Master Class: Michelle Feeney
Michelle Feeney may have risen to the highest ranks in PR at the Estée Lauder Cos., but she’s always been an independent spirit. Unapologetically outspoken and an astute synthesizer of culture and business, Feeney has since parlayed her public relations experience into creating the sustainable fragrance brand, Floral Street. Launched in November 2017, the brand is sold in over 22 countries, including Nordstrom and Sephora in the U.S., Mecca in Australia and a boutique on its namesake street in London’s Covent Garden. As the demand for clean beauty products has grown, so has Floral Street: Sales rose 257 percent in the U.S. and 66 percent in its home market, the U.K. last year. Industry sources estimate the brand will reach 15 million pounds at retail this year. Feeney describes Floral Street as an “independent British brand,” with an emphasis on independent. “That’s the most important aspect for our consumers,” she said. “They really like the word independent because it means they’re finding you and they believe that your values match theirs.”
Your path to entrepreneurship wasn’t a straight one — how did you get there?
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Michelle Feeney: Entrepreneurship in itself is a path. You have to hone it and learn it along the way. Being part of fashion in the ’80s — the whole thing was new. There wasn’t a London or New York fashion week. At the core of what we were doing was inventing something new. When I moved to New York with my record producer boyfriend, I started my own PR company. Bumble and bumble was my first brand. When I went to Estée Lauder, it was still a privately held company. I was told they wanted me for my entrepreneurial spirit and now I can see why. As they were acquiring brands, they needed a different kind of person within the organization.
So I’ve followed this creative entrepreneurial path that gathers momentum. The more successes you have with being entrepreneurial, the more you get to risk. Now in my fifties I’m willing to risk everything on my own brand because it has built up along the way.
What were the big lessons that you learned in the corporate world that have served you well as an entrepreneur?
M.F.: Strategy. Future planning. The right team. What you realize in that corporate world is if you want to get an idea from A to B and beyond, you need a team, a really, really good team. It is never one person. My first team at Lauder included Jane Hertzmark Hudis, James Gager, Marianne Diorio and Annie Carullo. We were this incredible team of interapreneurs. I also learned how to deliver a good idea. I remember Jeanette Wagner saying, ‘There are a million ideas in the world, but it is making them happen that is the difficult part.’
What’s the key to making it happen?
M.F.: Clear vision and really good products. And consistency. I talk a lot about the “Tortoise and the Hare” fable from Aesop. Keep moving ahead, don’t get diverted. And relationships — relationships still matter.
How has your leadership style evolved?
M.F.: I am really direct and clear and some people can’t handle that. I am very driven, so I like to drive the team on that journey. Where I’ve had to evolve is that younger people today have different needs and expectations; they need to feel that they are being shepherded more. I am collaborative, but I’m also very strong, and I’ve had to soften my delivery of myself with new teams. You don’t want them to be scared of you. I’ve had over 30 years of experience. They might have had three months in another company and then they work for you, and they’re very valuable to me because they are the modern consumer and open to new ideas, which is how I am. It’s how to meet in the middle of those two things.
Floral Street is both clean and sustainable. What have been the biggest pain points in product development and how did you surmount them?
M.F.: There are some challenges, not just with ingredients, but delivery systems and all sorts of things. The industry is now catching up. We just met with a big packaging company in New York that’s building a pulp plant in Las Vegas that will be powered by the sun. The hardest thing was finding suppliers and developers that wanted to go in a new direction.
It’s also hard as a new brand to shout loud enough when you’re doing something differently — like a pulp box for fine fragrance. Hardly anyone in the U.K. wanted to write about it in that old fashioned journalistic way — so how do you tell the consumer about it? I realized I had to create my own audience. D-to-c becomes really important, but you have to be quite patient.
In terms of messaging, it was back to what I call the Tommy Hilfiger effect — finding like-minded groups of people. So, for instance, we’re a premium brand for vegans, so we worked with the Vegan Society and all sorts of different people where we knew our customer might be but they didn’t know about us. It’s guerrilla marketing to find people who want to hear what you have to say, and to find retailers who want to tell the story. Mecca and Sephora were early adopters because they knew their consumer was ready to hear the story.
How do you see the fragrance category developing?
