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Nov. 28, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
57:37
Delingpod 47: Trinny Woodall
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Welcome to The Delicpot with me James Delicpot and And I know I always say this, I know I always say I'm really excited, but I am so excited about this week's special guest.
And this has been a long time coming, hasn't it Trini?
Trini?
It has, because I've got to say, we do know each other.
We do.
And we've had many conversations.
And I always felt also that I wouldn't be earnest enough or clever enough for your podcast.
Earnest?
No, earnest is the wrong word.
It's the importance of.
I think it's just the people I see that you interview.
I think, okay, I'm a bit left field, but left field is good.
No.
I'll tell you what the thing is about podcasts.
There is a massive glut at the moment.
And there are lots of podcasts now in my area, even though I was one of the first, which go after the same guests.
And so at the moment, for example, everyone's trying to capture David Starkey.
They're all the hot cross.
You go because David Starkey.
Let's get the royal family.
But actually, as you know, there's only one special friend and they're very special or indeterminate gender.
The person who listens to the podcast.
And I think what the special friend likes is that sometimes they throw them a curveball.
And some...
Part of the special friend is thinking, A, Trini, who is this Trini person that, I haven't even mentioned your surname yet, Trini Woodall.
And the other part of the special friend is going, oh my god, you've got Trini, I'm so excited.
So let's start from the beginning.
Because I first got to know you When you and Susanna Constantine were doing your column for The Telegraph.
And that was the beginning, wasn't it, when you invented yourself as this couple who talked about women's bums and tits in a kind of very frank way and you started doing makeup.
Is that how it all began?
I think probably that's how my public...
You know, introduction to the public began because the column was at the time a little bit different.
We said what was great.
We said what was terrible.
And I think there weren't so many people out there perhaps saying, you know, dear Mr.
Lagerfeld, why do you make a brooch in plastic for Chanel and charge a thousand pounds?
You know, we kind of wanted to challenge a few things.
And at the time, because this is 1997 or 96 even...
You were, as a woman, when you were looking for clothing and you were in between expensive or cheap, there was really nowhere to go.
So cheap, I don't mean cheap, I mean classic, slightly dull, and then it was where your mum took you shopping, M&S. My mum took me to M&S shopping.
You know, for anything that wasn't school uniform.
So there wasn't lovely, exciting things.
And then so you've got Benetton and Cook Eye.
This is like many years ago.
But then they would make them up for Vogue and they'd never make that thing in real life.
So you'd read Vogue and you'd think, oh, that's lovely and it's from a high street store.
You'd try and find it in the high street store.
It wasn't there because they were never going to production.
They just wanted to get their name in Vogue.
So as a consumer, I think I was always not...
Not about fashion and style, I was about the consumer and style.
I was about, I really love it, I'm inspired by it, where can I get it now?
So it was, in that regard, different, because it was saying, we went this week in the high street, we found these things, we tried them on ourselves, Susanna is curvy, and with boobs I'm flat-chested and pear-shaped, and this is what we think.
And we found one for you that's expensive, that's mid-range, and that's really inexpensive.
And I think that probably was a first.
So for a few women, and then it grew that, and your lovely wife was our editor as well, so she had to probably rewrite a lot of the copy.
But it opened the doors for real things for real women that were available, and then from that we did TV, and then things grew and we did books, etc.
Yeah.
You were lucky in a way, or maybe it was totally...
You rode away which led to the transformation of the High Street.
Because I remember back in the day...
Look, we're now on the King's Road or just off the King's Road.
This was my stomping ground when I first moved to London.
Me too.
And Chelsea was so...
Different then, wasn't it?
Very.
I mean, Chelsea then, when I had grown up outside of England, but we had a flat, my family, off Sloane Square.
So from 16, I came back to England.
I'd been at boarding school all my life, but I'd been living abroad.
So I remember going down the King's Road in the late 70s, and it was, you know, you had punks one end, you had...
Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood at World End.
You had the Red Cross charity shop on Old Church Street.
I'm trying to think of my stopping of points.
You had Blush's Cafe.
You had Pucci's Pizzeria in Oakley Street.
Are these all still there, by the way?
Some of them are still there.
I don't think Pucci's is still there.
I think it's now Gale's Bakery or something like that.
Or the Ivy, probably.
I don't know what it is.
But there was, you know, it was very much independent, quirky shops, not much High Street, a few antique shops, but you had this parade ground.
You know, in the 60s, Kings Row was really known as a parade ground, and then it got a bit of resurgence, because there were a lot of punk rockers around Sloane Square, and they'd walk up that bit of the Kings Row.
So you've got this kind of quite cutting-edge fashion, too, and that kind of real anti-establishment.
What I'm sort of leading to is there wasn't that thing in the middle where you could...
It was either expensive, expensive designer.
I used to get my suits from Jasper Conrad for the high end.
And they were on King's Road?
No, no, no.
Up the road.
He had this place by the Michelin.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
So not so far away.
But there was either the high end or there was the bottom.
But there wasn't that thing where you can go to...
Zara now, or all those shops where you can get versions of posh stuff, but really cheaply.
Yeah, there wasn't that didn't exist.
So then you had your TV thing, and...
What happened to that?
Why did that stop?
Well, it started in 2000.
And then I always see that careers go in 10-year cycles.
And then we have an epiphany or we're rejected and we have to kind of start over.
So I kind of felt the column was a seven-year column and that went into us writing books.
And then we did telly and started in 2000.
And in 2010, we were no longer doing things in the UK. We kind of had this...
On BBC Two, then our audience got too big for BBC Two after two years.
So we went to BBC One.
We did that for three years.
And then the BBC wouldn't let us do any commercial deals whatsoever.
So we were paid okay, but it's like we had a couple of commercial deals and they said, no, you can't promote coffee.
So our agent said, look, ITV have asked for you for three years.
Let's go there.
And then it allows you actually to control your own destiny and to do things.
And also if you want to do a commercial deal, do it.
