Is Pippa O'Connor lighting the way for all influencers?
After conquering the world of fashion with her jeans range, Pippa O’Connor-Ormond has just launched a new line of candles, she tells .
At 34 years of age, model-turned-entrepreneur Pippa O’Connor Ormond is living her best life. In the last six months, the mum of two has settled into her newly renovated ‘forever’ home in the grounds of Kildare’s exclusive K Club, finished a wildly successful second year with her denim brand POCO by Pippa, and launched a sister lifestyle brand, The Pippa Collection, whose candles launched in Brown Thomas Cork this month.
We catch up as she is being driven from Dublin to Cork where she will host a customer evening in Brown Thomas.
“I always love going down to Cork,” she says.
The Cork women are always such craic, they are always up for it and so, so glam
Glamorous is the perfect word to describe the candles in the Pippa Collection. Featuring five signature fragrances, the thinking behind the range was to have a scent to suit each mood and space in the home. For everyday use, Pippa favours the Mandarin and Mint candle in her home. “I burn it a lot because it’s really fresh and invigorating. I love it in the kitchen and living areas because it’s so uplifting.”
A woman on a mission, the entrepreneur has honed her brand with an unparalleled precision. She says every product she brings out is something that she loves, inside and out.
At the end of the day, Pippa is her own customer. “Everything we’ve done, whether it’s POCO or the planners or the candles, I am involved from every stitch and every fold and drop of fragrance — you have to be. I’ve gone for the same customer throughout — we want to give our customers affordable luxury. The product must feel luxurious but if it’s not giving you value for money, then it’s not worth it.”
It’s three months since Pippa and her husband Brian moved their family into the luxury home they spent most of this year renovating. Pippa documented the renovation to more than 300,000 Instagram followers, and the result is sublime.
A study of restrained luxury, It’s the kind of aspirational gorgeousness that Pippa fans lap up.
Is it a living advertisement for a future interiors collection, I wonder. “I have such an interest in interiors, and maybe down the line I could see us going down that road because I have such an interest in it, but not right now. I’ll always do whatever I’m interested in, I think that’s what keeps things exciting — you have to be passionate about it.”
Loving what you do, especially as an entrepreneur, is the most important business rule, according to the businesswoman.
When people ask me if I think their idea is a good business idea, I always say ‘Don’t mind me — it matters whether you love it and whether you think it will work.’ You can’t convince anyone else of something if you don’t believe in it yourself
As one of the earliest adopters of monetising social media in Ireland, Pippa is a trailblazer in her field. She says her training as a model gave her the opportunity to learn the art of sales and marketing in a more traditional sense, and carry that through to the online market. “I saw the opening and the opportunities online early on,” she says.
“In terms of the online thing, even when I wasn’t doing collaborations with anyone, I knew that when I talked about something, they were selling. I realised back then that people were engaging and listening to what I was saying. Early on I thought that I needed to do something for myself, rather than selling stuff for other people, and that’s where it all started.”
Pippa.ie started as a lifestyle blog, but quickly grew into a business model for her brand, she says. “It was a learning curve for me — I knew nothing about the reach of the internet. About six months after I set up Pippa.ie, people were asking me about hits and views, telling me that I could make money from advertising on the site — it was a completely new thing for me, so there was a lot of learning at the beginning.”
Doting mother to Ollie, 5, and Louis, 2, Pippa says that without a strong team around her, there would be no success story. “I think any working mother who says that they are not overwhelmed at times is lying — how could you not be? I would not be able to anything that I do without the amazing people I have around me. I rely heavily on other people to stay on track. In order to grow in all aspects of life and business, you have to have trust in people.”
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