Beauty Boss

Joann Mahon, owner of the online beauty shop Millies.ie, has been working flat out during the lockdowns and has no intention of slowing down. The 38-year-old entrepreneur talks to Carissa Casey about her love of skincare and why most of us will continue to shop online.

When the world first locked down more than a year ago, orders on Millies.ie rocketed “literally overnight” says Joann Hayes. The online store had been growing steadily since it was set up 11 years ago, but suddenly it was a struggle to keep up with the amount of orders coming in. 

“People felt that it was their only way to shop. And everyone suddenly got into skincare. People stopped investing in clothes because they’d nowhere to go. Makeup sales fell a bit too. But there was a big demand for hair masks and face masks and things like that.”

Despite the pressure, Joann and her team quickly adapted. Having set up in business at 24, she now has 36 people working for her, mostly women. Along with the online store, she operates two salons, one in Naas and a smaller retail-focused premises in Kildare. From the very start, she intended her beauty business to be different.

Her interest in skincare was personal. At the age of 16 she was struck by what looked like a case of full blown acne. “It was rough when I look back now,” she says. “Especially when there was no Internet to look things up. It puts you in a place where you feel a bit paralysed and you don’t know how to fix something. I was so overly conscious and I thought, I have to get to the bottom of this.” 

“I literally went to any therapist that was around. I went to a doctor who linked me on with a dermatologist, and I was able to ask the questions and build up my knowledge. I delved into particular ingredients, and then found products with those ingredients. When you get the right products, there’s a switch in your skin. You can see over the course of a couple of months how your skin completely changes. I was completely hooked at that stage.”

Joann was eventually diagnosed with polycystic ovaries, which were at the root of the outbreaks. And the experience of finding a solution to her skin problems, make her want to help others do the same. “I’m very determined,” she says. “When I feel like there’s a problem, there’s no side-tracking me. Nothing gets done until I’ve solved the problem.”

She also grew up in a retail business. Her parents owned Centra shops around the Naas area. “From when I was knee high, I was helping behind the counter. By the time I was doing my Junior Cert, I was helping my dad with his books. I used to order stock. I’d put my hand to anything.”

So it made sense, when her parents sold their business and retired, that Joann would go into business herself, this time in the beauty area. When she set up her first salon in the village of Sallins in 2007, she decided from the start to focus as much of offering a broad range of skincare brands and products, as on the treatment side. “About 80 per cent of the results you get in skincare come from what you’re using at home,” she says. “Back then salons would have a few products for sale in a cabinet behind the desk. I wanted half of my space to be devoted to retail and offer as broad a range as possible.”

The concept worked. That first salon attracted customers who didn’t necessarily want a skin treatment. It helped grow the business and convinced her that beauty retail was an unexploited opportunity.

By 2010, she had decided to set up Millies (named after her grandmother). “Back then it wasn’t really that common to shop online. A few big UK sites were doing it but only a handful here in Ireland.”

She spent her evenings doing courses in graphics and coding. “I knew that in order to have other people do that online work for me, I needed to be able to speak their language at least,” she says.

She’s by no means arrogant but Joann has plenty of confidence in her retail skills. When the online store went live, “I had that instant feeling, this is going to work. I’ve set it up correctly.”

Within eight months she moved out of Sallins to a bigger property in Kildare, located where visitors to the Kildare Village shopping outlet come for lunch. “I opened it so that I could get more brands and offer more to customers. Sallins was so small, I was running out of space.”

She also opened a large salon in Naas. It too has plenty of retail space but also ten treatment rooms. 

And then came the lockdown surge. “In the space of a year, it bought online shopping on about ten years. The pandemic lasted so long, it really has changed people’s shopping habits.”

“There’s not been much of a fall off since things opened. The trend from China shows that there was a small drop off when shops reopened, but people are staying online. They like the element of convenience. People want to go out and browse shops rather than have a list of things they need to get.”

For all the spectacular business opportunity the pandemic bought, there was also a huge personal tragedy. Joann lost her mother between the two lockdowns. It was a huge personal shock compounded by “needing people around you and not being able to have them around you”.

She doesn’t think she’s really been able to process the loss during the pandemic. It helps that her dad is so much part of the business. “My poor dad never got a day of retirement because I opened up when he retired and he’s been helping me ever since. Even to this day, he’s opening up the businesses in the morning. He’s delivering stock to locations. He’s invaluable.”

The salons are now open again, albeit at a slower pace because of the Covid related restrictions and procedures. “It’s great to be back to it. As handy as online is, the human interaction is still a big part of it all.”

The salons have been in the local area for more than 14 years and still have clients from back when they opened. “We’re completely booked up,” says Joann. “We had to take our online booking offline. We had 2,000 people on the waiting list as well as hundreds of emails and social media and phone calls.”

She’s already looking ahead. “We’ve put so many plans in place for the future. This last year was so horrific on a personal level but it gave us the opportunity to grow. We had to be ready to grow and we were. So expect more things from us over the coming while.”