steven Bartlett?

  The relationship breaks down?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:55Steven Bartlett?

  You get divorced?

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:58Steven Bartlett?

  You go your separate ways, you remain close.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:03Steven Bartlett?

  And then Johnny ultimately passes away around the time when you finish, before you start Trinny London. But around the time when you finish What Not To Wear and you you separate from Susan.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I separate from Susanna and I started working on, I'd started working on Trinny London. Yeah, but I was still filming abroad. I was still doing telly shows abroad, but I was also working on the business.

• 20:28Steven Bartlett?

  And you were close to him still, even though you'd separated.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. We spoke every day on the phone.

• 20:34Steven Bartlett?

  Every day?

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:38Steven Bartlett?

  He passes away when you're fifty?

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:43Steven Bartlett?

  How does that change things in your life?

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Biggest change is you become a single parent.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  The thing you think will never happen, happens. So it's a wake up call just for

• 21:07Speaker 00

  life and how you see life.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  It took me a long time to grieve because he left a mess when he died, which I had to kind of deal with a little, yeah.

• 21:27Steven Bartlett?

  Financial mess.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Just, yeah, just a mess. And so it preoccupies you to not then actually just think about what you miss in somebody. You know, it just, you focus on what you've got to do. You go onto autopilot. You think of the kind of things you've got to deal with. And

• 21:54Speaker 00

  probably oddly,

• 21:58Speaker 00

  I moved in March and that was the first time, I remember.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Lila went away and it was the first time in thirty five years I'd been on my own in a house.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  And I grieved for Johnny.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  All those years later.

• 22:25Steven Bartlett?

  Did something trigger that?

• 22:26Speaker 00

  No, I think it's just you need, sometimes you need space, you need to,

• 22:32Speaker 00

  you know, he died, there was a mess, I then, starting the business, I was living in a house I couldn't afford to live in, I had to sell it for lots of reasons, one of them,

• 22:43Speaker 00

  you know, for that reason, and there was so much, I was, so many sort of fires I was dealing with, and

• 22:53Speaker 00

  and then I was, you know, trying to start the business, trying to guide Lila to, you know, be okay.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  So there was a lot of years of that, and then, another life change of just deciding I want to live on my own. Then brought up in a way

• 23:13Speaker 00

  to be able to just feel some things that I hadn't really let myself feel, and I think sometimes in life, we know we're not in that part of that strong enough to feel that feeling and move forward, and we have to be in the right situation and give ourselves that right breathing space to be able to feel the fullness of that feeling without judgment or guilt or remorse, you know, because all the other ones are so connected to situations externally, and it's very difficult to get to a situation where you're not bringing all the external factors in, and you're just feeling how you feel about somebody.

• 23:56Steven Bartlett?

  What was the fullness of that feeling in that moment?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  I think, um,

• 24:13Speaker 00

  that there was nothing, there's nothing better

• 24:17Speaker 00

  in anyone else than the bestness of Johnny.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  If that makes sense. And I missed it.

• 24:32Steven Bartlett?

  The circumstances of his death are particularly complicated. Because he, he didn't die by natural causes. He died by suicide. And having sat here and spoken to people who've lost a partner or an ex in such a way, the feelings, from what I've seen, are much more complicated.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  I think anyone dying, who dies unexpectedly, whether from illness or anything, it's...

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Somebody has gone, you know, that's the biggest fundamental of anything. The circumstances

• 25:18Speaker 00

  drive how differently people deal with death. So, you know, some members of his family wanted to believe there was a conspiracy theory. Some, you know, you, you suddenly have 101 kind of

• 25:34Speaker 00

  views on things and stuff that really confuses and complicates the fact that somebody has gone. You know, they've gone, nothing is going to bring them back, they have gone.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  But it leaves more questions. And then you look at

• 25:53Speaker 00

  your part in something, you know, and that's

• 25:59Speaker 00

  every person who has had somebody commit suicide, at some stage will say, was there anything I could have done to stop it? You know, that's the first thing, for sure. If you love somebody.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  And the more I have learnt about suicide, the more that you know that when people when people will talk about wanting to kill themselves.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  I'm not saying it happens less frequently than people who don't, but once somebody makes a decision that that's what they're going to do, they don't talk about it. You know. And you'd like to feel you'd pick up on it. But I think it's the hardest lesson to learn. But when you then come across people where you feel that you now pick up on those not saying things, that there's a lot of internalising going on and should you be reaching out and just talking, getting them to talk? Because people get themselves to a stage

• 27:15Speaker 00

  where they feel it's the only solution. And what's staggering is Johnny had hypervigilance around his children because he'd been in the Israeli army and he was paramedic. And he had a really, it was a really tough situation. And he had from it post-traumatic stress disorder, which wasn't acknowledged, you know, it wasn't diagnosed until about 20 years later. But one of the things was his hypervigilance around his children. So he had, he was always so, you know, worried for their welfare. So you kind of have this thing of, where do you get to in your brain

• 27:57Speaker 00

  when you are so worried about your children? That you can convince yourself that the best thing for your children, who you love profoundly, is that you're not in their life anymore? And that...

