Irish Women In Business: Marissa Carter of Cocoa Brown

For the next installment in a series of editorials focusing on Irish women in business, we talk to Marissa Carter of Cocoa Brown. Not only is she the brains behind Cocoa Brown Tan, Marissa is also beauty editor at Irish Parent Magazine and a beauty expert on TV3's Xposé. With strong entrepreneurial skills and an exciting idea, Marissa created one of Ireland's most successful beauty brands. Here, she explains in her own words how she set up her brand, where she gets her inspiration from and the plans she has for Cocoa Brown's future. I taught Beauty Therapy for two years before opening my own beauty salon, Carter Beauty in January 2006. After I won the Irish Beauty Professionals Association Facial Therapist of the Year award in 2007, I went to Philadelphia in the USA to complete my studies in Cosmetic Chemistry and Skin Histology with a view to creating my own beauty product range but it wasn’t until I was on maternity leave last year that I put my plans of bringing a fake tan to market into action. My customers in Carter Beauty inspired me to create a tan that would solve their tanning problems. Spray tanning was and still is the most popular treatment we offer in the salon and so I had first-hand feedback from thousands of people about what they love and hate about fake tanning products. Now, I get daily feedback via Twitter, Facebook and email from Cocoa Brown users and they inspire me to create more products for them. For example, I had a lot of customers contact me asking me what body scrub I would recommend for removing fake tan. It was a big issue for people that there wasn’t a strong body scrub on the market, specifically designed to remove fake tan and so I created Cocoa Brown TOUGH STUFF in response to their needs. The Cocoa Brown range makes the bronzed goddess look achievable  My son was just a couple of months old when I started Cocoa Brown and so I was settling into being a new mum and trying to get the business off the ground at the same time. A lot of my meetings had to take place in the evenings because I would have to wait until my husband got home from work to mind our little man before I could go anywhere. In terms of the business itself, the most difficult challenge was competing with big brands that had massive advertising and PR budgets. To overcome this challenge I decided to do my own PR rather than paying a company to do it. I also decided to reach out to the beauty bloggers of Ireland and sent them my first product, Cocoa Brown 1 HOUR TAN. The response was phenomenal and positive reviews started coming in thick and fast. Cocoa Brown is now sold in thousands of retailers across Ireland and the UK including household names like Penneys/Primark, Boots, Superdrug, Superquinn, Tescos, Meagher’s Pharmacies, Sam McCauley Chemists and most recently on all Aer Lingus flights around the world. The Cocoa Brown professional Spray Tan is available in approximately 200 beauty salons nationwide. Online sales are also really important to us and we're stocked on websites such as feelunique.com and cloud10beauty.com. We hope to continue growing the business by increasing the number of products in the Cocoa Brown range and the number of stockists selling the products. Cocoa Brown has been chosen as the exclusive tanning partner for the Pre-Oscars Gifting Suite in the Beverley Hills Hilton Hotel, so the team are heading to Los Angeles at the end of February. As a pre-HPSU with Enterprise Ireland, I’m confident that together we’ll make a dent on the US market with Cocoa Brown. There is a couple of exciting celebrity collaborations planned for 2014 as well as plans for expansion in France, Germany and Holland in early 2014. I recently received the Image Magazine Start-up of the Year 2013 Award. I was thrilled to have even been nominated so to win feels like a dream. Marissa recently won the IMAGE Magazine Start-up of the Year 2013 award Cocoa Brown now sells 3 bottles per minute across Ireland and the UK. We just celebrated our 1st year in business and on the same day we hit 30,000 fans on our Facebook page. It's exciting to see how we can top 2013...As they say ‘No pressure.’ To find out more about Marissa and Cocoa Brown, visit www.cocoabrown.ie To suggest other great Irish women to feature in this series, please drop us a line to editorial@her.ie