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Invest Northern Ireland - Meet successful women in business
Invest Northern Ireland, Building Locally, Competing Globally
I'm Nicky Kinnaird
originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland
I'm founder, president and creative director of Space NK apothecary
which is a chain of beauty boutiques across the UK
the way I saw beauty developing was it was as a natural extension of fashion
rather than just this area that operated out of the ground floor in a department store
we work with some of the main innovators within the world of
makeup skin care and hair care
who have developed some of the best products available anywhere
in the world
and what we do is offer to the public
an edited selection of those
my own experience has always come from
the customer side of things because I have had
no formal beauty training
my background has actually been in chartered surveying
but think I thought I was going to end up
working in chartered surveying in my fathers company back in Belfast
I soon realised when I started working in London
that whilst property interested me
it was particluarly the retail side of the business that I found fascinating
I was a little bit bored with what I was doing
and was looking for a challenge
I thought I could do something in a different way
I then had decided to move and work with
a retail consultancy company for a couple of years and
for whatever reason I'm never going to question but they approached me to see if I was interested
in putting together a retail concept
I went away on an August bank holiday to write a business plan
fundamentally creating the store that was
my ideal from a consumer perspective
opened my first store in convent garden back in nineteen ninety three
which was more of a lifestyle store concept
and very quickly it became
apparent that the beauty side of things
was the runaway winner concept within that it was the one that generated the most interest from the consumer
we traded the lifestyle store concept
for three years before deciding
that that really was something in the whole beauty arena
and decided to open up three stand alone stores
the very nature of opening
three stores in quick succession which
was actually over a four week period
in central London that had impact on the market
probably a lot of people say who is this young
whipper snapper that thinks she knows what she is doing on beauty
now we are just opening our fiftieth store in Newcastle Upon Tyne
and we are now up to I think it is
three hundred and sevety eight employees across the company
NIcky Kinnaird, Space NK apothecary
Invest Northern Ireland www.investni.com