Pippa O'Connor Ormond: 'You can have it all — just not all at once'
Pippa O'Connor, founder of POCO Beauty
A mainstay in Irish make-up bags, POCO Beauty has grown quickly in the two plus years since it launched.
Their bestseller, Universal Glow Treatment — a tinted, serum-based product with SPF 30 — sold out in just two and a half weeks when it first hit the market. It’s my own holy-grail product, I tell founder Pippa O’Connor Ormond when we sit down to chat in the beautiful office space she has out in Rathcoole. Bright, airy, and impossibly chic, it’s reminiscent of a Kardashian office, and although it doesn’t have an in-built amphitheatre as Kim’s does, it is the perfect place to host staff workshops, shoot content, and plan future launches.
“It feels like the longest time that I’ve been in the industry,” says Pippa, who has been in the public eye since she began dating her now husband, Brian Ormond, aged 22. In the years since, her career has shifted from modelling to media and ultimately, entrepreneurship. It wasn’t part of any grand plan, she says, but rather the result of learning to trust instinct over strategy.
“It’s a long time to be around,” she smiles, admitting that confidence didn’t always come easily to her.
“When you're young and naive and green, it's hard to have that kind of self-belief. Growing up in the public eye, you’re open to scrutiny all the time — [it] takes chips out of you,” she explains, adding that you go through “stages of vulnerability” in your twenties and thirties.
“Then you have kids, and you feel vulnerable again. You're like, ‘Oh God, who's going to want to work with a pregnant person or a new mother?’ or ‘What do I look like now?’...I think it’s only really now that I'm past all of those stages that I'm coming into my prime.” (That, as a woman who has just celebrated my 30th birthday, is very reassuring to hear, I tell her).
Being both founder and the face of the brand carries significant responsibility, but working for herself was always something she envisioned.
“I was never comfortable being at the mercy of other people,” she tells me of her early modelling days. “I was waiting for the phone to ring, wondering what my income for the next month was going to be. It was so uncertain, I hated that feeling. I wanted to feel like I had a bit more security and a bit more control.”
Taking that first step out on her own wasn’t scary, though, as O’Connor Ormond felt like she “had nothing to lose”. She isn’t a particularly cautious person, she tells me, but that has actually played to her advantage.
“I think that's why Brian and I work well together,” says Pippa of her husband, whom she’s been with for over 20 years. “We're both risk takers, and we both can see a bigger picture. I have the mindset of, ‘Well, why not me? If someone else can do it, why not us?’ I think it’s scarier now in ways,” she continues. “There’s more riding on it because of the number of people we employ now, but I suppose I've learned from loads of mistakes and experiences.”
When we meet, it is a week out from their newest launch, an exciting time for O’Connor Ormond and her beloved beauty brand. But with growing popularity comes rising expectations. Does that concern her? Not especially. The only person she sees herself competing with is herself.
"I always want our next launch to be better than the last," she acknowledges. “I expect that of myself and of the business — whatever we do now has to be better than what we did six years ago. It’s dangerous to be complacent. It’s a tough industry.”
On the night of Dreamglow’s official media launch, rain buckets down on Dublin’s fair city, but the weather is hardly a deterrent. In fact, it’s a full house at the celebratory press dinner at the RHA Gallery — the scene of POCO by Pippa’s first fashion show 10 years ago.
“There was a weather warning then, too,” she laughs. If it felt like a bad omen at the time, a decade of success has proved otherwise.
One of the brand’s first standalone products, the new range comprises hydrogel eye patches, a hydrogel mask, and perhaps the most exciting of the three, gel toning pads. Unlike other toning pads on the market, which are astringent and feel drying or sharp on the skin, theirs are deeply hydrating, infused with a powerful blend of peptides, niacinamide and vegan collagen.
“We don’t scrimp,” says Pippa, referencing the generous amount of product infused into each tub.
