A Career of Dreams with Triona McCarthy, from Manifesting the Goop Cruise and Attending the Venice Film Festival with Giorgio Armani
Inspired by Triona's trailblazing approach to fashion, beauty and entertainment, we explore beauty journalism through her eyes, with a special focus on fragrance storytelling online.
Hello Tech Powered Luxury listener, and now reader!
🎙️ This week, we are thrilled to bring you an exclusive interview with Triona McCarthy, the Irish trailblazer who has done everything from working as a fashion buyer to being one of the first print-media bloggers and writing her own beauty column for the Sunday Independent in Ireland.
🌟 Are you new here? Welcome to our amazing community - keep reading to discover everything about Tech Powered Luxury, our Community Rewards and how this newsletter came to life.
✨ I’m Beatriz Barros and I’m very excited to have you reading us today!
👀 TL;DR
A Leo from Schull, West Cork, in Ireland and the eldest girl of 8 siblings: this is Triona McCarthy. Triona's success underscores the importance of passion and adaptability in the beauty and fashion industry. By leveraging her unique background and experiences, Triona has crafted a distinct personal brand that resonates with her audience.
Triona McCarthy’s journey into beauty journalism started with a unique opportunity at the Sunday Independent. Her engaging first-person narrative and personalized approach redefined beauty journalism in Ireland.
From fragrance videos to engaging experiences online: we look at how brands are connecting to their consumers and leveraging gamification to gather preferences and provide personalized suggestions. Explore how Penhaligon’s, Aesop and Le Labo translate their brand values and identity into fragrance profilings.
💎 Exclusive Question 💎
Who has been your most unexpected mentor, and what did they teach you?
“Mentoring was not something I was aware of when I was a young wan! I’m not joking! It seemed like something that happened more in business or law or nursing or teaching and not a concept in the cutthroat world of journalism where everyone kept their contacts close to their Wonderbra — it was the 90s — it was the law that you wore one!
However, Melanie Morris, the editor of Image magazine, proved to be a shining example of what a mentor could be. Even though I had only ever written about beauty, she recognized my passion for fashion and gave me the opportunity to write a column called Wardrobe Mistress in the magazine.
Despite facing opposition from another publication that I was working for at the time, that forbid me from writing with anyone else, Melanie resolved the situation on my behalf. I was so deeply touched by her generosity and support, and have never forgotten her kindness as she remains one of my closest friends to this day.
Interestingly, my husband Will has also been a tremendous source of encouragement and support. He’s my biggest cheerleader. Always waving those invisible pom-poms. He was the first person to truly believe in me and tell me that I was “amazing, just the way you are!”
Hang on… is that a Bruno Mars song?!!
Will was a stark contrast to the constant criticism I had faced in the past, with people always urging me to change and conform, and be someone different.”
💄 On Triona McCarthy’s Beauty Journalism
Like with most people that have a career in fashion, there is always one point in your childhood or adolescence in which you hear or read somewhere about a designer, a specifc path someone took and how it landed them into being within the fashion ecosystem, opening up fashion as a real and pursuable career option.
Mine was reading an article on Vogue Brazil’s 2010-something edition in which they put a major focus on Central Saint Martin’s excellent fashion designer graduates, the beauty of their collections and how they were each innovating in their own niche. That for me was the moment of “ok, this is doable, this is how I get there.” Did I end up studying design at CSM? Nope, quite the contrary. By the time I had to choose a university the only thing I was 100% sure of was that I didn’t want to be a fashion designer.
But this is not about me. Triona McCarthy tells us about one of hers “ok, this is what I want to do when I grow up” moment:
“I was always reading that [Rob Lowe’s] girlfriends were always makeup artists and I used to think that's how I'll get my hands on him. I will become a makeup artist and then I'll go to Hollywood and I'll be doing his face and he's gonna lean over and we're going to get married and that's going to be it.
It didn't really happen like that. But I did go and study beauty therapy, with Bronwyn Conroy, because at the time in Ireland, there was nowhere to actually study to be a makeup artist. You had to do a full, beauty, therapist course: aesthetician.”
That’s how it started. She then pivoted to other areas of the fashion industry throughout her career, from window displays to fashion buying, but never let her beauty expertise go to waste.
