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LEADING BY EXAMPLE
Interview & Words Phadria Prendergast
Since creating the British Beauty Council in 2018, Millie Kendall MBE is the woman responsible for raising the reputation and value of the multi-billion pound industry that was so desperately underrepresented and disregarded in the United Kingdom. Her platform has established a new order, given a voice to the next generation of beauty leaders and will produce fresh opportunities. Put simply, the BBC is a platform to enforce change for all, in the area of cosmetics and beauty.
It’s a late Thursday afternoon in London when I get on the phone to Kendall. The last of the cold February sun danced over the River Thames from outside my window. She’s had quite the week but it’s no change for the powerhouse. It was the ideal time for her to be a WOTC cover girl, and for the second time. Her service to the industry was inspiring.
The day before our call, I had seen via social media that she had submitted a letter to Chancellor Rishi Sunak, calling for a Personal Care Fund and pushing her ongoing VAT campaign; to have targeted VAT reduced to five percent. She explains that since June 2020, alongside her team, they had been working towards lobbying the Treasury to provide supplementary funding to the hair and beauty sector. “It's not an overnight sensation,” she states. “A lot of the time, these things take months and months, and we were turned down and turned down and other industries were getting it. We are the newest lobby group essentially. We are the newest group of industry bodies that talk to [the] government and there hadn't really been any specific team that pushed for that. We've got that now. So we’ve got our own personal care sector team, which is fantastic. [It] makes internal lobbying much easier because we can work with our team to get the meetings that we need.”
From the very beginning, Kendall and her team had put in the groundwork; Googling MPs and the name of civil servants alongside their job roles, then sending cold emails. “You really do have to make these evidence cases for why you need what you need. So with the budget coming [in] March, we really had to ramp up campaigning, lobbying and meetings. We were up for about a week until three a.m. Four of us [were] on WhatsApp drafting evidence, reports, gathering information from salons and freelancers and putting it into a spreadsheet, a big P&L that showed the fixed cost and what they were losing.” The few grants the industry was entitled to barely touched the surface, particularly for the larger businesses. Furlough also did not pay for the national insurance, nor did it pay for the pension. A friend of the British Beauty Council CEO, who runs a large salon, has been paying out twenty seven thousand pounds a month in national insurance and pension.
Funding and financial support that has been available during the pandemic to the beauty industry in the United Kingdom are few and far between. Business owners have had access to Business rate relief and rates holiday which was introduced in 2020, allowing some properties a discount by their local council. There has also been a moratorium on rent, meaning that landlords are unable to evict tenants if they are unable to make payments. Tax deferrals were also introduced meaning that as a business, if you have VAT or PAYE that was payable, you could defer it. Furlough is perhaps the most well-known grant amongst them all, however for many, the process isn’t straight forward. “A lot of people had to pay accountants to do the work for them, so it cost them to do it. Obviously, what that's doing is saving the workforce, because it means that you're not firing your staff and making them redundant, you are just putting them on furlough, but you still have to pay national insurance and pension contributions,” she adds. “The government is enticing you to keep your staff on by paying them for you, but you're still having to pay additional bits to the government for the privilege of keeping the staff on, but in some cases, you can't even afford to keep [them] on.” Business owners still have rent rates, utilities, insurance, credit card machines, and numerous other fixed costs. Some freelancers have had the benefit of the SEISS, which is a self-employed grant, however, with some of the beauty industry either being new to the sector and therefore not having three years worth of self-assessment tax returns, they were not eligible. Other freelancers earn under the threshold and therefore, have only had the option of Universal Credit.
When Kendall created the British Beauty Council in 2018, she began by defining the beauty industry - something that had never been done before, despite the sector being centuries old. “That was really quite important because, to form a sort of cohesive group, you have to define who you are. So are tattooists part of the beauty sector or are they slightly separate? Is permanent makeup included? We know hairdressing is, but what about wigs? There are so many different nuances. It's such a broad and very complicated industry, that we really needed to define it; both in terms of products and services, so that we could understand, is toothpaste and deodorant part of the beauty sector? Is that personal care? What does that mean?”
Kendall, alongside her team, then went on to create the value of beauty; which once again, had never been carried out to that degree. In the past, there had been speculation and run-of-the-mill valuations, but nothing close to the in-depth work the BBC produced. Their valuation is now considered the go-to figure, doing precisely what she and her team had intended. Now a policy which is spoken about in government, the beauty sector can be found amongst the list of other key industries in the new covid-19 spring response document. In the document, it states, the industry’s value, how many people work within the sector and of that number, how many are women. It is a great change and major milestone for beauty - an industry that just two years ago, was never spoken about or regarded in the way it is now.