An ice roller and no-crease hair clips are also included in the collection — the brand’s first foray into accessories. Pippa advises keeping the former in the fridge, freezer, or even “a bucket of ice with your champagne”. That last recommendation gets a cheer of support from invited guests, all impatient to get home and try it out for themselves. Described by Pippa as “extra special additions to your skincare routine”, the new products were designed in Ireland and developed with skincare experts in South Korea.
“They’re lightyears ahead in terms of skincare,” says O’Connor Ormond of the team there, noting that while the quality of the products speaks for themselves, nothing beats word of mouth from existing customers.
From the beginning, skincare has always been the brand’s forté, and their latest launch is no exception. For Pippa, the goal was simple: elevated, easy-to-use pieces that don’t sacrifice on that sense of luxury. “Our heroes are the skincare products. They’re the products that people want. They buy them over and over and recommend them to other people. We’ve started off really strong in that category, and it’s given me so much confidence to develop it out more.”
Coming up with the idea and the formulation for new products, understandably, takes time; Dreamglow was approximately 14 months in the making, and the process involves multiple steps with lots of back and forth between Pippa and her international manufacturers. “I work with cosmetic chemists between Italy, Korea, and Germany, and we literally sit down and talk about how we want the range to feel. I've learned so much. They’re the experts, but it is very much a partnership in how we develop things from scratch,” she shares.
From the outside, Pippa’s social presence might give you the impression that her life is an endless succession of fancy dinners and glitzy events, but the day-to-day of running a business is far less polished. “I don't think it's glamorous at all,” she says. “People might think that, but I suppose they're the bits that you see—finance meetings are not glamorous!”
That’s the less publicised part of the job, she agrees. “I've been in business for 10 years now. I've experienced so many highs and so many lows and so many times when I was like, ‘Jesus, this is hard’. There were times when there was more money going out than there was coming in, and you have wages to pay. It’s stressful and unglamorous… but I think experiencing things like that is really important because if you're constantly on a high and constantly just rising, it's easy to lose sight of yourself. It's all part of it.”
Her best advice for anyone hoping to emulate her success? “Don’t dwell on anything. You have to get up straight away.”
“Nobody cares about you the way you care about yourself. Get over yourself and just do it.”
It’s a tough-love philosophy, but one that’s served her well thus far.
On the enduring narrative that women can — and should — be able to ‘have it all’, Pippa takes a pragmatic view; it’s possible, just not all at the same time.
“You can't spread yourself three or four ways,” she clarifies. In simple terms, if she’s at the office, then she’s relying on someone else to mind her kids and make them their after-school snack or do their homework with them.
“I don't like when people ask me, ‘How do you do it all?’ Please don't think that I do, or that anyone does. Delegating is an important skill to learn. I don't think you can do anything successfully, especially if you're a mother, unless you're delegating.”
Mum to three young sons — Ollie, 12, Louis, nine, and Billy, four — motherhood has inevitably shaped how she thinks about the values she wants to pass on. I wonder whether raising boys has shaped how she thinks about masculinity, particularly as they watch their mother build a business of her own.
“I’m glad that they see both mum and dad go off and work hard. I'm very conscious that they understand that if I'm not at home, it's because I'm working. They're so proud of Brian and I and the business. When they see POCO Beauty at the airport, they’re delighted. Or if one of their school teachers says, ‘I wear your mom’s makeup’, they come straight home, and they’re like, ‘Guess what?!’
"I'm always reminding them that they can do whatever they want once they put their mind to it.”
Although 2025 was a strong year for the business, it was more challenging personally, with Brian in and out of the hospital multiple times for back surgery. If anything, the hard times have brought the family closer together and redefined how Pippa thinks of success in this phase of life.
“I saw something online recently that said a good life is when you can pick your kids up from school whenever you want. I really feel that now. I'm committed to everything here [at work] and obviously if I’m in London on a shoot, I can’t just go and collect them at the drop of the hat, but the majority of the time I can. If I’m at the office and I decide I want to leave at one o'clock, I can. That’s success to me. That brings contentment. I'm just so lucky that I can do that.”
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