Her journey to becoming the first beauty columnist for the Sunday Independent is another fun and fascinating story of seizing opportunities that led her to shaping a niche in the evolving landscape of media.
“I was friendly with the fashion editor of the Sunday Independent at the time, Constance Harris. And I would be like, ‘hey, have you seen this or try this’, you know?! She went on holidays and said, ‘do you wanna do my page while I'm gone?’ And I was like, ‘absolutely!’
I had no clue what I was doing. I did the shoot in the paper because it was before they had the magazine. I'm down there and I'm also doing the makeup and the hair and I'm styling it. And I had never worked on a shoot before. Here I am for the biggest selling newspaper in Ireland, and I'm just absolutely winging it!
Then I was saying to them, ‘guys, why don't you have a beauty column?’
So the editor at the time, Angus Fanning, says, “Okay. Why don't you write something about beauty?”
McCarthy's vivid, first-person narrative style and her idea to personalize the column with her own image, instead of using a random model picture that was unrelated to the products reviewed or the topic being discussed, conquered everyone.
She set the bar high for how beauty was being communicated in Ireland at the time, “I wanted to change how beauty columns were written, you know”, she says. That meant changing the photo for her own column every week to match the subject and to feature the products that were mentioned.
She notes, "I always kind of written in the first person, and instead of being very scientific, I added a little bit of entertainment in there as well", which brought a refreshing personal touch to the beauty column, resonating deeply with her readers.
“I think it was Barbara Power, the fashion editor of the Irish Independent, that said, ‘Triona, you were kind of like blogging before people were blogging, you're wearing a different outfit.’ People used to open the magazine to see what I had on, to see how my hair was done.”
In a time with no social media, in which 1 out of 4 people in a whole country read the Sunday Independent, the reach and influence a move like that has is hard to even measure.
When it comes to pivotting and adapting to keep up with changing media consumption, constant drivers in Triona’s career, she says:
“Well, funnily enough, now my column in the Sunday Independent is online as well. But also, because a lot of people don't read, they just wanna watch videos. So I do a video now and those that perform best are the ones where I'm talking about fragrance, would you believe?”
Beauty goes hand-in-hand with fragrance and so do the emotional aspects that you’d leverage upon to talk about it and sell it. However there is an extra layer of complexity with the fact that there is no final transformation, there is no before and after, if you’re on the other side of the screen.
Triona relies on her excitement and extroverted personality to communicate it, but how do brands do that online?
🌼 The storytelling (and selling) of fragrances online
When I used to watch TV (I blame the past tense on Netflix and Prime Video), my favorite ad commercials were those related to fragrance. I still remember the feelings from watching Givenchy’s Dahlia Noir ad featuring Mariacarla Boscono from 2012, or the iconic Chanel n.5 ad video by Baz Luhrmann featuring Nicole Kidman and Rodrigo Santoro back in 2004.
Even though beauty and fragrance products often generate high revenues and margins for fashion brands, selling them online remains challenging because customers can't experience the scents firsthand and decisions can't easily be based on clear advantages or logical reasoning. Sure, you can add the scientific aspect to certain products, but for the most of makeup and fragrance the purchase drivers are hardly rational.
Big brands leverage fragrance as an entry product to the whole brand universe, and invest a lot on creating and communicating a personality and story to each of their products. But how does that translate into digital strategies when it comes to selling them online?
I’ve gathered three of my favorite examples on how different brands lead you on their customer journey to introduce you to their brand and their products, and how fragrance finders are a great opportunity to engage and educate the consumer on your brand.
Penhaligon’s Fragrance Profiling
In a very interactive quizz, you answer questions that range from your own personality, to your preferred getaway, to which vintage hat you would identify with and so forth. Everything is perfectly on-brand, from images to copywriting.
It’s not only until the 6th out of 7 questions that anything fragrance-related appears, stressing how much of an important role feelings and emotions play when chosing a perfume. Even the descriptions of the fragrances are much closer to ambience and emotions rather than a scientific and rational telling of their scent.
Try it here.
Aesop’s Fragrance Finder
Aesop is known for its minimalist and sophisticated approach to beauty and wellness. The Fragrance Finder reflects this by offering a clean, intuitive, and elegantly designed interface that simplifies the process of discovering a fragrance, connecting scent preferences to lifestyle and personality traits.