• 28:26Speaker 00

  It's something that

• 28:29Speaker 00

  is so important that we can help people who get to that situation, that they don't get to that final part of that situation.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  And it's understanding what to recognise, it's understanding, you know.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And it's very hard to recognise, you know, I didn't recognise. And there were lots of

• 28:57Speaker 00

  details of it which

• 29:02Speaker 00

  could have really upset me, you know, of things that

• 29:06Speaker 00

  were done wrong, just were just like police stuff that was done, you know, lots of things which you could hold on, you can hold on to lots of things.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  But you kind of have to let go. When I see people who have family who have died and they want to hold on to things. Or get this, you know, and it's like

• 29:30Speaker 00

  all those things you might hold on to will prevent you to go through the process of grieving. Because it will hold you in this place in time and you will just be sitting with that. You know, and you won't be able to work through. And, you know, when somebody dies, you need to work through these stages. And acknowledge these stages, but not get stuck in something which eats you up. So even though there were all these things that kind of could have eaten me up, I sort of knew and I had a very good. There's a wonderful one called Julia Samuel. And she wrote, "This too shall pass", and another book called Grief Works. I don't know if you've ever had her on your podcast. She's an incredible grief counsellor.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  And I saw her straight away. She came to my house when

• 30:24Speaker 00

  when I knew and I hadn't yet told Lila.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Because the first thing is you need to find the words of what to say.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  She was a friend of my sister and she gave me words. It's like you just feel so like this.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  I'm at a good place with it now. And I think that final thing was

• 30:56Speaker 00

  this, the moment I had by myself when Lila went off and for a week and I just, I thought, okay, I'm very, I'm totally, you know, this is eight years later, but things take time.

• 31:12Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting with how the, the process of grief, that those first sort of eight years where you kind of compartmentalize, or it's not the right time to address it yet because there's other things going on. And then eight years later, how it can show up in a moment of like solitude and

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:26Steven Bartlett?

  in a moment of space and come out. It's interesting because I think there's so many of us, whether it's the grief of losing someone or the grief of some other form of trauma that we have it compartmentalized and it might be impacting our lives in ways we don't, we don't understand. I hear this a lot when I speak to people about, you know, their mood or, you know, they were a slightly different person through that period. But until they were able to kind of sit down and confront it and, and go through the process of grief, they, they didn't realize that they had, it had changed them in some way. Eight years later, you have your moment.

• 32:02Steven Bartlett?

  Fifty-three years old, you start. Trinny.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:08Steven Bartlett?

  Big smile on your face.

• 32:12Steven Bartlett?

  You know, starting a business like that at fifty-three, a lot of people have a, like a stigma or a stereotype that you can't start a business in midlife, you know, you shouldn't be doing that at that point or that, you know, you won't be able to raise, you know, all of those kinds of stigmas around starting a business in midlife.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Crap.

• 32:29Steven Bartlett?

  Crap, yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Total crap. I started a business at sixteen called, what was my first business? Boz Unlimited, when I was at school, I sold hair bows.

• 32:37Steven Bartlett?

  I know.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  And then I started a business at fifty three. So it's like, there's no other way to put it, that that age is is a number. It is just a fucking number. And you can either mention that number endlessly, or you can look at what energy do you have at that moment in time to execute on your dream? That's all it's, that's all you need.

• 33:01Steven Bartlett?

  Energy.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  All you need, well, you need a lot, but you know, you need to feel that. You need energy, passion, drive, relentlessness, perseverance, resilience. Pick yourself up and just get fucking on with it. You need all of those things, but you need the energy so that you jump out of bed in the morning and you are on it.

• 33:23Steven Bartlett?

  Did it take time for you to cultivate that in the in the passing, after Jo, after Johnny had passed? Was there like a, do you know what I mean?

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Because I did, I did already too before, and for that I was, you know, I did eighteen hour days for two and a half years. It's like, you know, it's it's in me that I've I've been a grafter for quite a long time, so.

• 33:42Steven Bartlett?

  You'd been mulling this idea for many, many, many years. And then, and then you finally put it into action. I I heard you say I started pitching in two thousand and fourteen and it took me three years to launch.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'd started pitching in two thousand and thirteen, I think.

• 33:56Steven Bartlett?

  And what were you pitching?

• 33:58Speaker 00

  I was pitching.

• 33:59Steven Bartlett?

  What was the elevator pitch?

• 34:00Speaker 00

  The elevator pitch was to create portable,

• 34:07Speaker 00

  cream-based, personalized makeup for women thirty five plus.

• 34:14Steven Bartlett?

  And how was that pitch received?

• 34:16Speaker 00

  I did forty eight pitches before one person bit. I must have sent three hundred emails.

• 34:22Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of negative feedback did you get?

• 34:24Speaker 00

  Oh, I had lots. I had, I had, you don't have enough followers.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Fine, I had like, I think fifty thousand followers then. Um, I had your two old start a business. I had who's going to really run the business? Classic.

• 34:40Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, that's a nice look.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  I love, I love that one. You live in this Neverland, it's not like it's never gonna happen, but it's never gonna happen. But you don't put words to either, you sit like this place. And I had that feeling, I thought, are people ever gonna get it? But I thought, I'm never gonna give up. So they both sat side by side, really strongly.

• 34:58Steven Bartlett?

  Why don't you give up?

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Because I knew it was a fucking good idea and I knew it would work. I just had to find the right people who would get it.

• 35:05Steven Bartlett?

  But everyone's telling you no, everyone's telling you to.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  I don't care if everyone's telling me no, I know. And I know enough and I believe in myself enough to know, I know it's a good idea. I just know it. I just gotta find somebody who has the vision to understand it.

• 35:17Steven Bartlett?

  How do you know it though?

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Because I know women. Because I've made over five thousand women in my life, because I know what women miss. I know the frustration they feel at the beauty counter. I know that some of them don't want to admit they don't know how to do a smokey eye. I know that some women feel stuck, but they don't know how to articulate, how do I do it again? Because I don't wanna seem silly in front of my friends. I know that some women feel just, they could never do that.

