ModelCo CEO Shelley Sullivan on Her #1 Tip for Starting a Business

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If you haven’t ever used a cosmetic or beauty product from ModelCo or MCoBeauty, chances are you’ve at least heard of the brands. ModelCo released the world’s first-ever aerosol self tan, TAN Airbrush in a Can, in 2007, which, unlike today when you’ll find countless copycat versions like it, was a revolutionary product at the time.

The self tan, along with a heated lash curler called Turbo Lash Wand, both of which became global hits, helped catapult ModelCo into a household name, and in 2016, spin-off MCoBeauty, which sees all items priced under $40, was launched.

And the brands’ success is all owing to the savviness and hard work of Shelley Sullivan, founder and CEO of ModelCo and MCoBeauty and the first-ever guest on POPSUGAR Australia’s podcast Dinner For Two, hosted by Alyce Tran, herself the co-founder of popular Australian businesses The Daily Edited and In The Round House.

As Sullivan shares with Tran in the episode, their success all came down to her doing one thing (well, technically, two things).

“It’s really about confidence and taking the risk,” she says. “I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was creating a heated eyelash curler to curl someone’s lashes, and the next minute I was at Colette in Paris [a now-closed Parisian boutique once dubbed ‘the trendiest store in the world’ by Forbes] and everyone around the world wanted one.”

“You never really know what you’re doing until you’re knee deep,” she adds.

Also in the chat, Tran asks Sullivan what she thought it would be like if she’d launched both brands today. Turns out — and this should be some great news for any budding entrepreneurs — Sullivan thinks it would be a lot easier to start a business now than it was 20 years ago.

“[Back then], you had to work a lot harder to get eyeballs onto your website and [people] into your retail stores, whereas now everything is so immediate with the benefit of social media and all the various platforms,” she says. “You can market to people a lot quicker and be a lot more savvy.”

From a personal perspective, Sullivan says if she were to start her businesses today, she’d try to learn a lot more about the industry. While she’d thought she was going into a world of beauty products and “looking fabulous”, the reality was that she was creating wholesale businesses with product development, finance, logistics, sales, marketing and more.

To listen to the full chat, in which Sullivan shares on how to take the first steps to launch a business, how to get it to gain momentum and how to create a marketing strategy and brand collaborations for it that actually work, hit play below.