So we then moved and we did three...
Or four years with ITV. And in that fourth year, ITV wanted us to do more ITV type things and The Great British Body was a show we did with them and I couldn't bear that show.
A bit tacky.
So yeah, it was just a little too...
It's obvious.
I loved a journey with a woman to transform her and give her confidence.
That's my favourite thing.
But when that was all going tits up in the UK and really there was then Gok Wan and all these other people who were coming into that space who were exciting and fun and different...
And being commissioned on English TV shows.
We took a tiny show we'd done because we had a magic knicker company that was out of Belgium.
And the Belgian said, will you make a TV show in Belgium to support the knicker company?
And as we were suddenly going from...
You know, flavour of the month to nothing.
You take what's offered totally and you kind of have a mortgage, you have kids, you have, you know, we were both kind of main breadwinners in our family.
So it was okay, let's go to Belgium and make this show.
So we did it.
And they took that tiny show to MIPCOM, which is the TV conference in Cannes.
And then our agent called us up and said they want the show in 16 or 10 countries.
And I thought they just wanted to buy the format.
But they said, no, they want you to go make those shows.
So then Susanna and I went from doing nothing in England to leaving Heathrow Airport on a Sunday night, working five days in a country, coming back on a Friday night.
And we did that for two and a half years, for nine months a year.
And we did Israel, India, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark.
Were you doing...
Shows in individual countries?
In individual countries.
That must have been knackering.
It was very knackering.
I probably, you know, I earned a tenth of what I'd earned before, but we were working.
And there was a certain, some of the shows were very reliant on the sponsor, so they wanted us only to use clothes from one or two people, which I can't bear.
I hate to be compromised in my...
What I want to feel is best for a woman.
So I found those shows difficult.
But other shows were...
Like when we went to Israel, it was tremendously exciting because Israel is a hotbed of people, all different nationalities, who converge on this country to start their life again.
So one week we were in a kibbutz dealing with 70-year-old people who'd literally helped to form Israel.
And when they'd been there in the late 40s to have any vanity, it was like you would...
To toiling the soil.
You know, you were tending the fields.
Vanity was like, you've got to be killing.
So for the first time in their lives, they were being...
Yes, like we had this lovely scene in a kibbutz.
I mean, I can think of this in lots of different countries, but I was in Be'er Sheva in a kibbutz, and there were these...
We were sitting in a circle, and all the women were in trousers and an old jumper they knitted.
And I said, you know, I want you all for Shabbat to maybe...
How do you feel about wearing a dress?
And they're like, no, no, no.
And then I had all the men who were sitting there and I said, how would you feel if the ladies were in a dress?
And there was like silence.
And then one man went, I'd love that.
I haven't seen a woman in a dress for 30 years.
It's like that kind of thing.
And then we sort of did a whole mixture of clothes that were right for these women.
But there was that wonderful moment when they all went in for supper on Friday.
And all these women went in.
And these men for 40 years who'd lived on this good books with these women had never seen these women putting their vanity first.
And so I got moments like that.
And then I would be the next month in Australia with a girl who had fled...
From a beating up husband.
She'd been in Kenya.
She'd gone to Geneva.
Her husband was in the diplomatic corps and he had beat her up every day.
And she finally escaped to Canberra where her sister was a diplomat.
And I met her in this beautiful botanical gardens in Canberra.
And there she was.
She was a black girl in black.
And, you know, I spent time with her getting to know her, and we never were told...
Susanne and I never wanted to be told about the person.
We wanted to discover that live on camera, because we never do scripts.
It's everything...
This is why I didn't research.
Because, actually, I want to find out this shit from...
Live!
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
And that was kind of...
That's so important.
Also, I'm lazy, by the way.
There's something to be said for that, too.
But...
So I remember with this woman and she, you know, there was a moment when she was just saying about her journey and then she took off all her clothes and her whole back was covered in whips.
You know, she'd been whipped for like five years and it was just, you know, there's women I met all around the world who had either been on an unbelievably traumatic journey and They were ready emotionally to then show themselves to the world.
So, you know, for her, it was about she had never worn colour since she'd met that man.
And when I met her, she was still wearing black.
And her thing to wear colour was a very symbolic thing for her to say, I put it behind me now.
I have my life in Australia.
I'm ready to move forward.
So that was quite a big, you know, those things stay with you.
Yeah.
And so I... It taught me so much those three years because I made over thousands of women.
I also knew that it didn't matter what country you were in, there were issues emotionally that were similar issues for women and the confidence they might feel or not feel to be able to decide to want to be a different kind of woman.
All of that was in my head when I then, you know, decided my next stage of my career.
And I think we just glean stuff.
We then are presented with, you know, then that TV sort of, Suzanne and I were like, we hardly saw our children.
You know, I saw my daughter at weekends.
There was a sense that I can't travel like I've been traveling.
Even if it pays the mortgage, it has to be another way.
And I'd always wanted to start traveling.
A brand.
We're going to come on to that.
I want to rewind, first of all, because I think you and I are roughly the same age.
Yeah, I'm 64 when you're born.
65, yeah, yeah.
So we are the same age.
Now, I reckon unless you're exceptionally freakishly lucky, you can't get to our age without having had setbacks.
Oh, yeah.
You know how when you're young, you think everything's going to run on rails, and you know you're going to be famous, and you know you're going to be rich, and you know you're going to be happy, and actually life...
doesn't let you have all those things without a real fight. - Yeah. - And I've certainly had this, but I don't know, one day I might even talk about it, but I was thinking of that moment where you and Trini, sorry, you and Susanna were this massive thing.
You were the face of women's fashion on TV, weren't you really?
Everyone knew who you were.
And then suddenly you went out of fashion.
TV decided it didn't want you anymore.
How did that feel, first of all?
I think that...
The transition was gentle because we stopped in the UK, but then we had going abroad.
But for a tenth of what you were earning.
Yeah, but what I liked about that, James, I have to say, is I got to a stage...