“I can't change the fact that I'm getting older, but I can't sit here and accept the status quo,
“It's given people confidence,” Kendall exclaims. “People now have a sense of pride”. A polar opposite to the feeling of being very overlooked, which she recalls it’s how her father; who was a hairdresser, had felt. It’s also a feeling Kendall was familiar with. She remembers attending parties where she was asked what she did, only to receive judgemental looks and have conversations concluded for her - the other party assuming she wasn’t smart enough to converse with. “I think I grew up in this world of shame in a way.” She recollects being eleven years old and the hardship she faced despite being quite a bright child. “I took all the entrance exams at schools and I didn't get into the ones that I wanted to go to, because my parents were interviewed and my dad was a hairdresser. It just wasn't seen as being the kind of parental job that would warrant me getting a place at City of London or any of the schools.” Though she didn’t entirely understand what was happening at the time, as she got older, she began to reflect. “I passed the exams and my parents didn't pass the interview. Why is that? Because he was a hairdresser? What an awful position to be in as a parent. To think that your job - a skilled job, was the reason that your child didn't get the education that they wanted or deserved, I just think it's horrific really.”
“I’m a doer, not a thinker”
After receiving her MBE in 2007 for her services in the cosmetics industry, she was often ridiculed by husbands of friends, who would find it hilarious that she had been awarded for that reason. “It's frustrating, and when you get older, you start seeing, OK, this is not OK. Personally, I turned 50. Donald Trump was elected president and half our country decided to isolate ourselves [referring to Brexit],” she commented in response to what had propelled her into creating the platform. “I can't change the fact that I'm getting older, but I can't sit here and accept the status quo,” she recalls thinking. In short, the British Beauty Council’s inception was a culmination of many years of frustration and she wasn’t the only one. Many of Kendall’s friends and counterparts were feeling the very same and she decided to act. “I’m a doer, not a thinker,” she laughs.
In the past, Kendall had been asked to do radio interviews, where questions asked were along the lines of ‘so does the cosmetics industry take any responsibility for the damage of teenagers mental health?’ “You're like woah, where did that come from? You realise that actually, the perception of our industry is really poor,” she exclaims.
She recollects an occasion where a friend had drawn her attention to an article in which the daughter of a politician had expressed his outrage regarding his daughter’s decision in wanting to become a YouTuber/vlogger within the beauty sector. He was mortified that she did not want an education in accounting or law. “I just thought, well, what's wrong with it? People have made good business from it and if it's your passion and what you want to do, why the hell not?” she states. “Why is that deemed any less or not as important to society when everything that we do encompasses well-being - from the products we use, to the treatments and services that we offer.”
The beauty and cosmetics industry is 88% women; more so than any other sector and have the biggest female workforce in the entire country of the United Kingdom. In 2020, Kendall and her team put forward numerous documents ranging from mental wellbeing, to apprenticeships within the industry. “We've put in two asks; one is a VAT reduction of five percent for the large businesses - those that are VAT registered, which means that they have a turnover of over eighty five thousand pounds. There are twelve thousand, three hundred of those salons, but they employ half the workforce. So it's very important to save that small amount of businesses, because they are large employers. The other piece of work was a personal fund, which is really for reopening, to give the sector some cash based on turnover, not rent rates. We might not get it, but I think we put in a damn good case for why we should.”
Kendall has also pushed heavily for the next generation of leaders within the beauty industry. When she delivered the value of beauty report, it was found that sixty five thousand young people took an NVQ level two or three in makeup, hair, beauty or multidisciplinary, which would include nails - all practical, further education and vocational jobs. “Sixty five thousand people were not employed by our industry that same year, so where did they go? Why did they take those courses?” Her thoughts; these young people were pushed into these jobs because they are not seen as academic.
“There are things that you can do in beauty that are creative that are not beauty, hair, makeup or nails. You could be a formulator, you could be a beauty PR or journalist. You could be a packaging technologist, you could be a retail manager. You could be in marketing. Nobody I know in this sector now, came from a traditional background. Ruby Hammer studied economics and worked in a restaurant; Sam Mcknight was a French teacher; Marian Newman was a forensic scientist working for the local police department. So not everyone has come via a traditional route and there aren't very many cosmetic science courses in this country. There should be more, because if you said to a bunch of GCSE level kids, 'do your double science, you can then make Lipstick for Pat McGrath', they might decide to take double science.”