It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the woman behind two-lipstick businesses, Poppy King.
So it was surprising (and refreshing whenever you see a woman in business profiled in the mainstream press), to see an extensive interview and feature on King in the Australian Financial Review today.
King was one of the few businesswomen and female entrepreneurs I could name growing up, as with her always-striking looking lips the young woman built her beauty empire.
Of course that empire came crashing down quickly and very publicly, and so King’s name also became one of the few businesswomen I would also come to associate with ‘failure’.
Which is very, very sad when you think about it.
King’s today only 44, and now as I look at her career I can see just how very young she was when she independently took on the Beauty industry, launching Poppy Industries in 1991 while still a teenager, and a number of cosmetic stores in the years that followed. In 1995, the company reportedly made a $6.5 million profit, and King was named Young Australian of the Year. In 1998, following a U.S expansion, the company collapsed.
King moved to New York in 2002 and has since gone on to work as a consultant for a number of major brands, write two books, start and sell the majority share of another beauty start-up, Lipstick Queen, and will soon announce her next big thing, working with new nail technology startup.
The AFR reports King only agreed to the interview on condition it didn’t dwell on the past. But King herself opened up on her history, noting how quick the Australian media were to depict her as a ‘villain’ as the business encountered problems, and how Australia still remembers her for what she did in the 1990s rather than what she’s done since. An experience that can be typical for anyone who experiences success and failure at a young age, but particularly for a woman.
Indeed as King said in the interview, Australia continues to have a problem with the F word, failure, and it’s preventing Australians from reaching their full potential. For King, it’s “better to try something and mess it up rather than not try at all.”
King ignored the naysayers, got up, and tried again. The AFR describes her not as being willing to take risks, but rather as having the “self confidence and ego” to start another company.
So where does King get the self confidence? Well like a woman who’s created a career out of beauty would say, lipstick always helps.
“Since I was a seven year old I was really fascinated with this confidence lipstick gave me that nothing else did,” she said. “My fascination with lipstick is a bona fide fascination with the kind of transformative powers in can have on your psyche.”
As for her beauty predictions for the future, she believe the ‘full face of make-up’ young women are wearing to attain the perfect look — a look pushed through social media — may soon swing the other way. “Whatever is rare becomes fashion,” King told the AFR. “When there’s too much perfection the trend will be to go to imperfection … Finally my time will come and imperfection will be completely desirable.”
If only more of us would be willing to chase imperfection in business, life and in beauty.
Perhaps with more women like King speaking up about failure, and less of us moving to quickly cut down the tall poppies, we will.