In just a few questions, Aesop’s fragrance finder educates the client about their range of perfumes, grouping scent characteristics emphasizing the sensory and emotional aspects of scent as part of overall well-being
Try it here.
Le Labo’s Proust Questionnaire
By guiding users through a series of questions about their olfactive memory, scent preferences, personality traits, and lifestyle, the tool helps identify fragrances that align perfectly with their individual tastes and needs.
The questionnaire format does require some more thinking rather than just clicking on button. It allows for a wide range of answers, and I wonder how they work through all that non-standardized data to provide actual personalized recommendations.
Try it here.
💡 These are fantastic ways to gather information on your prospects and customer base, as you leverage gamification techniques to entertain the user while acquiring their preferences: ✨ that’s zero-party data right there ✨.
It allows you to segment potential customers based on their personalities and behavior, and with further analysis coming from their user experience online (what were other product pages they saw, what parts of the content grabbed their attention, what samples they took home, did they buy any product…?) you can target them with better, personalized (for real) content and marketing activities.
Taking Aesop as an example - for each customer that left their email and expressed a preference for spiced scents, whenever you want to push sales for a line of products that have that feature, that segment is way more likely to convert rather than those who expressed a preference for floral scents. Not rocket science, but not that easy to implement either.
👀 How much AI is used in this newsletter?
When Ashley and I had the first conversations about creating this newsletter, we were very inclined on making it as AI-powered as possible.
I, however, sure that my days last at least 30h and not 24, liked the idea of writing and deep diving (for as long as a newsletter format allows for deep dives) on each episode’s main subject. Or at least what I relate to the most, as we wanted it to have a personal touch to expand the conversation that the podcast on its own kickstarts.
So here I am, sleep deprived, writing as I travel from Paris to Milan instead of taking a (very much needed) nap on the plane. No regrets.
We do use AI for transcription, to proof read the content and to give a little frizz here and there when my creativity or memory fails me, but everything else is typed word by word and fact-checked by yours truly.
🎁 Community Rewards
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The process of creating these chocolates takes three days as each one of them is meticulously made and painted by hand, with signature fillings that change with the seasons, reflecting Ireland’s rich larder.
Want to know more? Listen to one of our early episodes featuring none other than Gráinne Mullins herself in the link below.
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🎙️ Upcoming Conversation: Hasna Kourda, Founder & CEO of Save Your Wardrobe
This week we have a special extra episode of Tech Powered Luxury on Thursday. Stay tuned to discover all about Save Your Wardrobe, with LVMH Innovation Award Winner Hasna Kourda.
See you on Thursday,
💫 Who are we and what led us here today?
🎙️ Launched as a podcast on November 1st 2022 by Ashley McDonnell, Tech Powered Luxury has since nurtured a vibrant community of experts passionate about the evolving synergy between technology and luxury. We have reached over 20 million people through the podcast, social platforms and media, and have hit +500K downloads.
🎁 Every week we are bringing Community Rewards to our subscribers. Stay tuned for discount codes, mentorship sessions and so much more!
💡 With over 60 episodes live across podcast platforms and MBA-worthy content - especially considering that Tech Powered Luxury is also taught to executive MBA and master students in business schools around the world -, we’re launching Season 4! We’re moving from an audio podcast to a full-blown show, with all episodes recorded in-person and available to watch (as well as listen).
📩 Not only that - in order to connect more deeply with our community and to curate essential insights for our readers, every Tuesday alongside a new podcast episode you'll receive an email brimming with exclusive content, key takeaways from the week's discussion and a sneak peek at upcoming interviews.
🪄 Our weekly newsletter is curated by Beatriz Barros, a seasoned expert in luxury and technology based in Milan, Italy. A dedicated collaborator of Tech Powered Luxury, Beatriz applies her expertise as a Fashion & Luxury Business Consultant at Retex—Italy's forefront company known for integrating strategic acumen with operational excellence to solve complex retail-oriented projects for fashion & luxury brands. Additionally, she educates aspiring professionals at Polimoda, renowned for its focus on Fashion Design & Business in the vibrant city of Florence, Italy - also where she first met Ashley during one of her lectures on the future of luxury: a match made in academic heaven. 🌈