• 35:46Steven Bartlett?

  Was it expensive to start the business?

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:48Steven Bartlett?

  What were the personal sacrifices?

• 35:50Speaker 00

  There are, there are financial ones and there are friendship ones.

• 35:55Steven Bartlett?

  Did you have to sell any tables? Let's start with the financial.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  No, but I sold my house.

• 35:59Steven Bartlett?

  You sold your house?

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I sold my house. And I kind of.

• 36:01Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Because I couldn't afford to stay in it. I had debt, I had a big mortgage. I had kind of, when I had separated with Johnny, I'd wanted to get this house that I bought that would enable me to walk my daughter to school. I just wanted this thing, okay? Like desperately. So I bought this house with a really big mortgage and I did a loan. And I did it from scratch. And it was my dream, every single little element of this house I built.

• 36:30Steven Bartlett?

  Did that make you sad? That realisation, because it seems like.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  The idea that I would have to leave the house was something I thought about every single day for six months and thought, what can I do to prevent it? Because I've worked this hard for so long to have this house. I've always wanted to own a house, you know?

• 36:49Speaker 00

  But once you let go of it, it's just a fucking house.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  And you think there's a bigger picture. And the bigger picture, maybe you could buy me five houses. But the bigger picture is that there is a bigger picture. Not even to look to the stage where you might be able to buy a nicer house. But it's like, I was on a mission, Stephen. I was on a mission. I thought, I've got to make it happen. I can't not do this. There was no turning back. I couldn't not start the business. So then it was, what did I have to do to start the business? Because first of all, I sold all my clothes. I did this sale and I went on to Emily's List and I, Emily's List is this. And I was renting out the house, so I didn't care who came in my house. I had like a thousand people coming in my house, buying clothes. So I raised in two sales, sixty grand. Because I used to follow, I used to follow Gary Vaynerchuk.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  And Gary was always like, what the fuck can you sell in your house? You know, you can sell your trainers. You went and spent a fortune on those people who were saying, oh, whinging to Gary. And Gary's saying, sell something. Everyone has something they can sell. Well, how much do you want the business? How much do you want to be successful and start the business? What are you prepared to give up? Look at the long term game.

• 38:01Steven Bartlett?

  Was there any doubt, even a whisper of doubt? I say this in part because I look back on when I started my business. I was keeping diary entries.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:08Steven Bartlett?

  And I was, I feel the same as you. There was no going back. There was definitely not a plan B. My parents weren't speaking to me.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:14Steven Bartlett?

  I'm shoplifting pizzas at this point to feed myself. I'm like, I can only go forward, right?

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:19Steven Bartlett?

  I haven't paid my rent in three months. My rent is only a hundred and fifty pounds in Rushalm.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:23Steven Bartlett?

  But then I, so I recount that moment of my life as, I zoom in on the tenacity and this certainty and this conviction.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:31Steven Bartlett?

  But then I look at these diary entries and on this day, I'm like doubting myself a little bit. It didn't last.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:37Steven Bartlett?

  But there was, there was a day where it was like a rocky.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 38:40Steven Bartlett?

  You know, and that's.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  For sure. It's not all like, the thing is, the overarching theme is, I can't go back.

• 38:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  It shouldn't negate the fact you're going to have doubt. You're going to question, you know, it's like, there's things, somebody will believe in it. But there was like another ten meetings and nobody has. You know, you think.

• 38:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  And also at the end of an investor present, you know, when you present to investors. The real questioning of your integrity over your idea is how much you decide. What was the last meeting they had in the room, which they brought that advice to your meeting on a totally different business to kind of talk about the market? Or I mean, the amount of times I've talked about like, you know, it's about growth. It's not about retention. It's about 70% new customers, 30% retention. And I was always saying, no, it's 60% retention, 40% growth. But saying this when Casper mattresses was going high fly was like, nobody want to listen. I know now then why they didn't invest because their whole thing was growth, retention, fuck it.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  You know, and it's like retention is everything. You've got to down or grow. You've got to have new customers. But if you don't have the bedrock of retention, the kind of classic, you know, like companies that don't do any publicity, like Five Guys or some companies that haven't done much publicity, they're relying on the customer loving it. They're relying on getting new customers from their customers. You know, they're relying on the most classic word of mouth moment. But you've got to build a company on cement. And I felt at the time, these guys looking around, they're building it on quicksand. You've got to then leave that investor meeting and think, what do I take away that's good advice?

• 40:23Speaker 00

  So the advice I took away to myself was if I'm in a room of predominantly men, I want to go in and a female trait to me is you want to paint the entire picture. You want to bring somebody into your universe and you want to show them everything. So they don't have one thing they can hone in on to make sense of your business and join the dots. You don't give them the dot joiner. So therefore, the thing I learnt was to go in and say, look, we're starting with this and from this, I'm going to give you this and then we'll get to that. And they're like, okay. And it's not men are slow and women are faster. It's like there is a fundamental difference in how people need information delivered to

• 41:07Speaker 00

  them so they can absorb it, go, yeah, that ticks my box and then be ready to listen to the next bit of information. And that I didn't know. I didn't know into the 10th pitch. And then in the 10th pitch or whatever, halfway through my pitching, I kind of thought, actually, what am I not doing right here to convey? Because if I believe this is a good idea, if I believe it has legs. What am I not getting through to them that I need to?

• 41:30Steven Bartlett?

