I first met Lisa McGowan in 2017. We were heading to the Maldives on a swanky press trip and she was the sole influencer in a group of journos.
Her Lisa’s Lust List blog may have seemed small fry compared to the media titles represented on the junket, but the Offaly native knew the worth of her blossoming brand.
“I wouldn’t have been invited on that press trip unless [the organiser] knew that I had influence,” she says. “Back in 2017, a lot of people were trusting me.” Indeed they were.
Within days of our arrival, two ‘Lust Listers’ trusted her enough to book holidays to the tropical paradise on the back of her Facebook posts.
She had proved the value of her inclusion on the trip before I’d even finished unpacking my suitcase.
It was clear that not only did McGowan know her customer — key to any successful business — but that those customers wanted to buy what she was selling, including once-in-a-lifetime trips to luxe Indian Ocean resorts.
How has she achieved that level of engagement with her audience?
“In a nutshell, by just being me and just telling the truth,” the former insurance broker says, pointing out the contrast between the unfiltered honesty of her online platforms and the “rose-tinted” fakeness that typifies swathes of social media.
“Telling the truth” and being “real” is paying dividends for McGowan, who has leveraged the power of her personality to build an empire at warp speed.
Last year, the 52-year-old entrepreneur paid herself a salary of almost €1m from Lisa’s Lust List LTD.
She launched Lisa&Co in 2020 with a fragrance, a decision she acknowledges “was a risk”.
“I suppose people went, if Lisa thinks it’s good, and if Lisa says it smells beautiful, I trust her, and I’m going to buy it. That’s what happened, and that’s when it all kicked off.”
The potential was clear. “It was like, OK, wow. People are trusting me, not in their tens, not in their hundreds, but in their thousands. This is really going to work.”
And work it has. There are now Lisa&Co clothing and cosmetic lines, which are wildly popular.
“I want to be the Trinny of Ireland,” McGowan says, name-checking 60-year-old Trinny Woodall whose seven-year-old brand is now, according to Forbes, “a $250m beauty empire”.
“I was told with the cosmetics, don’t do it, the market is saturated. Nobody is going to buy any cosmetics,” she says.
“Here I am, nine months later, and we’ve turned €2m. If the product is good enough, it will sell.”
McGowan’s first forays into cosmetics, Skin Silk, a CC cream and Fake it Til You Make It, a mascara, aren’t just selling, they’re selling out.
She mainly retails through her website but a deal with Dunnes saw SkinSilk stocked in 10 stores.
It “sold out in half an hour”, McGowan says, with customers “buying them from the baskets” before staff could fill the shelves.
“If it keeps going like it’s going, we’ll probably turn €3.5m in the first year on cosmetics with two products.”
In five years’ time, she hopes “to be in the UK with cosmetics. There may be another brand there at that stage. I can’t say more than that.”
Will there be Lisa&Co skincare?
“Who knows? Never say never,” is the enigmatic answer.
To the outsider, it seems everything McGowan touches turns to gold. But she’s keen to emphasise the graft that has gone into her success, including the daily interaction with her almost half-a-million followers.
“I could answer up to 1,000 messages a day. I start [answering] messages from six in the morning. I could be still answering messages at 2am,” she says.
“I’m totally consumed by all things Lisa’s Lust List. I love it. It gives me joy. When it stops giving me joy, I’m stopping.”
Emphasising the positives of having an online platform is testament to McGowan’s ‘glass half-full’ nature, because she’s certainly experienced the negatives.
She began receiving online abuse in 2016, when she won Best Dressed Lady at the Galway Races and her image featured widely on national media.
“I’ve read lots of stuff about me over the last few days, horrible, hurtful comments,” she wrote on Facebook at the time.
In 2019, a handwritten letter calling McGowan “mean, a bitch and a liar” was sent to her office. Scrawled on it were the sinister words: “R.I.P Bitch”.
She posted the letter on her Facebook page, saying: “Some sad people out there, girls.I actually feel sorry for them.”
A year later, the keyboard warriors crossed the line and McGowan had had enough. “I don’t mind people picking holes about my appearance, about my face, my legs, my teeth, whatever you want,” she says now.
“But if you come after my business, as a business owner, I’m going to protect it like a mother would protect their child. And that’s where it was going with social media. They were coming after my integrity and my business.”
In 2020, defamatory claims circulated online implying that McGowan, who has “raised over a million euro for charity” — she runs an annual Christmas raffle funded with her own money — was “spending charity money”.
She took swift action, securing High Court orders requiring Facebook Ireland LTD to provide her with information to identify the anonymous people she claimed were trolling, defaming, and stalking her online.
“It 100% stopped it,” she says of throwing down the legal gauntlet to the trolls. “Since we had that High Court action and Facebook and Instagram gave me those addresses and IP addresses and all the rest, I haven’t had anything.
“So I protected myself there. I have nothing but lovely comments, messages on my social media channels. As for any other sites, I don’t go into them, I don’t read them, I’m oblivious to them.”
Is she referring to well-known trolling website, Tattle Life?
“I don’t know anything about it,” she answers. “Because it’s having no impact on me personally. It’s having no impact on my financials. It’s having no impact on my brand growing. It’s nothing to me. It’s there and it’ll probably always be there.”
Do the personal comments not hurt, though?
“You’d want to be a robot for it not to hurt. But you just get on with it,” she says.
“It’s my life. It doesn’t bother me anymore what anybody thinks of me.”
Being an influencer has impacted McGowan’s privacy but she says she “doesn’t mind” the constant intrusion “because I treat all those people as family. They are my group of girls.
“They are effectively paying my wages. My followers have made me. I’m very much aware of that.”
Ultimately, though, McGowan’s top priority isn’t business.
“It’s all about family to me,” she says. These days, she’s happily coupled up with Scotsman Chris McManus, whom she met on a blind date eight years ago.
When her now 22-year-old son, Daragh, was a baby, her marriage broke up and she moved back to her hometown of Tullamore, where she worked in the family business alongside her dad, juggling her day job and her burgeoning brand until recently.
“I am a younger version of my dad,” McGowan says.
“I’m very proud to say that. When we started, I hadn’t a clue. I didn’t know anything about insurance. I said, Dad, what am I going to do here? He said, Lisa, I’ll teach you.
“My dad has taught me everything. He helped me buy my first house at 18. It cost something like £18,000. That was a lot of money back in the day.”
McGowan “rented it and flipped it in six months and bought the one four doors down. And did it up and rented it and flipped it a year later”.
By the age of 24, she was on her third property. Her dream house is currently being built “just down the road” from her current home in Tullamore.
She’s now passing on those financial smarts to her son. “He bought his first house three months ago, and I helped him get on the property ladder,” she says.
She will also be bringing her son in on her next venture – launching a menswear line in 2025.
As we wrap up our chat, I ask if she has any interest in doing homewares or interiors, inspired by her personal focus in the last few months.
“Never say never,” she says. “If the opportunity arises, I will grab it with both hands.”
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