(ALMOST) RECKLESS

Episode 2.8: Trinny Woodall

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A conversation with Amy Smilovic and Trinny Woodall. Trinny is the Founder and CEO of Trinny London, an independent beauty and skincare company based in London that she launched in 2017 and has since grown into a business approaching $100 million in annual revenue with millions of customers worldwide. Before Trinny London, she spent eight years as one half of the BBC's What Not to Wear, the makeover series she created with Susannah Constantine that was licensed into markets from Israel to India and produced eleven books, several of them million-copy sellers. The road between those two chapters was long and rarely straight: a hair bow business at seventeen, a sock company undone by bad glue, a stretch trading commodities, addiction and recovery, a dot-com startup that raised £7 million in six weeks and closed within two years, and the loss of her husband just before she began building Trinny London. Throughout the episode, Amy and Trinny discuss the difference between being a founder and being a founder-CEO, why she chose to bootstrap the second time around and learn every function of the business herself, the frameworks she now uses to give her team real authority, and what it means to refuse to compromise who you are in front of your children.