  And that's the vision of the future, kind of.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  It's a bit the vision of the future. It's like, there's a real classic that if you are a woman, generally, men, if it's predominantly males, they will ask, how do you protect your downside? And if I'm a man sitting here, they will say, how do you maximize your upside? It's a classic, all right? So when then.

• 41:49Steven Bartlett?

  So just to explain for people that don't understand, downside is basically like.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  How do you, how do you negate your risk?

• 41:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  So, so, you know, how do you protect your risk? You know, what happens if you have a problem with the product? What happens if you can't find the customer? What happens if blah, blah, blah? And maximizing the upside is how are you going to scale? How are you going to make that business bigger? So I thought, okay, all right. So then when they would start to get to that little thing, I would say, you know what? These three ways, like any business, is what I'll be doing. Now let us focus on how I'm going to maximize the upside. And just kind of gently, not insultingly, sometimes I was a little bit, you know.

• 42:29Steven Bartlett?

  So you became aware of their prejudice and would counteract it before they kind of had a chance to use that as a way to.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you kind of wanted to bring in a conversation. Well, but it took me a while, Stephen. It took me, because I had never gone to, you know, when I did investor presentations in ninety nine, I did five and I got it, you know, in those two of them invested. It was a very different time and pitching a concept.

• 42:52Steven Bartlett?

  How did you counteract the prejudice that you knew was existing in those pitch boardrooms? Or did you? How did you deal with it?

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Because there's a part of me that thought, like, I went to one and he said, I love the idea, but it will only be successful if you do it for millennials or Gen Z. Because they're the only people who are going to buy like that, because women of your age don't know how to buy makeup online. Okay. And at the time, twenty six percent of people bought beauty online, all right? And of that twenty six percent, maybe fifteen percent were in the demographic that I said. But I said, I'm providing personalization that will make a woman, and I will talk to women in a way of a language they understand, to think, actually, maybe if I went online, I'd be better diagnosed than if I went in store, because she has this personalization and.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  And then when it launched and those very first few people who had never shot for makeup online did it and thought this is better than me going to Peach Jones, it was like, spread the word, spread the word and it built on itself. But at that time, when the man from this VC was saying that, and I was like, I left the room and I thought I actually would not want this person to invest in my business anyway. So there is that maturity you can get of thinking, because you've got to also, you know, when you're going for money, you very much feel the power is in their hands. And there's got to be something you bring into the room where you think, do I want these people to invest in my business? And to get to a stage where you're the one in a way on the back foot

• 44:27Speaker 00

  because you're wanting the cash, how can you then say to yourself, turn it around, you know, do I want these people in the business? Have they got something to contribute? And asking them questions like, what will you contribute? What do you do for your other VCs? I've spoken to a few, you know, you have this big thing saying that you get the CMOs together and whatever, but do you actually do that? And how does that happen to you?

• 44:52Steven Bartlett?

  How much is this business worth in your perspective?

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Don't give out valuations.

• 44:58Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, I read a hundred and eighty million online. It's doing well, though.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:04Steven Bartlett?

  What can you tell me about the scale of the business, just to give us an inclination?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  We've, you know, grown over a hundred and a year.

• 45:14Steven Bartlett?

  How many years?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Over five years.

• 45:16Steven Bartlett?

  Five years.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, we did fifty something million last year. We sell in a hundred and eighty countries. We started skincare a year and a half ago. It's now thirty eight percent of my revenue. So it's grown quite quickly. It has the highest retention. So when I look at the business and I look at retention of products, for me, the value of the business and look at what product bases there are. So that to me is an exciting place the business is going to. We're localizing in different countries. So there's one thing to be sold internationally, but then when you localize, it takes a lot of.

• 46:02Steven Bartlett?

  Personalization across.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does. And so we did it when we're about fifty percent in the UK and then we're about twenty three percent in Australia, with ten percent in America.

• 46:12Steven Bartlett?

  That is a fantastic business.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:14Steven Bartlett?

  And I would like to invest. What, when you think about your character traits and what you bring to the business, what, what is that? And how has that led the business to become successful? Because I think in founders, we talked earlier about focusing on the thing you're good at.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:27Steven Bartlett?

  What is the thing that Trinny is good at in this business?

• 46:30Speaker 00

  I think I'm good at understanding how women react to things and what they want and how you speak to somebody so they can hear it. I think that's probably what I know better than anyone else in the company.

• 46:44Steven Bartlett?

  How do you speak to someone so that they hear it?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Well, years ago, I did Oprah and Oprah taught me a lot and she was, she is an amazing woman. But when I used to do her shows, we would tell her stuff because we'd just done a book and it had become a number one time bestseller in, in America. And it was like, she helped us do that. But she would tell them stuff I'd said and then she would repeat it three times within that half an hour. She'd just repeat it, repeat it. And I said, after Oprah, you, you always repeat, she said, because it registers. They get reminded, they remember. So that sense of you say something and you say it three times in maybe three different ways, so that by the end of that conversation, somebody walks away with a new thought in their head.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  So there is that and I don't consciously do that anymore. I think at the beginning I probably did because I remember what she said and then it, it got into a habit. But, and it's also remembering who you speak to. Because when you speak, when I do my contribution to, to Trinny London on social, I could be speaking to many different women. I could be speaking to a nurse on eighteen grand a year who saves up every month to buy one thing. And I could be speaking to somebody who could buy ten things and choose to spy us. Okay, so it's quite a broad remit, but they all realise because of what I spoke about, the importance of actually buying things that really work for your skin and not wasting

• 48:17Speaker 00

  your money and and not putting things on that are bad for your skin. I don't mean bad like green. I mean, like, don't do anything for your skin or just understanding what you should use is not what your best friend should use. And because I've I had very bad acne. I mean, like, when you talked about your turning off the light, okay, I used to decide what restaurant do I go into. Like, if I was going out and as an eighteen year old and I had this lighting, I would literally say, can we go to another restaurant? Because you would see my acne postules coming down and I would go like, I'd literally, I'd be like this for dinner. So that obsession with my skin and the effect it gave on my confidence and was a lot of what I put into when we look at what ingredients are we going to use and how are we going to use them. And

• 49:02Speaker 00

  we have a lab in England, you know, I'm proud the fact we have a lab. We make things from scratch. We're not like, hey, let's put a label on here and say Trinny, London, you know.

