WHEN SANDRA McClumpha’s mother was diagnosed with skin melanoma in 2001, Sandra, a tanning salon owner from Clackmannanshire, was shocked. “It was ignorance, really,” she says, elegantly sipping a cup of tea inside her flagship new salon, Brown Cow,
which commands an entire townhouse in Glasgow’s prestigious West Regent Street.
“It was ignorance about the sun, about not protecting yourself and about sunbeds, that had caused the melanoma. Seeing that happen so close to home definitely pushed me into action.”
That action was to find the perfect fake-tanning product, something so good that it would stop women going on to sunbeds or cooking themselves on the beach. At the time McClumpha, who will be speaking this Thursday at the everywoman Conference Scotland, owned a nail and tanning salon in Stirling. Having had sunbeds in the salon – “we didn’t know better” she says – she got rid of them and became a convert to fake-tanning products instead. She road-tested those already on the market, but wasn’t completely happy with any of the results.
She eventually found a product she was happy with in Fake Bake, which was then unlicensed in Europe. McClumpha made a pilgrimage to the US to pitch for its foreign distribution rights. A one-woman show with no business experience at that point, she was sent home empty-handed, but persevered and eventually won the day. Thanks to her efforts, the brand is now a favourite among Wags, models and ordinary women across Europe who don’t buy into the ‘pale and interesting’ look.
Having sold her Stirling salon in order to fund the business, she has gone from working alone out of her kitchen – waiting until her baby boy Lewis had gone to sleep in order to get on the phone and start negotiating – to a savvy businesswoman with a multi-million pound turnover, the managing director of Fake Bake UK and the head of her own high-end salon business, the delightfully named Brown Cow, which will open a second branch in Dublin later this month.
Yet her mother’s experience with melanoma has stuck with her. It was found to be benign, but McClumpha’s attitude had changed fundamentally. “It made me very aware of how much damage [sunbeds] can do,” she says. “And it’s still going on. One of my staff’s husband has just been diagnosed with skin cancer. I have a friend who nearly died from it after years of sunbed use. It’s incredibly scary.”
In fact, McClumpha feels so passionate about the dangers of sunbeds that she even ran a campaign several years ago, going into Scottish schools and telling girls that the popstars they wanted to look like didn’t get their tans from a sunbed, but from a bottle. She is also keen to see the law changed so that sunbeds can’t be used by those under 18.
“People might say I’m being hypocritical in speaking out about sunbeds but I’m not, it’s through knowledge. I know the damage that it does, I’ve seen it up close. Glasgow is the biggest sunbed-using area in the UK and it’s madness. Things have changed, but not enough.
“I had a conversation with a 22-year-old girl the other day who had been using a sunbed every day since she was 15, and now she’s getting Botox because of the state of her skin. The whole rise in cosmetic procedures is because we’re ruining our skin.”
She admits, too, that “I was a culprit. We didn’t know any better [at that time] and thought it was fine to go on a sunbed; it didn’t matter about your skin.”
The problem is, as she says, women still desire a tan. “Ever since Coco Chanel did it in the 1920s, women have wanted a tan. They want to have that healthy glow, to look good. The fashion writers regulary declare it’s not trendy to tan, but it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. Having a tan makes you feel better. It’s always going to be popular.”
McClumpha herself has a beautiful glow – nothing like the garish orange traditionally associated with bottled tans. Slim and attractive, she looks younger than her 40 years. “I look ill without a bit of a tan!” she confides.
Her salon, which she opened last July, is an attempt to take tanning out of the back room, where it has traditionally lurked in beauty salons, and make it one of the main events. It’s designed for women in a rush, the idea being that a customer can pop in during her lunchbreak and have as many as three treatments done in an hour, with two or more therapists working on her at the same time.
McClumpha has worked hard to get here. She calls selling her business to fund her Fake Bake licensing a “huge gamble” and it was one that she took not long after she had given birth to her son, Lewis, who was born ten weeks premature.
“I was diagnosed with endometriosis and told I wouldn’t be able to have children, so to become pregnant at all was a big surprise.” Then, when Lewis was just a year old, there was another surprise when she fell pregnant with her daughter, Natalia.
“That made me even more determined to succeed,” she says. “It had to work. There was no option. But it was pretty difficult for a few years.”
With no formal business training, she was forced to learn on the hoof. “I didn’t have any business knowledge, I couldn’t send an e-mail, I didn’t even know how to switch on my computer. But I learned along the way. I was never scared to ask for advice and was willing to admit that I didn’t know anything. It’s funny though, in spite of everything, I still don’t think of myself as a businesswoman. I think of myself as a working mum.”
So why does she think she’s been successful? She smiles. “Anyone who sets me a challenge knows I’m going to succeed,” she says. Not a bad philosophy for this particular Brown Cow.
• The everywoman Conference Scotland “Maximising your potential and growing your business” takes place on Thursday 13 March, at the Caledonian Hilton Edinburgh Hotel. See
www.everywoman.com for more details. SW readers can claim discounted tickets for the conference, at £50+VAT (regular price £65+VAT), by quoting discount code SRE. To book call 0870 746 1800 or e-mail
events@everywoman.co.uk• For information on the conference agenda click
here• Founded in September 1999, Everywoman Ltd is the UK’s leading provider of training, resources and support services for women in business, thought leaders in women’s business development and promoters of women in business and gender diversity. Its mission is to Inspire Women to Excel. Everywoman works to increase the number, and raise the status, of women in the UK economy, using their experience and expertise to help women achieve their aspirations and realise their business ambitions. everywoman delivers conferences and events, awards programmes, training and leadership programmes. It developed the UK’s first, and largest, online resource for women business owners (
www.everywoman.com), which now has 31,000 members.
The full article contains 1266 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