Before we stopped working in England, where, you know, certain things would be in the public domain.
And it was that I didn't particularly love that I'd walk out somewhere and there would be a photographer.
I've never liked that.
Suzanne and I weren't 20 discovering Fame, Fortune.
We were like 32.
But you were quite a big thing.
I mean, were you recognised everywhere and fated?
To an extent.
I've never...
I've never been a sociable, let me go and hang with the showbiz crowd.
That's never been me.
But there was just, you know, like, I remember after giving birth to Lila, Daily Mirror people in my garden to see, you know, that I was wearing cracky bottoms and had to sit down in front.
You know, that kind of stuff.
That's quite big.
Tabloid big.
A little tabloid moment.
So by then having, you know...
Working abroad and living in England, even though it was stressful, I kind of loved the balance because nobody then, you know, knew us in England.
And I've never been somebody who was, oh my God, nobody recognising the streets anymore.
I always found it difficult when people did.
Not difficult that I would never want people to feel they couldn't come up and say hi, because I have that a bit again now.
But I'd always feel embarrassed.
I'd always feel a bit embarrassed.
And, you know, I remember walking down the street and somebody was all going to say, Trini, do you know everyone stops and looks back?
And I was like, oh, I wish you hadn't told me that.
Because there's part of me that feels...
You know, when I was very young, I was really, really shy.
And sometimes people who are quite shy, you seem distant.
You have that kind of shy distance and then you have the in the corner high distance, you know, shy.
And I was that kind of can look old, but I'm just feeling a bit shy.
Like I go to parties and sit in the loo for 20 minutes because I think, oh, my God, I can't talk to people.
There's a part of me that is that person.
Yeah, was was that person.
So that transition, going back to your question of being out of England filming, but back in England living was lovely.
But then I got to a stage where, you know, even abroad, we could have got a few more series out of it.
Suzanne and I were exhausted and that made moment to make a decision so I'm going to reject any work that might be on the table live on a very small residue of book earnings so my salary went down like 95% by this stage have extended myself overextended myself in a mortgage in a house which I knew I couldn't afford and every month I was thinking how am I going to pay the bills and school fees Yeah.
You know, all of that crashing upon you and at that moment deciding, let me start a business.
See, this is one of the many reasons why I love and adore you and worship you because you really are impressive.
You've built up this business.
I mean, you're the new Coco Chanel.
Yeah.
I'm the antithesis of Coco Chanel, but I think it's the art of reinvention.
She's quite famous.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
But I mean, the only way I'd be like her is the art of reinvention of that brand.
Why don't you like Coco Chanel?
I love Coco Chanel, but I kind of say...
I know where you're coming from, James, and you're just saying that it's, you know...
No, I really am a successful entrepreneur.
My little brothers are successful entrepreneurs.
I know how much work you have to put into it to be successful, and I know that you've put in that work, because you're always turning up late for dinner and stuff like that, and you've been to Milan or wherever, and you've been doing proper grown-up things.
It amazes me.
We can't see it where we're filming, but you've got this...
What are they called?
The boards where you plan out your...
This is a board which has on it...
We're in the project room at Trinity London.
And we moved in here in March, I think.
And when we moved, we were in a tiny house before with like 20 of us.
And literally, you know when you're doing a start-up, you...
I remember having the man who had to do my key man insurance and I had the meeting with him sitting on the loo and he was in the bath because there was no room.
Somebody would get up from the table in the middle and somebody else would take their seat and they didn't have a table for the rest of the day.
So we moved here in March.
Beautiful offices.
We now need to get another office because we're too many people in here.
So that's exciting.
Well, yeah, I mean, you're actually off the King's Road, which is like, I don't know what the rents are here, but...
Well, we got a very good deal, actually, because this street was going to be a part of Crossrail.
Oh, yeah.
So the property we are in, it was, at some stage, they didn't know if they were going to have to say, actually, we've got to flatten that for the air duct.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we actually got a great deal.
That's what my brother did with his first office.
Again, it was going to be redeveloped, so he got it quite cheap and it was quite scuzzy.
But nevertheless, Chelsea...
But also the brand.
So what's interesting is when you're building a brand, you think, what is...
What is that brand?
And when I first had the idea, what came first?
So, you know, I'm sitting there and in all the years that I was going in all those countries, I would take all my makeup, I'd put it in little Muji pots, I'd mush together different foundations to get the right shade.
I'd create my own kind of formulas and colours that I like.
And I'd be in a loo and a woman would say, what's that?
And I'd go, this is my makeup bag, this little...
stack at the Fast Incarnation and she'd go, "Where can I buy it?" and I think, "Oh Trini, when are you going to take the idea out of your head and put it on the kitchen table?" You know, many women, men, they have an idea and it's like, when do you bring it out of the safety of being inside your head and then expose it, challenge it, critique it and try
So I had that for about three years of kind of doing the TV shows and thinking, I want to do this.
Then even trying another idea before I tried it.
Because I kind of thought, once I got to that idea, I knew I had to put my all in it.
So it was like I wanted to try all the other things first to realize, in fact, Trini, you should be doing that.
And it took somebody else to say to me, you know, at a dinner one evening, you talked about this other idea and whatever, and then you talked about this, the Trinity London at the end.
Trinity, why on earth are you contemplating anything else?
Because the passion and your eyes coming alive, I haven't seen that in years from you.
You have to do that.
So, the concept is that it's kind of like...
Semi-DIY makeup?
No, it's not at all.
No.
I love this, James.
I mean, I even sent Tiffany some makeup.
So she would know it.
Yeah, because you were a bum man.
You're a man.
I'm going to describe it to you.
When a woman makes up her face, she might use a number of products to get there.
So she might use something to make her skin even, which you could call a foundation or a tinted moisturizer.
She might cover a spot with a concealer.
She might put on a little eye shade and To just enhance the colour of her eye.
She might put a little lip tint on or lipstick on and some blusher.
