Brand Story Hero — Cocoa Brown
As part of our Brand Story Hero series, we shine a spotlight on storytelling around a brand we admire. Today we’re looking at Irish tan and beauty company Cocoa Brown.
Brand: Cocoa Brown
Industry: Beauty
Product: Tan
Founder: Marissa Carter
Year founded: 2012
Mission: Be well, be kind and be beautiful
Their story
Cocoa Brown marked their fifth birthday in November 2017 and the team certainly have reason to celebrate. With 15,000 stockists in 23 countries and a bottle of the tan being sold every three minutes, Cocoa Brown is a phenomenal Irish success story.
The popularity of the iconic hot pink bottles is down to CEO Marissa Carter — a determined entrepreneur who founded a beauty salon in the height of the recession and established her product as an industry leader in a saturated market. She’s amassed numerous awards, including a spot on the Women’s Executive Network’s (WXN) ’25 most powerful women in Ireland’ list.
But like any brand founder, Marissa had to start somewhere.
Her journey with Cocoa Brown had its roots in studying the Beauty Specialist Diploma course at The Galligan Beauty College in Dublin. Unable to afford the fees, operators Lorraine and Careena Galligan offered Marissa the opportunity to work part-time work during the day, and to study in the evenings. In true Marissa fashion, she qualified with honours and then taught beauty therapy for two years before opening her own salon in 2006.
The salon had humble beginnings in the laundry room of the house she was renting, but after saving, getting a bank loan and a few relocations, Carter Beauty Salon moved to its final home in Blackrock.
It was here, in Carter Beauty Salon, that she gathered feedback from clients on what they wanted from spray tans. She still has the same ethos of staying in touch with what customers want and using social media to ask for people’s thoughts on new products.
Three weeks after giving birth to her first child, Charlie, Marissa treated herself to a spray tan, and as anyone who has ever had a spray tan knows, she had to wait overnight for the tan to show up. When Marissa woke up she was beautifully bronzed, but the tan had also transferred onto Charlie! This was the Eureka moment, she decided to work with a team of cosmetic chemists to create the world’s first 1-hour tan.
Less than a year later, Cocoa Brown hit Irish shelves and the success story and product range has only grown from there.
To read more about Cocoa Brown’s story and their storytelling tools and lessons, click on the link below.