• 49:09Steven Bartlett?

  Are you proud of the business?

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Very.

• 49:12Steven Bartlett?

  Are you proud of yourself?

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Yes, I am when I remember to be. I mean, I get.

• 49:20Steven Bartlett?

  When I remember to be?

• 49:22Speaker 00

  No, like.

• 49:23Steven Bartlett?

  You've crossed your arms. Look at the body language.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  I am. I don't. It's very easy to. Well, I never get to a place conceit. Many people are proud for me and I sometimes find that challenging.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  It's like I want to move the conversation on.

• 49:42Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 49:43Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't. I can't answer it. And it's just a thing, you know, but I'll have good friends of mine who've known me a long time, who will.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Just say, you know, very lovely things about having grown the business.

• 49:57Steven Bartlett?

  I often, I'm gonna have.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  How do you feel on this one? Because we've got to discuss it together because we must go through the same stuff.

• 50:03Steven Bartlett?

  I'm asking questions, but I, I can relate.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Okay, so, so give me your feedback first.

• 50:07Steven Bartlett?

  Well, when someone gives me a big compliment, at the same time, they're also reminding me of everything I could lose. And so I think my, my natural way of dealing with things is to, as you've kind of described, is that forward motion. That forward motion makes me feel stable.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:20Steven Bartlett?

  So whenever someone comes to me and gives me a compliment about something I've achieved, it's, it's, I always say like, chaos is stability and stability is chaos. It's a moment of stability that I don't like. Like, just the idea of accomplishment creates a stability that I don't like. I want chaos. I need that forward motion to feel stable.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  It's a weird one because it's like a lot of people would disagree with what you're saying in terms, in terms of, you know, sort of a self-worth guru who's saying you've got to, you've got to, you know, take a step to. A lot of friends who say, Trin, you need to take a moment to acknowledge how far you've come. And I think what you're saying is, I'm just trying to grasp exactly what you're saying of the chaos and stability. And I think.

• 51:04Steven Bartlett?

  I can explain it better.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 51:06Steven Bartlett?

  So when, when Olympians go to the Olympics, they come back, even if they've won a gold medal and they fall into a depression. I think they call it gold medal depression. The stats around it are alarming. I read one article where it said up to 80% of Olympians post the Olympics feel that way. I think that humans, most of us anyway, maybe that's why we're in these buildings with these amazing, amazing technology, have it within us to need to, it goes back to what I said before we started recording about progress.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:31Steven Bartlett?

  We need a sense of forward motion. We don't, the opposite of, what we don't want is completed goals, abundant resources and nothing to strive for. So maybe because I'm particularly, I was particularly insecure as a child, I need, I get my worth from the sense of forward motion and accomplishment. The thought of stopping.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:48Steven Bartlett?

  And being done is a form of psychological chaos. It's a form of purposelessness. And so I think stability is actually the forward motion, the chaos, the uncompleted goals, the striving. That's when I feel most stable.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:03Steven Bartlett?

  And when you remove that, something to strive for, I feel, I feel, which people would call stability, I feel chaos.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:09Steven Bartlett?

  But also, I think for me and you, there is something.

• 52:14Steven Bartlett?

  Where our work is, I know it for me anyway, is inherently linked at a deep, deep level to our sense of self-worth.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:20Steven Bartlett?

  And so, um, yeah, it's quite, I feel deeply uncomfortable when I get a compliment about the work we do. Or when people say that to me, oh, you need to pause for a second and just think about how far you've come.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:34Steven Bartlett?

  It's robbing me of something.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, it's like, it is, um.

• 52:41Steven Bartlett?

  When will enough be enough?

• 52:45Speaker 00

  I don't know if enough should never, ever be enough. I don't know if you should always have a little bit. I don't know. Because you see, you live in chaos. So I'll ask you that question. When will enough be enough? When will enough be enough for you?

• 52:58Steven Bartlett?

  There's that Hamilton song, I will never be satisfied. I always think about that. Well, I go back to what I said. I, I hope, I hope there's no such thing as enough in my mind.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so when will enough, answer your question. When will enough be enough?

• 53:10Steven Bartlett?

  It will never be because enough is always going to mean forward motion. So, and progress.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Enough is going to be enough?

• 53:18Steven Bartlett?

  Enough, success to me is forward motion and progress. So success can't therefore possibly be any destination. It is the forward motion of progress. It is forward motion. It is challenge. It is autonomy. It is a meaningful goal to strive towards and it's doing it with people I love. That's success for me.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:36Steven Bartlett?

  And, and so I need challenge. I need forward motion with people I love, high degree of self-control.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's your life breath.

• 53:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And then I'll die someday as I'm doing it.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is life breath. Yeah. It really is.

• 53:49Steven Bartlett?

  What is success to you these days? Like what is, what does success mean for you? People ask me that all the time as well.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  But I mean, it's such a, when you hear that question, I think, oh, fuck. So make it specific. It's too generalistic.