That makes her face up.
Your wife doesn't wear much makeup and I think you're the kind of man who loves a woman to look like she's just come in from a lovely walk and she's fresh.
I kind of love that too but I think there are many women who don't feel when they get out of bed they look like that and for me I wanted something where you could very easily Just literally, I'm going to open a little pot now so I could do under my eye, close it up, that's my foundation that's in that little pot.
It's all cream based, do it with my fingers.
I could open up the next one and I could say, let me put the blusher on and I'll put the blusher on.
I could open up the next one and just say, let me do my eye shade.
Oh, there's something I can do my eye shade with.
And just put that on my eye like that.
And those...
Those stacks.
Is that a thing that nobody else does?
Nobody else does that.
And each one is a little pot.
So we have 80 different pots in 13 categories of makeup.
And women, you know, buy that, build their stack, and then have their makeup in their hand instead of in a big handbag.
So that's...
No, I can see.
It's really good.
It's a really good idea.
I know you know it's a good idea, but I'm impressed.
It's simple.
But then, so I kind of, that was my original idea.
Yeah.
All right, that's my idea.
And then I remember going with Charles every week and we'd go into Selfridges and stuff before lunch on Saturday.
And I'd look and I'd think, where would I want my brand to sit?
Because you have to vision...
Where you want it to be.
And I had started seeing this sweet little meditation man.
He said, really?
Imagine it's already there.
Imagine people opening the boxes.
Imagine it going on a conveyor belt as it's being made.
You know, imagine women using it.
So I was in Selfridges imagining where would I be in Selfridges.
And I kept thinking, yes, I could be there, but am I that?
Do I want to be that?
There's something about where we're at today in terms of how we buy and decisions we make compared to when all those brands started.
And I made that decision.
And I thought, I want to be online.
So if I want to be online and I want to be direct to consumer, how do I get a woman who might not be, let's say I think my average customer is like 35 to 50, 60.
That's my kind of customer.
I mean, my customer's stretch is actually from sort of 18 to 80.
But let's say that's the meat of the primary audience.
Then, you know, she's really still shops.
You know, her daughter does a lot of stuff online and will go out with her girlfriends, you know, to kind of Urban Decay or whatever they might do.
But she shops.
She goes to Peter Jones and she goes to Bobbi Brown and she tries a foundation.
There's a lot of frustration when she goes there because she might see 98 foundations and think, which texture should I buy?
She might see 200 lipsticks at MAC and think, what colour am I? Yeah.
And she might not trust the girl behind the counter who she can't identify with to say, actually, you suit this.
Because she might not like the look of how that person is to be able to advise her.
So I knew from those 3,000 women I made over all the issues they found about buying makeup.
So then I thought, okay, can I try and find a system online where you can go in and say, this is me.
And we say, this is the makeup you suit.
So it's not just, this is your makeup.
It's like, this is what you, with your skin, hair, and eye combination, this is what you suit.
Yeah.
So to do that, I started getting women in the bathroom with Shasha, who's our makeup artist.
And we started making over women.
And whenever we made them over, we had a chart of our 70 products.
And we put in which ones they suited and didn't suit.
And so that process was about 500 or 700 women that were made over.
And we said, where do they fit?
So from that, we created an algorithm.
And we did some data, you know, data learning.
And we said, okay, where are the clusters?
So if you are a blonde hair with an olive skin and a brown eye, you suit these colours and this woman suits these.
And you start to build up little clusters and communities in your algorithm that give you a sense that you can then do a front-end little thing.
And how can you make that so simple so a woman finds it easy to navigate?
You go in and you say, what's your eye colour?
Every woman knows your eye colour.
Okay, put it in your eye colour.
What's your hair colour?
We show you colours of hair, put it in.
What's your skin colour?
It's like sitting at the hairdress and saying, I want this done.
And it's very subjective.
You know, how we describe something is sometimes very different from somebody else.
So it's finding, you know, we have women doing videos saying, I have this skin.
This means when I go in the sun, I'll burn after 10 minutes.
It means that I can easily get pinkness on my neck.
So we told some things that we felt, this is really a characteristic of this skin, so it's easy.
So then she's chosen her skin, her and I, and then we go, and then she pressed the button that matched me, and then we go, hi Mary, you sued 40 of our 80 products, and now if you want to, you can build a stack or you can buy them individually.
So, we then started to get, you know, when we launched, my big thing was, will they do match to me?
Will they want to go and see it in a shop?
So, we launched, and because I'd chatted on social and I'd sort of built up this, like, social media thing, many women who'd never, ever, ever bought makeup online before trusted it.
And trust is a huge thing.
Right.
Trust is the biggest thing online.
So, I imagine there were doubters.
Oh yes.
I mean, because raising money is never easy, is it?
Raising money is incredibly difficult.
Why are people saying...
I remember one stage where you were trying to raise money.
I was thinking, God, if I had a hundred grand spare, I would so have put it in there.
So bloody obvious that it's going to work.
But it's not like that, is it, out in the fundraising world?
Everyone's spending their money on crap instead.
Well, no, they're not necessarily spending their money on crap.
They're spending their money on trends they see in the market that they feel, I want to be the next Uber.
I want to be the next this.
Yeah, but they should have looked at you.
Come on.
I mean, you had so much hinterland and...
I did, but I think I was, when I first went out in my first fundraise, it took me a long time to get to an investor who then understood the proposition.
And before that, I went to investors who were too tech, so I would go to people like Boulderton and the guy, I can't remember his Frenchman, very nice Frenchman, he said, really, I like it, but can you not separate out the technology and offer all the different companies and you make it a database to offer, you know, people, I want a blusher, which is the best one, which is something I did actually in 99 as a first internet business.
Right.
It was too early.
Or can you take your product and sell it in a shop?
But not the two together.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
And I was like, but the two together is what makes it unique.
Right.
So please understand it.
He went in there.
So many, list and list.
