The industrial estate is so unassuming I have to call Peigín Crowley to make sure I am in the right place. On the western edges of Cork City, the Model Farm Road business park sits alongside a garage, in the company of office supply shops and signage companies.
Sure enough, there is Crowley, phone in hand, outside to meet me.
Arms open, she does more than embrace me. This is a bear hug.
She whooshes me inside this nondescript building.
From the outside, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that this is the global HQ for GROUND Wellbeing, the award-winning wellness brand that is making waves internationally, taking centre stage in luxury five-star hotels across the world.
Then you step inside. And the Peigín Crowley magic happens.
There’s the fragrance — calming, therapeutic, otherworldly — and the sleek wooden foyer, green ferns, and mosses creating an immediate wave of calm.
The busy thoroughfare, the commuter traffic just outside, fades away.
And then there’s Crowley herself. When I tell people I’m meeting her, the responses are one and the same. Everyone has heard of her, and everyone knows someone who knows someone who has heard her speak. The word ‘inspiring’ is always mentioned.
A few minutes in her company and you swiftly realise the location of her business means nothing. She did, after all, start crafting her oils back in 2020 at her kitchen table, the world in a pandemic lockdown.
The success of GROUND is all down to one thing. It’s the Peigín Crowley effect.
As she brings me behind the scenes, to meet her team in their small but cosy workshop, she apologises for the chaos, for the boxes stacked in reception. They are moving offices, she explains. They need more space. There’s been so much growth.
In January it was announced that GROUND would be launched in Dubai’s Jumeirah group — considered among the world’s most luxurious hotels, it includes the iconic Jumeirah Burj Al Arab.
It’s yet another addition to GROUND’S growing list of luxury clients, a who’s who of five-star destinations: Rosewood, Four Seasons, Waldorf Astoria, Kempinski, Bulgari, Six Senses. The list of Irish hotels runs from the Shelbourne to Hayfield Manor to Mount Juliet.
In February the brand picked up the Emerging Business Award at the Cork Company of the Year awards, another glass trophy to add to the others sitting by the window at GROUND HQ. Last month they pivoted to skincare, her new Biome cleansers, serums, and moisturisers lauded by beauty writers, with facials exclusively unveiled at Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel.
Crowley’s success has been meteoric. Within months of launching in 2020, there was an order from Brown Thomas Cork. And as hotels gradually reopened, the five-stars came calling.
GROUND made noise instantly because it wasn’t just another spa product — it was a complete mindset.
Crowley talks passionately about training and investing in spa therapists. Her range is holistic with products designed specifically for people undergoing chemotherapy and children with sensory issues.
In an Instagram world where the word ‘authentic’ has been bandied around so much that its impact is diluted, Crowley seems like the real deal. There’s a big picture, a vision at GROUND. And it all comes back to Crowley’s training and her early days in the industry.
She wanted to study beauty and massage but her father, a UCC Geography professor, felt she should get a degree.
The lure of massage and the power of touch was with her, even as a child.
“I’d always loved massage. I’d always loved skincare. I was just fascinated with massage, touch, and the body wanting to be in alignment,” she says over a cup of coffee and chocolate biscuits.
“I would have worked in a chemist part time. So I would have sold all the witch hazel, the aqueous cream. It was the late ’90s but I’d known about Reiki and stuff. I loved it, I would rub someone’s feet, I’d brush their hair. I would love touch, even as small child.
“I’d have been a rogue in school, and I’d have averaged at 58%, anything over 60% there was a celebration.
“So the deal was, my dad said to me, ‘OK, if you do your degree, you’ll do the course you want in the best college in Ireland, and I’ll help you.’ I said, ‘Deal.’ I pulled through on the old arts degree and up I went to Dublin, and loved every minute.”
A year’s training at the Bronwyn Conroy beauty school in Dublin landed her a job on a cruise ship.
“The recruiters came into us talking about the cruise ships; myself and my great friend looked at each other, age 20, and went, ‘Ah, fuck it. We’ll have to do this,’” she says, laughing.
“I remember my dad saying, ‘I just don’t understand why you want to rub naked strangers in the dark.’ He was kind of perturbed by it, and I was
saying, ‘Dad, we’re going to have the time of our lives.’
“I remember coming home with gifts from the Amazon, from the Olympics in Sydney. I remember him being emotional and saying, ‘You are visiting the places I teach about.’ And there was a kind of full-circle moment where he kind of accepted, not that he had never not, but it was just a moment where he respected my work and said, ‘God, it’s taken you all over the world.’ And the truth is, hairdressing, beauty, massage, you’ll never know the opportunities. You could turn up anywhere in the world and get a job.”
She worked on cruise ships for three years and travelled the world, from the Arctic to the Amazon. She went everywhere from the Caribbean to the Inca trail. One cruise ship saw her under the Harbour Bridge for the Sydney Olympics. Celebrities from Jerry Hall to Mel Gibson were on board and instead of tipping the therapists, A-listers would hand over tickets to the Olympics. When Irish athletes competed, Peigín Crowley would more often than not be watching from a corporate box.
There was fun, yes, but these years were also a steep learning curve. Here, she mastered her craft. She began managing a team, and worked with international beauty labels, forging strong connections with iconic brands.
Bigger than all of that, though, were the skills she absorbed from the therapists she worked with.
“I had learned a Swedish massage in school, which is a cookie cutter version — arm, arm, leg, leg, and you work along the body. It’s like what you’d get in a spa, generally.
“But next door and down the hall from me on these ships are these therapists, body therapists from South America, from South Africa.