• 54:02Steven Bartlett?

  So what's, if, if I, let's look, look, look at the next decade of your life.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 54:06Steven Bartlett?

  If I say, if we meet again in 10 years' time and I say, and you say to me, that was a successful decade.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  All right. That's a good way. Okay. Next 10 years, successful decade.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  The one thing, this is the only thing where I will bring age into it, all right, is I am.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Fifty nine. So when I'm sixty nine, do I want to be working so hard that I sort of miss friends' birthdays and don't get to, you know, take part in life of things outside my work? Because that's a big one. Like, when you're in your twenties and thirties, you can kind of like, all your friends are doing that too, you know, and in that same space. So it doesn't matter if you say, look, in a month, we'll get together, we'll all go for a weekend somewhere, because you're all doing it. So it's like you're on this thing together. But when you're me, probably of my friends, maybe eighty percent of them, their life is slightly different from what I'm doing right now. So, and that element

• 55:07Speaker 00

  of that friendship and those connection with people is fundamentally crucial to our feeding ourself, you know. And there's always that, you know, guy who, not the head of American Express, but he's like, you know, will I be remembered for how hard I worked, you know, on the graves? And there's that classic corny thing of like, will they remember how hard I, you know, it's like, they won't. But whenever I read that, I think, but they just had a nine to five job, and this is a passion, you know, I always say that. I think this is so different, because this is, because if I, if it was just a job, I'd probably say, you know, I should slow down a bit, whatever. But I travel the world, I help a lot of people around the world, I meet a lot of, I was in Birmingham.

• 55:49Steven Bartlett?

  What about work-life balance, Trinny?

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Yes, but this is the thing. It's like, I don't see my job as job, and then there's work-life balance, because there's areas of my job which will be sociable things. I I meet people, I have conversations with women every day. You know, on this, you know, social media thing, which is now a few, few million people, I have these women who know me really well. It's so interesting how you think, oh, but I haven't seen, you know, I have my friends who have known me since I've been in my teens. But I have these women who are part of the Trinny tribe. They could be anywhere in the world, but they know me so well that like, I might do a little live, and they'll DM me, say, Trinny, I sensed this this morning. Are you okay? Do you need to take a breath? You know. And then when

• 56:36Speaker 00

  I, I shared this, you know, that John had died, and, and so, you know, they were, you know, they sent. Thousands of messages and I read, I read everything people sent because if people make the effort to write a message and on my Instagram, I respond to everything, you know, we have a team of 11 people who we had like 12,000 comments a week for Trinny London stuff, but I do all my Instagram because that's the beating heart of the women in my life and the feeling people are feeling, you know, whenever you have a business, you need to understand what is the feeling people are feeling. So in England, we have a big cost of loan crisis. I still want to give people quality products that are premium.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  So with all these things going on, how do I sense check this thing? How do I adapt the conversation so that it still is relevant to their life and they're just, so going back to this work like balance, like they helped me to sit for a second and like one of them sent this message three days, they said, Trinny, you have to remember to feel what you're going through right now because you don't usually, you just rush it and you need to do it. Someone I've never met before, ever, okay. But they're just incredible women.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  And so my, when you, when you talk about a business, all right, and you talk about starting a business, my business is this passion for these women to feel great and and are sort of, you know, you always have these, what's your vision board and what's your mission as a company, but it's literally to leave a woman feeling better about herself than before she came into contact with me, with Fearless, with the podcast, with Trinny London, with whatever. So that's my mission. I am here for a mission. I know that sounds like whatever, but I am, I know I am, you know, I know I am. I know that when, like, I know that during COVID.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  When there were people feeling in a full family of people fundamentally so alone as women. I knew how important it was that we should get out and we should chat to each other. I knew it was just to like really chat, really like share the shit, share the feelings so they could go. Me too, me too, you know.

• 59:04Steven Bartlett?

  So at sixty nine then, you're saying that you're going to slow down and retire and have pina coladas on the beach.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  No, I didn't say that at all. Did I ever say that?

• 59:12Steven Bartlett?

  So sixty nine.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  No, so you just said to me in the next ten years, in the next ten, what success looked like. It's that this community grows because the more women who feel like this would tell more women. And I would like, at the moment, maybe we have a million women. And I would like that to be in the next ten years, fifteen million women actually. So that I'm going to put that number out there, I'm going to now remember it. I'd like that many women because if you can get to that many women.

• 59:34Steven Bartlett?

  But then how are you gonna, I said that because you talked about changing the balance a little bit. So you could be there for your social connections a bit more.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:42Steven Bartlett?

  Your friends.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:43Steven Bartlett?

  If you've got a goal of fifteen million women.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  So how am I growing this business where I have people in place who can do things that I can do better than me?

• 59:53Steven Bartlett?

  So that you can go and do.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  So I can do even more of what only I can do.

• 59:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, in the business.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  In the business.

• 59:59Steven Bartlett?