You know, you call up friends of friends of friends, six degrees separation.
Do you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody?
So I tried angel investors.
I tried, you know, high net worths as well.
You know, high net worths fall into two categories.
Some of them I knew and some I didn't.
So high net worths for the audience are just individuals who invest themselves personally as opposed to an institution.
So, they can either have a financial advisor who suggests to them and they act as the kind of bodyguard to that person's money and they say, you know, what you should invest in.
Or they're a kind of serial entrepreneur themselves and they like now to take some of the profits they made from their business and invest in other things.
So, those people would, you know, some of them want to...
Follow a little set of their friends and see what are they investing in because they don't necessarily have the confidence to make that investment themselves so they'll go with the crowd so it's like oh no it's all about we're going to go into the delivery equivalent now we're going to go into fintech we're not going to go into a product which could nearly be in a shop we need to get as far away from that as possible if we're investing online so there was a few of that there were one or two people Those initial people who said to me,
Trini, I'm interested, were investing in me because they knew how I worked and they knew I'd give it my all.
So people who I knew...
I would say, Trini, I trust that you will really work it to make it work.
But they still were saying, and then I remember one day I went to see Unilever Ventures, which is a VCR of Unilever.
They invest totally separately.
They don't buy businesses afterwards.
They just want to see what's in the market, invest in interesting things.
And I remember going in that meeting, and I'd been in meetings before where...
You know, a friend of mine who was in the meetings with me would say, Trini, you can tell by body language if people are going to mess or not.
And I'd been to a meeting where there were seven men and one woman.
And the men were sitting, cross-legged, I mean, you know, leg one across the other, arms clasped, you know, hands clasped behind their back.
Is that a bad sign?
Leaning back.
That's like...
Bored.
Bored.
No, that's like, I'm not...
This is not for me.
And in this circle was one woman, Camilla, and she was like this...
Because she got it.
Because she was a woman.
She's your species.
Your species, my God, you're old-fashioned as you call it.
Your species, Jane!
Please let me hit you on the head now by saying that word.
Okay, so...
Ooh, do it again.
God, I'm going down a really bad route now.
So, I remember in that meeting thinking, I just need to get in front of more female investors who will get it.
Yeah.
And at Unilever, it was run by a man, Olivier, but there was a lovely woman there, Anna, who's actually now on my board, and another woman.
And they were leaning forward, and I knew they were thinking, I would use this, I like this, and I invest in tech.
And I remember leaving that meeting, and...
I knew they would email back and say, I'm interested to hear more.
So that's Lila.
So it was still a process.
You know, it wasn't like we left the meeting and they said, here's a million.
It was we left the meeting and they said, okay, can you now see our data analysts?
We want to check your figures on this.
There was a lot of that, which is what you need to do when you're making investments.
Sorry, I'm just putting it on the airplane.
Yeah.
But then once they got it, then those other high net worths had an element of reassurance.
Here was an institution investing in it, and then it happened.
So that was fine.
Second round, so we launch, we have nice figures, we've got growth.
Second round, I remember we went out in like March and April, and our figures for March and April were not brilliant in terms of new customer growth.
And that took us a while.
It took till Christmas to get that investment.
But by the time we got that investment at Christmas, there's a moment when you're starting a company where you're in so startup mode and you're thinking every day, my God, you know...
Are enough people hearing about it?
Are we growing right?
Are we getting enough new customers?
I was very excited that very quickly we shipped to 58 countries.
I thought this is amazing.
But also we had 50% new customers coming per month and 50% returning.
And I realized...
Actually, after you follow something called cohorts, which is when somebody buys originally, when do they come back and buy again?
You know, how strong is your cohort data?
That's a really important thing when you're looking and analysing a business because you want to know, is there a high chance your customer base?
Or do they come back?
And when they come back, how often do they come back and how many of them come back?
And then at the same time, you want a lot of your old customers coming back.
You want more new customers coming into it.
So in 18 months time, those are of the old customers coming back and it supports, it becomes the foundation stone of your building a business.
So I would say we turned that around at Christmas, last Christmas.
So now, you know, we are at six times multiple from this time last year.
Six times?
That's good growth, isn't it?
Yeah, this is great growth.
So this now, for me, I don't now have that panic of, oh my god, Are we going to get there?
Can we do another?
You know, I feel now for the first time, and I could just eat my own hat, but I feel I'm going to go, you know, do another round because I want to, you know, when I raise money now, it's only for growth because we've broken even as a brand.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We broke even in under two years, which I felt great.
You know, that was a very important thing.
That's really unusual.
And that was an important thing to do.
And there's a lot, but there's a, you say it's unusual, but then there's many investors still.
This is getting technical, but I find it interesting.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
But there's many investors who want people who are just, you know, I see a lot of online businesses which are far more fintech, but there's millions and millions and millions going into that business.
They might not break even or make a profit for years.
We can look at some very big household names that are not making profit, but they're growing a huge customer base.
So a lot of people look at the big balloon at the end, you know?
And for me, I knew...
That the business I want to grow, the traditional elements of what I want to grow around my business were that we should be self-sufficient within a period of time so that we have this old-fashioned approach in a weird way to main tech investments that we want.
We feel really good.
We broke even because all the money we raise now, we want to be entirely for aggressive growth.
But we know if we didn't have it, we wouldn't go under tomorrow.
We're a business.
So that's what I know I want in my heart.
It's not what every investor wants.
That is really exciting.
So, now that the world's your lobster, you could be massive.
Imagine that you are the new Khloe Kardashian, let's say.
That means you're going to be worth a billion.
You're going to be a billionaire, maybe.
How would you...
Is that going to change your behaviour?
I'll tell you what's really interesting when you say that, because I had, from some sweet person, they gave me all the figures of Kylie...
Oh, it's Kylie, not Chloe.
Kylie Cosmetics.
My ignorance?
And I looked at it and I thought, because there's a deal on the table that somebody's...
I can't...
