September closed a chapter for me. After two and a half years in global retail training at Stella McCartney, the British luxury house known for its sustainable approach to fashion, I’ve handed over the next season’s plans and taken a few quiet weeks to look back before starting a new role in October.
I sat down to write a short reflection on my time there and quickly realised two and a half years doesn’t fit into one post. Then I realised the same was true of everything before it. The work of a trainer is everywhere and nowhere at once. It doesn’t leave behind one big finished thing you can point to. It shows up in small moments, often in rooms you’ve already left: It shows up in small moments, usually long after you’ve left the room. It shows up in small moments, usually long after you’ve left the room. A new makeup artist walks onto the shop floor feeling ready for her first day. Behind a treatment-room door, a skin therapist explains a routine so clearly that her client actually sticks to it. A Client Advisor explains where a fabric comes from, and her client leaves knowing why it matters. Most of those moments happen without me, and that’s how it should be. It just makes fifteen years hard to sum up, so this is my attempt, starting at the beginning.
Where it started
I grew up in the Australian outback, about as far from the glamour of a magazine cover as you can get. Moving to the city for high school felt like stepping onto the set of Miss Congeniality, minus the makeover team. The girls around me seemed to know instinctively what to do with their hair and makeup, and I had no idea where to start. This was before YouTube could teach you anything in ten minutes. Everyone else seemed fluent in a language I’d never been taught.
So I threw myself into learning. At the time I didn’t know beauty could be a career, I just knew I wanted to understand it properly, and I wanted to learn from the best. I enrolled at one of Australia’s most respected beauty therapy colleges and graduated with three international diplomas recognised by salons and spas around the world. The standards were exacting, and they became the bar I’ve measured good education against ever since.
From there I went hands-on, first in salon and spa, then for five years at a Melbourne skin clinic, where I worked my way up from therapist to Clinic Manager. That was my first real taste of building a team. I found I cared as much about helping the therapists around me improve as I did about the treatments. By the time I left, we had repositioned the clinic as a premium skin destination with more than 2,000 loyal clients, and I had learned that clients trust you when you know your subject and can explain it simply. I didn’t have a name for it yet, but that pull towards teaching was the beginning of everything that followed.
Learning to teach
A few years later I went back to the same college, this time as a lecturer and examiner, teaching the qualifications I had once studied for. Standing on the other side of the classroom changed how I thought about everything. Knowing something and being able to teach it are separate skills, and the second one takes practice. Along the way I became a formally qualified educator, which gave me the frameworks behind what I’d been learning by instinct.
Around the same time, I joined MECCA, Australia’s leading premium beauty retailer, to lead in-store education at its flagship, hosting masterclasses in makeup, skincare and haircare for clients. It showed me something I’ve relied on ever since. When education is useful to a client, they remember the store for it, and they come back.
Brand education at scale
Next came Dermalogica, a professional skincare brand used by skin therapists in more than 100 countries, where I delivered its advanced education to retail teams, salon professionals and beauty colleges. Within months, the pandemic moved all of it online. In the first year of the pandemic, our team built 78 workshops that reached more than 10,000 beauty professionals across Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, and that same year we were named Organisation Educator of the Year at Australia’s national beauty industry awards. It taught me that good training can survive a change of format, but only when you redesign it for the new one.
At Sephora, the global beauty retailer, I led training across Australia and New Zealand as Training Executive, and the question became scale. After COVID, I rebuilt the specialist makeup artist team from nothing to more than 50 trained artists. I also designed Skin @ Sephora, an onboarding programme for skin services that was later adopted by other markets, including Europe. Seeing something I’d designed for one region go global is still one of the proudest moments of my career.
London and luxury fashion
Then I moved to London, something I’d wanted for years. A few months later I joined Stella McCartney as Global Retail Trainer, supporting 38 stores and franchise partners, with wholesale partners in 59 countries.
Fashion asked different things of me than beauty had. Season after season, I took the thinking behind each collection, from the runway and campaign down to the craftsmanship and materials, and shaped it into something teams across Europe, the US and Asia could bring into a real conversation with a client. Some of those material stories were hard to teach well. Explaining a next-generation alternative to leather so it stays accurate and is still easy to say out loud takes more care than people expect, and I learned to check every claim twice before it reached a store.
Stella was also where I started looking at training as one connected system. I still delivered sessions, but more of my thinking went into what surrounded them: what a new starter should learn first, and what a Store Manager needs to keep coaching after I’ve gone. The programmes I’m proudest of are the ones built to carry on without me.
There were moments I’ll keep, too. I trained teams on the shop floor in Paris, Milan and Madrid, and worked with colleagues from New York to Hong Kong. At Paris Fashion Week, I watched a collection come down the runway knowing that months later I’d be the one helping stores around the world talk about it. The one I remember most, though, is hearing a Client Advisor tell a story I’d written, in her own words, to a client who had no idea it started life as a slide.
Why I’m writing about retail training
It’s funny to think the girl who had no idea where to start went on to spend fifteen years showing other people where to begin. Looking back, the thread is clearer than it ever felt at the time. Whether it was a skincare active or a leather alternative made from agricultural by-products, my job was always to make something complex make sense for the person who would explain it next.
Fifteen years in, I’ve trained professionals across more than 70 countries, yet very little of what I’ve learned is written anywhere I can share it. Most of it stayed behind with each brand I worked for, or lives on in the teams I trained.
So this is the start of Trained, a new corner of the blog for what I’ve learned about retail training and client experience in beauty and fashion. Some posts will be practical, like how to build learning people remember or how to tell whether it worked. Others will answer the questions I get asked all the time.
It will keep growing, because I’m still learning. What I take from my next role will find its way here as reflection, the same way everything before it has.
Who it’s for
If you train people, lead a store team or run a retail business and have ever wondered whether training is worth the investment, this is for you. It’s also for anyone who has sat through a session and felt it could have been done better. I’ve felt that too, and working out how to do it better has shaped most of what I’ll share here.
To every classroom and store team I’ve worked with over the years, thank you. Much of what I’ll write here, I learned from you.
Next, I’m answering the question people ask me most: what does a retail training manager actually do?