M.F.: I talk about scentscaping your life. I’m not thinking of fragrance as a category, but a lifestyle. I think we’ll see more thinking about how scent can effect your life on a daily basis.
What has unlocked success for you on the d-to-c channel? How did you overcome the challenge of consumers not being able to smell online?
M.F.: Four years ago everything was going into digital and I realized that in order to get my message across I had to play in this arena. It was building the messaging into the site and also the discovery set, which costs 14 pounds and has eight different fragrances. It’s still our number-one stock keeping unit. I also came up with this concept of scent school, which we transitioned to scent school in a box. You buy this experience of scent school and you get a discovery set with scratch-and-sniff postcards. We have an hour of your life and we take you through the story of discovering these fragrances. The third thing is the way in which we told the story — through mood muses. We created mood boards of fashion and spirit, using words and visuals to evoke a spirit of a fragrance, rather than ingredients. I felt the fragrance industry was talking to itself when it was talking about top notes and middle notes. Who knows what a note is! I came to it from a consumer point of view. Let’s talk about mood words and inspiration. I also don’t use the words sex or sexy — that felt old-fashioned, a 1970s way of speaking to consumers about fragrance.
What’s the growth trajectory of Floral Street and how do you see that continuing?
M.F.: I have a much bigger wider vision for Floral Street as a lifestyle brand, which I’m working on. We have just launched over 30 new home products, which are all clean. This whole idea of scentscaping and what you can do with modern ways of encapsulation is taking my head into lots of new categories.
We have liquidless sticks that are totally recyclable — made out of paper, which come in a membrane that is totally recyclable. Normally it is plastic to keep the scent intact, but we found a membrane from the food industry to keep them in. That’s the kind of thing you have to do as a sustainable brand — look at other industries that are ahead of you and see how you can back that into beauty.
There are so many different standards around clean. How would you like to see the industry come together and harmonize these terms? What’s most important from a consumer point of view?
M.F.: That is the holy grail, isn’t it? My idealistic side would like to think we can all come together with some guidelines for the global consumer, but that would expect us to take off our competitive head. What we’re seeing more of is people coming together to say how can we improve the world rather than utilizing each individual win in sustainability as a marketing tool. It could start with supply chain and industries uniting around what they believe the guidelines should be. If you take fragrance — wouldn’t it be brilliant if the fragrance houses got together and said, this, this and this could be the guidelines. America is leading ahead with the retailers like of Sephora and Ulta Beauty really breaking it down for the consumer and pushing you as a supplier to live up to the expectations they have. I am part of the British Beauty Council’s sustainability coalition, which has elements of lobbying government to put rules in place, bringing brands together to put them on a more equal footing. It is going to take a lot of things, but supply chain is a nice place to start.
What brands outside of beauty inspire you and why?
M.F.: Companies like All Birds and Oatly that have used their brands to stimulate change in a massive industry. Brands like that have stimulated the Nikes of the world to think differently. These disruptor brands are gathering momentum and show me people do have the guts to do things differently and not be scared of not being successful, and that gives me heart in being a small brand in a sea of big companies.
What advice would you give to others hoping to follow in your footsteps?
M.F.: It’s about staying true to your vision. Because everything seems to move really fast, it is staying grounded with your idea and not getting distracted by the noise of speed. The speed of communication, speed to market — you can’t go that fast as an entrepreneurial brand unless you’re willing to give away your entire company to shareholders. You learn a lot by being slightly slower about your end vision. I have a big vision for Floral Street — I can see it. But what I’ve learned by being an entrepreneur — the buck stops with you which makes it doubly scary. But having a slower pace than in a big company because you haven’t got that many team members or a huge budget gives you the ability to learn and listen to the consumer, which gives your longer-term vision more validity. If you want to create a brand, those things are really important. If you want to have fast-paced sales growth — maybe they aren’t as important.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
M.F.: I still quote this all the time — it’s from Leonard Lauder. Just when you’re tired of hearing something, someone is hearing it for the first time. What I’ve learned with social media is you can think you’re being heard and it is a drop in the ocean. My team often says, shouldn’t we move on. And I say — no, we’re only just beginning to tell our story. The last four years have been learning, establishing and also putting a really great team together all running in the same direction, through a pandemic. It’s just the beginning now. It’s very exciting.
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