More than skin deep

THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:NICKY KINNAIRD is in the business of beauty. There aren't many people who can count both a Queen's University Belfast honorary doctorate in economics and an Irish Tatler Woman of the Year award among their accolades, but the Belfast-born entrepreneur takes it all in her impeccably groomed stride.

As the founder of transatlantic cosmetics apothecary Space NK (the initials are eponymous), Kinnaird (44) has created a retail business that not only enjoys something of a cult status, but also saw its profits swell by 60 per cent to £3.5 million (€4.5 million) last year as it wrapped up sales of £40 million. That's not bad for a bit of goo and slap.

Now Irish shopping tourists turned mail-order devotees can rejoice, because Kinnaird is finally bringing her personally edited selection of upmarket skin creams, niche lipsticks and in- house fragrances to the Republic for the first time.

Next month she will open a Space NK store-within-a-store in Harvey Nichols's Dublin boutique. Well, where better than the Dundrum Town Centre to find beauty browsers with recession-proof incomes?

"We see a lot of people coming up north to Belfast, shopping in both the city-centre store and also on the Lisburn road, so there's definitely a customer base here for Space NK," says a tanned Kinnaird.

She is showing no signs of the weariness of the frequent flyer, having jetted into Dublin in advance of the grand opening.

With a professional background in property investment, Kinnaird has been careful not to compromise on where she chooses to set up shop. It has been hard to find the right site for a standalone outlet in Dublin, she says, but she's still looking.

A modest trailblazer, Kinnaird is a shopkeeper who actually shops.

An early Space NK store in the heart of the City of London financial district was identified as a target for the expansion of the nascent chain because the time she had spent in the area conducting office rent reviews - "because you had to, to get your letters" - had forced to her to shuttle over to the West End on her lunch break if she wanted a retail fix. The captive audience became hers.

"It's all changed since then," she notes.

The daughter of a chartered surveyor, Kinnaird admits to being surprised by her own career trajectory. "My father was the second generation in his company and I had always insisted that I was going to be the third one in there," she says.

Growing up in Belfast in the 1970s, she was "very lucky" to spend her summers in the Valencia region of Spain and she recalls her early fascination with Spanish cosmetic rituals in idyllic terms.

"You still had orange groves going right down to the sea," she says. "I was obsessed not just with the great olive bars of soap you would see in the supermarkets, but these great litre glass bottles of orangeblossom water, citrus colognes and lavender water. When people came home they'd get showered and splash these amazing colognes all over their bodies . . .

"You'd be trailing in the wake and getting these wonderful wafts of fresh colognes coming through."

In 1985, she started at the retail agency department of property firm Debenham, Tewson Chinnocks and worked in central London at a time when it was attracting international designers and fashionistas to its regenerating shopping precincts.

However, after she had found for them what they needed, it was "bye bye, thank you very much", she says. "My bit of the equation was over and, from my perspective, that was when it was just getting interesting."

She moved into retail consultancy, where she "repositioned" high-end luxury brands that had lost their way. Meanwhile, she indulged in her own passion for scouring the globe for beauty brands that had yet to be discovered back home.

In 1992, she was approached by the property division of Kleinwort Benson bank, which was developing the Thomas Neal speciality retail centre in Covent Garden.

"Whether I'd given out vibes that I wanted to be a retailer or whatever, they came to me and said, 'if you're interested in putting something together and come up with a business plan that makes sense, we would be interested in funding you'. So I went away one August bank holiday weekend with the 'how to write a business plan' books and basically came up with my dream lifestyle store."

Kinnaird decorated the whitewashed walls of a 4,500sq ft converted banana warehouse with clothes, accessories, beauty products - and, in proof that it is possible to be too far ahead of the curve, a juice bar.

"The juice bar was an unmitigated disaster," she sighs. "In 1993, it was like fine. In the States, it was the hot thing - people in New York and California were absolutely obsessed with them - but it was too early in the UK."

Kinnaird quickly jettisoned the clothes and the accessories in favour of beauty brands such as Eve Lom, Dr Sebagh, Laura Mercier and Diptyque, drawing inspiration from the catwalk as well as the chemist.

At the end of 1996, she opened three stores in the space of four weeks. There are now 63 Space NKs in the UK.

This is not the end of her ambition, though. Recession or no recession, Space NK has signed a deal with Bloomingdale's to open nine store concessions in the US before Christmas, which will add to the four standalone storefronts over which she has already put her initials in New York.

The expansion is funded by Manzanita Capital, the private equity firm that now owns most of the business.

It has US retail pedigree on board: one of its main investors is William Fisher, whose parents founded casual clothing behemoth Gap.

A mooted flotation on the New York Stock Exchange is off the agenda for the moment because "we have more to achieve", not because of market turmoil. "It's not like the Prada IPO [initial public offering] that keeps getting put off and put off," she laughs.

But is she not worried that slump-struck women will be less willing to fork out for £100 eye creams? "I don't think anyone's immune," she says. "Customers, when times are tough, are looking for value for money, but it is value for money at whatever price point."

Despite not betraying any, Kinnaird admits to occasional nerves. "You still have the fear factor with every store you open," she says. What if no one comes by?"