But I became aware of some really interesting information.
And I was reading it and thinking, oh my god, you know, she has 178 million followers on Instagram.
And they look at a lot of the value of her business against her following, which is the way now that businesses do that comparable.
And I also know in that brand, it's profoundly successful and it's got revenues of 400 million a year.
And will it be here in 10 years?
I don't know.
Okay.
I don't know.
So, do I want to be Kylie or do I want to be Estee Lauder?
I want to be Estee Lauder.
You're Estee Lauder?
Or Ralph Lauren.
Have you seen that documentary?
I saw that documentary, yes.
I mean, I thought it was going to be awful because it was made by Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair.
I think it's going to be a vanity project.
But what an extraordinary man.
I just really admired him.
All the more, they made a deal about him being Ralph Lifshitz or whatever.
He's an ordinary Jewish guy.
That is what makes his story ten times more exciting.
Because he's become this kind of wasp.
Iconic.
Iconic.
Yes.
And so many clever things.
As you were talking about your business, I was thinking, yeah, although it is online, but actually, I've just...
When I came in, the first thing I saw were all these people going into your make-up.
A pop-up here, yes.
Your pop-up.
We have a studio here.
And actually, you'd be doing a disservice to the nation if you didn't have little pop-up places.
Oh, that is crucial, because there's always a woman who I talk to every day on social who...
We'll never be able to go online and buy.
And I don't want her to not be able to have access to us.
So we have Fenwick in Bond Street and Newcastle and Brink Cross.
And we have our pop-up here.
But with all of them, you can walk in.
Us, you walk in Tuesday, it's Sunday.
But you can go online because I like this connection.
So you go on to Trinity London, you go to visit us, but you book an appointment.
45 minutes.
So I want to treat you so differently if you come in store.
I want you to have an experience.
I don't want you to feel you pop up to a counter and nobody cares about you.
So when you go into the Fennec and Bond Street, we're the busiest stand there because there's so many women as well who are already in the chair because they've booked online.
So if you come in as a customer to Fennec, you're thinking, why is that stand so busy?
Yeah.
You know, so I wanted always to create that atmosphere in store.
That it's like, you think, what is that that it's so different?
It's a buzz.
Like a pop-up thing.
Like, what's it called?
Supreme.
Supreme.
I queued for two hours in Paris for Lila to go into bloody Supreme.
I said, well, go to the Picasso Museum.
You know, if you want to go to Supreme, you're going to come with me to the museum.
The kids have it so much easier now, though.
We never had pop-ups like Supreme.
We had to make our own entertainment back in the day.
How do you think Charles is going to take it if you end up richer than him?
Do you think you'd be gracious?
I think you'd be overjoyed, really.
Good.
Yeah!
Because you don't want to be in that Mick Jagger situation where he had that girlfriend who he was kind of supporting her project and the project didn't go well.
I mean, that's kind of...
But you see, I've never ever been that woman, James.
I've never ever relied, you know...
I think in my very early 20s, I did.
I went out with somebody who was quite wealthy and I kind of, you know, I lived in their home and I didn't earn very much money.
And then when I was about 26, I kind of woke up one day, a lot of...
I had real difficulties in my 20s, but I woke up one day and I thought I never, ever, ever want to be dependent on anyone else for myself.
Because it just, you know, when you're in that situation, it's tricky.
So since that moment...
And since I started earning my own money, I never have been irrelevant of who I might be going out with.
It's been a thing for my personal thing that I can't because it's also a control issue.
You know, it's one of the most important things is if somebody else slightly controls your financial situation, there is an indebtedness to that situation.
And it could be...
In some ways, that's...
You know, I have friends of mine who are wives who decided to be mums and not have a career, and therefore they live through the salary of their husband.
But it's a very equal partnership.
They contribute a tremendous...
You know, there's an equal contribution to that, which is then paid back.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So when you're a career woman and you go out with somebody...
For me as a career woman, I want to know that I am totally, totally autonomous.
It's like the most important thing for me.
Yeah, and you are.
I've seen it.
And it's added to the list of things that really impress me about you.
I was thinking, well, if you're going out with Charles Sartre, you don't need to have a job, really, probably.
But actually...
But I find the fact you say that, James...
Am I being so sexist?
No, it's worse than being sexist, actually.
The presumption in that statement to me is just utterly...
Antidiluvian.
Too big a word for me to understand.
Right.
Before the flood.
Oh, alright.
But I was catching it in the manner of it being a good thing rather than an impressive thing.
I know you are.
I know you are.
But I think it's a...
And it's an obvious thing.
I remember when I first was starting Trini London, and I did one interview.
It was the only interview I've ever done since Trini London's launch, where I just wanted to call up the editor and say, really, did you have to be so hackneyed in your approach?
And she put the cover.
It was on the Saturday Times.
A nice picture of me, and it was like...
You know, I'm not a kept woman was the headline for somebody, you know, raising money, starting their own business.
And it's like, that was the headline.
And I just thought, how insulting that you as a female editor thought, hey, let's just go with the quick default.
Yeah.
Just like...
Am I being rebuked here?
No, I'm just saying how I feel about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, it just...
Sure.
Yeah.
That's all right.
So...
If you've got unlimited resources, which I believe you will do one day, what is your killer luxury going to be?
I would say that...
At the moment I don't own a house because I had to sell my house because I needed to kill my overheads because I was starting the business and I was paying myself a very small salary and I needed to be able to pay Lila's school fees, do all the stuff I need to do.
So I then sold quite a few of my clothes, raised some money, kept me going until the fundraise.
So I would love to own a house.
Yes.
Okay, it's a really simple thing.
I live with my partner and share his home with him and his daughter and Lila and Phoebe's husband.
And I would just love to have my own property, not that I want to stay in it, but just to own a house.
It's the simplest thing, but it's something that my parents...
Before they died, had to sell their property to have money to live.
I saw what that did to a couple in their 70s.
It's very, very unsettling.