“You learn a craft, an advanced massage. You move past remedial, you move into lymphatics, into gut cleansing — like when you see Kim Kardashian getting a sculpting massage. So I learned everything from drainage to sculpting to lifting, all from amazing people.”
Crowley learned to tune into people, today she can read a person through massage. “You could do an eight-hour day, a 10-hour day of massage, one after the other. And someone would say to me, who did you have today?... And I’d say, do you know, I wouldn’t know if they were men or women but the third person I saw had grief. I had a woman, I think, who had recently lost someone. It’s hard to describe.
When you massage a body of someone who’s lost someone they love, it’s like a wet overcoat over them. It’s dense, and then this space underneath, it’s like it’s empty. It’s so sad to feel it, but you can feel loneliness.
Listening to Crowley, the GROUND worldview begins to make sense. She talks of taking her lead from her second brain — the gut.
“Our primary brain, our ‘doing’ brain, is our head and we need that to kick in to get up, work,” she says.
“Our second brain is our gut, our ‘being’ brain, and it’s just as powerful and intelligent, managing rest and digest, and how it communicates to the brain depends on our wellbeing.”
She advocates a similar approach to training GROUND therapists. We talk upstairs at GROUND HQ, and beside us, among the boxes ready for the move, is a massage bed in a beautifully designed compact corner of the room. Here Crowley and her team do video training for spas around the world, training clients and five-star hotels in their massage techniques and therapies. Often, they’ll travel globally to teach the therapists in person.
“It’s not that we don’t work with four-star hotels,” says Crowley. “Some of them just won’t take their therapists out of revenue generation. It could be two weeks of training depending on how many treatments they want, especially if you want to offer a treatment for menopause, for sleep.
“Most spas will take on a therapist who’s done mediocre training and start throwing them into a treatment room and charge €100. It’s why this industry will go under, because we don’t mind our therapists.
“This person is trained for two years to learn anatomy and physiology. They don’t pay them enough. And then on top of that, it’s physical work.
“And for the client, you have Mary with healing hands, or it could be Joan who doesn’t give a.... and puts down the day. At least in hairdressing, I can either pay the stylist, a designer who’s done 10,000 heads, €80 for a cut, or I can get a junior to do it.
We’re disrupting the industry because our training is so high for therapists, helping them fall back in love with their craft.
The cruise ships also introduced Crowley to Elemis. She worked for the spa brand when she came back to Ireland in 2001. From there she moved to Estée Lauder. Married with two daughters, the travel demands became too much and she left to set up a spa consultancy. Adare Manor was one of her first clients. Later she worked with the Cliff House Hotel. She would design signature products for them, slowly sewing the seeds for GROUND.
Traditionally spa brands are about indulgence, luxury, and beauty, they are exclusive. “I wanted mine to be about reaching inwards,” she says.
A skilled aromatherapist, Crowley is self learned and modest about her talent. “It’s like making cocktails,” she says, “but you need a nose. And I’d have a very good nose, though I was afraid in covid that I would lose my scent.”
During lockdown the spa consultancy abruptly ended. She began to blend oils at the kitchen table. Her two daughters and mum were drafted in to help.
“My mum came into our bubble. She was head of bath salts,” Crowley laughs. “And the daughters who I should have been homeschooling, there wasn’t a scrap of homework done. They were boxing.” At the time, the couple had €48,000 in savings for home improvements. “I told Shane [her husband] I need every cent to build this brand and he said yes.
“That order from Brown Thomas. It was a €10k opening order, and it needed to be ready for I think the first of December, when the shops were opening again.
“I have to say, the well wishing from Cork... I don’t know if my business would have done so well if it was in Dublin, Cork’s a really special place to do anything.”
When spas reopened, she began supplying hotels, including the Shelbourne and Mount Juliet. Crowley eschews traditional spa menus that focus on beauty, luxury, and anti-ageing. Instead she develops products for people with sleep issues, for pregnancy and menopause, as well as for people going through cancer. There’s a focus on gut health, the vagus nerve, the lymphatic system.
She teaches massage to families, partnering with Little Kneaders to develop sensory dough for children with additional needs. She is passionate about sustainability, buying everything she can for GROUND from Ireland, so it is a circular economy.
The creative is her driving force but investment and Enterprise Ireland support has secured her key hires to look after sales and operations.
A successful businesswoman (she is brutally honest and says five years in, she isn’t bringing in the big bucks), I tell Crowley this interview will be published on International Women’s Day.
She talks to the power of working with other women. “We are magical,” she says. “But the fact that we try and turn up and compete with men on their terms... what men have to understand and women have to understand is we’re cyclical. We cycle up and we cycle down monthly. We recalibrate after babies. We recalibrate in menopause. When you catch us at our most capable, when you catch us in that couple of days, I totally know a man in the world wouldn’t touch us.
I can tell you now, when women work together, there’s an energy. It’s like witches, in a good way. A channeled energy.
As I leave Peigín to pack her boxes, I ask her what’s next.
There are more products to come in her skincare range, but ultimately there is another beautiful ambition. She wants to build GROUND as a refuge, a place to stay.
“I’d love people to be able to sponsor people to go. So if you lost someone, God forbid, or I lost someone, or someone was diagnosed with something very serious, that you’ve people who give back and sponsor someone to come. So it’s not exclusive.”
As Crowley walks me back to my car, back to the reality of industrial estates and rush hour traffic, she reflects again on the last five years.
“When you’re all in on plan A and you put your whole life savings in again, there was no plan B. This had to work,” she says.
“But I never expected it to go global.”
Watch this space. Two hours in her company and I’m in no doubt. If she builds GROUND, they will come. It’s the Peigín Crowley effect.
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