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Business

04th Apr 2017

Cocoa Brown’s Marissa Carter on the death of beauty blogging

Alison Bough

This week on The Capital B, one of Ireland’s busiest and most successful business women, Marissa Carter, talks Kardashians and why there’s no authenticity left in beauty blogging.

Marissa Carter was self-employed as a beauty salon owner for almost eight years before launching her hugely popular Cocoa Brown tanning range in 2012. She developed the revolutionary brand to include a “wardrobe of tans” including eight sister products to suit different skin types.

Now one of the most well respected beauty editors and business women in the country, Marissa shared her thoughts on beauty bloggers and business with The Capital B’s Nick Webb.

“Innovation is key to getting ahead. Never do the same thing twice because you won’t get the same results.

Brands copy us now all the time. They try to do what we did with Cocoa Brown when we initially started…working with bloggers to try and grow their brand. But that game is dead now, there’s absolutely no authenticity left in that business.

When I started Cocoa Brown bloggers still had credibility…they were telling the truth about the products that they tried.  Now, the value of a blogger endorsement is nothing – there are no bad reviews anymore.

There was an authenticity in the market when we started, you sucked up the bad reviews and delighted in the good reviews but at least it was real.”

Marissa also told Nick how her tanning range ended up being so beloved by a certain celebrity family…

“A girl came to work for me…well, I actually poached her from one of the biggest PR companies in the UK! On her first day at work she said to me ‘I’m going to get your products into the hands of Kylie Jenner.’ I said yeah right – well ‘cop on’ I think was exactly what I said to her.

You gotta know the right person and she knew the right person, so we sent the products over to the right person. Cocoa Brown got to Kylie’s agent and she liked the product.”

The Capital B is available free of charge every Monday morning from 7am; listeners can tune in on Soundcloud and can also download and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and other podcast providers.