  In a personal context.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Because at the moment, I did this thing the other day and I did this thing with my CEO and a board member. And I did like three hundred and sixty five days a year, all right? And we divided up because we need to like see, because people, it's very difficult to get meetings in with. So it was like, okay, there are six full days a year I do board meetings. There are twelve days a year I do investor stuff. So we added all up or whatever and it ended up to more, more than the days of the year, okay? Because I haven't taken that much holiday. So Jane says to me, lovely Jane, she goes, Trinny, this we have to change. So she said, okay, what do you not have to do? You know, how could we move to a place slowly where? You don't do this, you do this, and you do this so much, but it's like,

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  you must talk to tons of people about when you have your best ideas. All right, we have our best ideas when we are not further removed from the chaos, because you love this chaos, but we're we're removed enough that things have the room to bubble to the top. So I do Michael's car map every morning, all right. And I just started doing this other one on the the one with the half bowl inner something. You know, that really good one. And there's this guy, David G. And it was discussed at Massachusetts State Hospital. They did some research that you listen to his meditation for fifty nine days, and it changes your neuropathways like ketamine might. Okay, it's really, I'm anyway, I'm day forty three. Okay, quite into it. But when I give myself that little space,

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  the really good ideas for the business come up. And the more I'm just doing, running the business, running the business, the less we're going to have of those. And I need to give the business the best of me.

• 1:01:43Steven Bartlett?

  So at sixty nine, do you think you're going to be working less?

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Differently.

• 1:01:47Steven Bartlett?

  Differently, more space for more creativity.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and you know, just just saying, yeah, I'll take a Friday off and go and go for a weekend somewhere and things like that. Yeah, because you know.

• 1:01:58Steven Bartlett?

  And will you be able to go for a weekend without thinking about the business?

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did, actually. Can I just tell you, for the first time in five years, I went away for five days,

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  two weeks ago, and I only did like eight emails, which was just great.

• 1:02:15Steven Bartlett?

  You wrote this wonderful book, Fearless. It's really, really surprising. It's surprising.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Did you read any of it yet?

• 1:02:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, I went through it.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Oh, you did.

• 1:02:23Steven Bartlett?

  And I read the entire section on life. The other sections about beauty and style are a little bit more tricky. But I read everything in the life section about that's where I got some of those quotes from and the stuff about imposter syndrome and self belief and all of those things. It is a a life advice book. It is a beauty advice book. It is a style advice book. And it's just a gorgeous coffee table style.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Have you seen the thing is, this is me, okay?

• 1:02:44Steven Bartlett?

  You want me to pass it to you?

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I hate looking at pictures of myself. So the whole point of doing this book was to say.

• 1:02:51Steven Bartlett?

  You hate looking at pictures of yourself?

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  I hate fucking looking at pictures of myself. Is I just do. So this is the book you have on your coffee table.

• 1:02:57Steven Bartlett?

  Ah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  You see, so nice, like just it will make you pick it up more because it's biased to have my face on the front. This is not bias.

• 1:03:08Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, no, that is beautiful. And it's a nice little message as well.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Steven Bartlett?

  To have a statement about yourself, like.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Steven Bartlett?

  You know what? It's funny, when people come on the show and they have a product, I often try and spend some time talking about their products and stuff. But the thing, the thing in this case is having got to understand you and what drives you, and having felt how authentic and deep your passion is, there is no need, that, the product is just a byproduct of exactly that, what we've just experienced. So it's funny because I hear you, how deeply passionate and obsessed you are about your mission, as you call it. And I just believe the product because I know where it's coming from. And that's the most important thing. It's coming from a deep sense of mission that is so unbelievably authentic. That starts, it sounds like in your childhood with a battle with your own skin issues and acne.

• 1:03:59Steven Bartlett?

  And the byproduct of that authentic mission is these wonderful products which are taking the world by storm. What have I got in front of me here?

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Okay, so every, I'm just giving you, I'm going to give you the quick headline so you can go back to your girlfriend and you can have knowledge.

• 1:04:13Steven Bartlett?

  Let's just close off on this. The book is available in September.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:17Steven Bartlett?

  Fab. So everyone can go preorder that now?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Steven Bartlett?

  Wonderful. Great.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:04:22Steven Bartlett?

  Highly recommend everybody goes and preorders it because it's a beautiful book.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Thank you very much. So fundamental skincare, whatever age you are or skin colour you are or anything, is you should clean your skin properly.

• 1:04:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  You should wear SPF.

• 1:04:36Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Every day, whatever your melanin levels.

• 1:04:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  Cancer being the primary cause, but other aesthetics as well. You should do something that regenerates your skin and retinoids can do that. And exfoliants can exfoliate your skin. And you should keep your skin even, so vitamin C.

• 1:04:57Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  So those kind of me are the showstoppers in a routine.

• 1:05:01Steven Bartlett?

  Well, what if I don't? Because I'm guilty as charged on all above counts.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  If you don't, genes might make you think, I don't need to. I'm fine. But I look at your skin and I'm going to come over now.

• 1:05:11Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, no, don't call me, oh, fuck.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  Is I do this, look at me, and I close my eyes because I need to feel your skin without. Judging you by looking at you.

• 1:05:21Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  So what I do is I just have a feel and I feel so first thing I feel immediately is the congestion you have here. Right in the centre, a lot of people like women will have congestion here because they don't like to get their hair wet. When they wash their face, you have congestion here.

• 1:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  Sure, it's not muscle or something or?

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  It's not muscle at all, I know the difference darling.

• 1:05:40Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  And this is not like that's beard, you see, but this is congestion under the skin because you have an oily skin. So you have a sebaceous gland that can sometimes get blocked under the skin, it doesn't become a spot, but it's congested. So that's there, alright, so exfoliant you're gonna use.

• 1:05:55Steven Bartlett?

  I do get a lot of spots there.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Okay, well then you're gonna use Find Your Balance, in fact, we've got to get you Find Your Balance. Then I go round here.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Then I feel your lymph. Whenever you're feeling blocked, doing this tiny movement here.

• 1:06:10Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Releases your lymph nodes and you go round the back.

• 1:06:13Steven Bartlett?

  She's massaging my face for anyone that's listening on audio, it feels really good.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  I'm not massage your face, I'm going round your ears.