In France, that would be very different because in France, a large proportion of people rent and don't own a property.
In England, it's much harder here to own a property because it's so much harder to get on the property ladder.
To me, it's still, as an old-fashioned person, It's a symbol that I've done okay if I own my own property without a mortgage.
I'm totally with you.
We have the same problem, as you know, that we don't own a property.
Of all the things that eats me up and haunts me in my life, I would say that is the number one.
But should it?
You see, having this conversation...
We're English.
We're English, yes.
But if we...
I mean, I think, to me, the thing about owning your own property is you think, if everything failed, I still have a roof over my head that I don't pay rent on that I could live in.
So even if I was earning £100 a week, I have a roof over my head.
That takes us back to our biggest fears, not having a roof over our head.
But if you were in another country where many people don't own their own home, there wouldn't be that thought around it.
Yeah, but we're not.
That's the thing.
We've got this stuff running through us.
An Englishman's home is his castle.
And it is partly that.
Because having gone through this, I know the sort of mental processes.
And it's not about...
I don't want to own a property in order for if everything goes tits up, I've still got somewhere to live.
It's not about that.
It's about something that is yours, that you can...
Decorate as you wish.
You've got a piece of land to go with it.
This is yours and no one can take it away from you.
And the biggest regret in my life is selling our house.
I mean, I did it because I went mad, but that's another story.
But definitely...
How much do you live in your regrets, James?
Oh, not very much, actually.
No, really not very much.
Good, good.
Because I think it's like a...
You know what the thing I've learnt most from Charles?
Is to live in the now.
It's a really interesting thing to live in the now.
And in a way, and this analogy he would hate, if you think of Thich Nhat Khan, you know, the road to mindfulness, those kind of meditation gurus, it's about living in the now.
So it's not should, would, could.
It's not, oh my goodness, I've lost my home.
It's not, will I have a house over my head?
head it's right now is the most important time in my life and what's happening what what planets are orbiting totally time so so i think as much as i when you asked me that original question of you know do i imagine tremendous riches yeah i kind of think well i would love to own a home and i would love to feel that i don't have to rely on anyone else in my old age because my mother who's got to a stage where she is relying on my brother sister and i
and when you are also the parent to a single child that sense of responsibility that that child is enormous yeah and also it's it prevents you being totally who you want to be when you want to be etc if you're relying on a child to help you stay alive okay these just
So when I think about things like that, I just want to be independent in thought and in finances so that I never have to have that sense that I'm a burden to somebody or they're a burden to me or vice versa and that I'm in control.
I think that you're lucky, though.
One of the things I envy you about being an entrepreneur, because my brother has the same thing, is that you do live in the now, because you're constantly...
You have to.
You're firefighting.
Yes, you are.
Whereas I'm...
You say, do I drive the past?
Not really.
I don't sit there feeling sorry for myself.
I am slightly of the jam tomorrow mindset.
So I'm always thinking of...
For example, I'm always thinking about the moment when I can...
I shouldn't say this on tape because I get found out but I always think about when I can afford my own hunter and possibly to pay a groom to look after my hunter and then It's like a man in London saying, when can I afford the Tesla?
Okay?
Yeah, I'd never get a Tesla.
No, but I'm just saying, for the man in London who wants the Tesla, I'm just going to give that as your safe out analogy.
Yeah.
But there's an ulterior motive about wanting a hunter, which is that Tiffany's banned me from hunting because of my bad accidents.
And I was thinking, if I've got my own hunter...
It kind of would seem wrong not to...
Then you're really going down this...
Yeah, I am!
I'm not saying I'm not flawed, but that's how I think.
But one thing I hope I've picked up from talking to you about this is that actually what I really need to be doing is getting my app together with projects that will enable me to What's more important, the hunter or the down payment for the property fund?
Oh, the property's more important.
That's not just for me, it's for my wife, you know, family and stuff.
So obviously that has to come first.
But I do think I deserve a hunter.
I'm not even going to take you on this journey.
Because no, I have a special bond with horses.
Do you not then want to be the groom for somebody else who has a hunter and you can bond their horse?
No, no, no, no.
Because I like the...
Just saying, I like horses.
Every week, one of the things I do almost religiously, I go riding once a week and I sort of barge things out of my schedule to make space for this thing.
That's my living in the now of things.
I know it makes me happy.
And I know that the horses like being with me because I have a sort of special horsey...
Horse with skill, which I never knew I had.
That's a weird thing, actually, because I didn't grow up with horses.
I'm not from a horsey family, and I like that relationship you have with the horse.
So that's my living in the...
So no one's taking that away from me, but I'd like to take it on to the next stage.
So just before we finish, because...
Tell me how low you went.
You sold your house.
How desperate were things before it all got better?
Before I rented out my house, because I lived in it, then I was really thinking, how can I pay next month's bills?
And I was just cutting, cutting, cutting any of the excess.
So I stopped shopping for clothes, because that's my passion.
I kind of thought...
You know, extravagances I can't afford are like a dog walker.
That sounds a very high-class problem, but I travelled a lot, so I had somebody to walk Lily and I thought, no, that's good.
And then I won't do the Pilates because I can go in the park with Lily and do everything at once.
That would be awful for me.
That would be a real sign if I couldn't go to my Pilates class.
But these are high-class things.
Anyone listening, you might think, oh my God.
But I'm just giving the reality of it.
That I... I knew I couldn't go on holiday, so I didn't go on holiday.
That I had to kind of explain to Lila.
I'd never want to deny her anything.
She wasn't that spoiled.
But I just like...
She'd never go in a shop, Lila, and say, can I have that mummy?
She's not been that kind of kid.
But I felt the need to say, Bunny, we're not going to go on holiday because finances are tight.
And to share that with her.
And she was only about...
She was 9, 10 when that happened.
So...
So that's because, you know, my parents would never let me in on our financial circumstances changing.
It wouldn't have been a thing when they were in that situation.