• 1:06:18Steven Bartlett?

  Agree to disagree.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Okay, and then you go down and you want to kind of go down to your clavicle and release. This is all like a channel for your lymph, so if you ever get a blocked face or you get dark circles, you do this kind of getting it down.

• 1:06:30Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, that's why women always do that thing on Instagram with the, yeah, with the stone.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  So you're oilier here.

• 1:06:37Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  You've got a slight dark circle.

• 1:06:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's unslept, yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  And you've got hydrated skin but blocked skin, so for me, the best thing you would do for your skin is you would exfoliate your skin. Because you need to slosh off dead skin cells and you need to clarify your skin, you need to get your pores, get the congestion out. So that means drinking water.

• 1:07:00Steven Bartlett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  It means having an exfoliant, a liquid exfoliant, so there's.

• 1:07:04Steven Bartlett?

  Do you sell an exfoliant?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  We sell Tiptoe in there, you don't have sensitive skin, so you would use one called Find Your Balance, which I'm gonna give you.

• 1:07:11Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, thank you so much.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  And then afterwards, use a moisturizer called niacinamide, it's called Energize Me, it has something called succinic acid in it. Succinic acid is like, it's an ingredient that goes into your cell and goes like this. So when you put that on, your skin will wake up, you'll feel an alertness to your skin.

• 1:07:30Steven Bartlett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  And then you'll feel, you get off a flight and you'd feel, I don't look tired because you haven't, you need to touch your face. A lot of people just don't touch their face enough, you need to get the oxygen to your face. You know, you go to the gym and the oxygen goes around your body and your lymph system works and you get this feeling of aliveness. But we just leave our face alone. So you do this, you go and do it with me, just do it with me. Get your, get your fingers like this.

• 1:07:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Like that. So it's like you've got a scissor and do friction like this. Up, down, up, down, then go left and right. Up, down like that. Okay. And then you want to get your hands here.

• 1:08:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  And you want to lift your cheekbones like this. Fast. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Feel the energy.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Okay, just let go. Now, do you feel there's movement, a rush in your face?

• 1:08:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  That's your lymph. Your lymph is like your hosepipe around your face. And if you put a sort of foot on the hosepipe, it stops. You need this to move around. If it's moving around, it's releasing the toxins, taking them down here at the moment. It's leaving them on your skin, under your skin.

• 1:08:36Steven Bartlett?

  So it's cleaning out my face?

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  Yes, you want it to be moving.

• 1:08:40Steven Bartlett?

  If there was just three things then, so tell me, tell me this.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  So if you had three things you would use?

• 1:08:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, three products I would use and then sort of three principles towards skin, good skincare.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Okay, you'd use Better Off, which is a cleansing one. You go in the shower.

• 1:08:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  And you put this on your face.

• 1:08:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, done.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  It's AHA and PHA. It's got gentle exfoliating acids.

• 1:08:58Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Okay, then find your balance, which is an exfoliant, which is not there. We're going to get for you, I don't know, we'll get that for you. And energize me, which you don't have. Those three things is what you're going to use.

• 1:09:09Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Your girlfriend, we use a longer routine. I don't know what she looks like or her skin tone, but she'll probably have the retinols and she'll have the vitamin Cs and a few other things. But you just need three things.

• 1:09:20Steven Bartlett?

  So that's the products. And then in terms of the personal routines, you said, drink water, sleep.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  Sleep.

• 1:09:26Steven Bartlett?

  And then like massage my face.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Steven Bartlett?

  Got it.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:09:31Steven Bartlett?

  I'm looking forward to, I'm looking forward to it. I, I've always kind of procrastinated on like skincare routines and stuff.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  I know, but if it's easy, if it's real easy, you'll do it.

• 1:09:38Steven Bartlett?

  If it's by the sink, I'll pick it up.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, well, you'll just like, we'll cement it down with Bootac.

• 1:09:42Steven Bartlett?

  Cool.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:09:43Steven Bartlett?

  So we have a tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Steven Bartlett?

  The question left for you is, what's the one thing that gives you the most healthy pleasure in life and how can you commit to?

• 1:09:58Steven Bartlett?

  Harness more of it.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  Going down a ski slope at eighty three kilometres an hour. But the thing is, I just feel responsibility now that I can't do that anymore.

• 1:10:08Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Because it's very dangerous, you know? It's like I. But it is, it's a guilty pleasure because I love it. I love the speed. I love the like, I'm just in control. Wind through my hair. You know, it's the only sport I know how to do. I'm shit at every other sport.

• 1:10:26Steven Bartlett?

  Sounds like the way you live life.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably.

• 1:10:29Steven Bartlett?

  In control, high speed.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Steven Bartlett?

  Wind through your hair.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Probably. Good man. So I could leave one for somebody else now.

• 1:10:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for the inspiration. You truly are an inspiration. Tremendously, tremendously so. And I'm going to make you feel uncomfortable. You should be so proud of how far you've come.

• 1:10:48Steven Bartlett?

  You must be so proud. Take some time to just breathe it in and enjoy it, Trinny. Because you're going to regret it.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  Shut up now.

• 1:10:55Steven Bartlett?

  I appreciate you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming and doing this. Thank you for creating a real business that's inspiring so many people just through its existence, but also inspiring them to be better and to feel better about themselves through the wonderful products that you've made. And I highly recommend that everyone goes and gets this book. It's more of Trinny, the Trinny that I'm sure you've loved in this conversation. And these products, I mean, they speak for themselves because as I said, you know exactly where they've come from. So thank you.