My dad went through that two or three times in my life where suddenly things were really tight.
And we were never told as children we just suddenly would be living in a different house or, you know.
So I think having grown up with that real rollercoaster of income coming into a household and then not...
I think I just wanted to be clear with Lila.
You know, we're not going to go on, whatever it might be, just so that she kind of did have quite a little bit of an understanding around it.
And then it was like, when you take action, it gets better.
So I thought, okay, I've got to rent out the house and let me rent somewhere else.
So I rented somewhere else.
That then became my office, all at the same time I then moved in with Charles.
I've been out with him for about two years.
And then I knew I had to sell the house because I knew that the, you know, my mortgage was coming up.
It was a set term.
I wouldn't be able.
So I knew I had to sell it before the mortgage came up.
So there was like that pressure.
I didn't want to drop on the price.
It was a difficult time to sell it.
But I just thought I have to sell it.
So when I didn't get exactly the price I wanted because it would give me a little bit of cash and it gave me half the cash after the mortgage was paid.
I just thought, you know what?
I just have to be debt free.
And so I thought I'll take that amount and have half in the bank that I thought I would have.
So things like that are kind of...
You know, it's a decision a lot of people have had to go through.
It was like the moment where Ralph Lauren almost had cash flow problems and got rescued.
Yeah, he got rescued.
Because Bloomingdale's rescued him.
Yeah.
Which was fantastic and which we didn't really know, did we?
No.
And we don't know how much Bloomingdale's own of Ralph Lauren.
No, we don't.
That was never disclosed in it either.
No, no, no.
I don't know if he paid the money back to Bloomingdale's, he didn't want them as an investor, or if they were an investor.
Who knows?
Yeah.
Actually, I have to ask you one more thing.
What am I doing wrong, now I've got you, with my clothes?
Okay, so for those of you who've never seen James, I would say that James is...
There is a thing I believe about Matt James, and I'm going to throw it at you.
Elements to do with physical appearance which are different in men and women.
So my belief, just having made over men and women for years, is that...
Women usually keep with a makeup that made them feel their most gorgeous.
So if they discovered that in the late 80s, you might find a woman in her 50s now still with a black eyeliner going round.
Because it was a thing that made her eyes light up.
And now maybe it closes down her eyes.
You know, there's certain habits she would have picked up and stuck with them.
That's what women do.
Men, how they dress...
It has a reflection on when they felt their most sexually successful, when they first encountered that moment.
So if I look at you now, you're wearing a sort of covered coat jacket.
It's probably as old as the 80s, 90s.
It's not that old.
But it has that feeling.
That was around when I saw those plummy boys going down the King's Road in 1981.
It's Sloan, Sloan Ranger.
It's a bit Sloan, you'll be in the Sloan book.
It's the shirt that's a little bit creased.
I don't want to look like it's too pristine.
It's the v-neck jumper.
It's a, you know, the jeans probably are far more modern than the wider jeans that would have been there.
And that's your concession to an ageless style.
Yeah.
And you've got on what we would call a Chelsea boot, kind of.
It's between an Australian riding boot and a Chelsea boot.
Probably expensive, but you could get it from Williams.
They are in Williams.
Okay, fine.
So you've done this look that...
And also...
Because you are a sportsman and you hunt and stuff, you've never, ever, ever had a weight issue impact on how you dress.
A lot of men have to adapt how they dress because they get a little belly or whatever, and that's never been you, so you're quite childlike.
You've always been quite childlike to me.
I always look at you and think, without my glasses on, you could still look 20.
Yes.
That's what I think of your dressing.
And I find that some people got a style in that 80s and it was a really bad style and they stuck with it.
You were a very cool dresser probably in the 80s and probably people looked at you and said, you're so cool, James.
I was.
I was a bit too cool for school.
Too cool for school and now you're classic.
Yeah.
You know, but you've taken all that that you've learnt in that time and you've honed it really well.
That's good.
Oh, so you say nice things.
Yes, I am.
It took me a long time for you to feel that.
No, but I was really nervous.
But actually, I tell you that everything you say is absolutely true and it's really clever.
But the other thing is, I had a period where I was the men's fashion correspondent of the times and I loved that period.
And I had various suits made for me.
It's Miyake Comme des Garçons?
No, they were more classic.
Sorry, I'm having a brain fog here.
Tell me what decade it was.
This was like...
About 15 years ago.
And the problem is that all the suits I've got from that period...
So Richard James?
Richard James?
It wasn't Richard James, it was...
I was also saying?
No, he's in Spitalfields.
What's he called?
Why can't I remember his...
He made this shirt as well.
Who made that shirt?
Okay, by the way.
I'm now undressing James.
Timothy Everest.
Timothy Everest, yeah.
Timothy Everest.
I love something else.
I don't know why I forgot his name.
Anyway, all the suits that I've got from that period, they're not that slim-fitted, not the Eddie Slimane look that became fashionable.
You know, transformed suits.
So I go around looking like an old man, and this hacking jacket is the only thing I've got which is not dated and not...
Okay.
That's the other thing.
So, after the house and the hunter, I'm going to get some of those slim...
Heady slimming.
Yeah, that kind of...
I mean, I think one needs those, doesn't one, in one's wardrobe as a chap, if you haven't got the guard, which I haven't.
We can end there, can we?
Savage.
Go and see Savage.
Tell me about Savage before we leave.
He's Savage or Savage, but he makes the most beautiful silhouette for a man, and I think he's off Savile Row.
Oh, okay.
Look him up.
Well, you've got me sorted.
Thank you, Trini.
That was really great.
And I love being...
I love being afraid because of my terrible sex...
Somebody's got to fight for the old ways, Trini.
James, I know where you're coming from.
Thank you.
Good.
You're listening to The Deli Pop with me, James Deli Pop, and my very special guest, Trini Woodall.
Trini London.
Buy your make-up from there if you're a girl.
I love Danny Paul.
I'll listen another time.
Subscribe with me.
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Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
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