Introducing Suzanne Duckett, Founder of Onolla, a natural health and beauty concept store
Suzanne Duckett, founder of Onolla
Meet Suzanne, founder of Onolla, a natural health and beauty hub and shop offering expert advice and showcasing world-class artisan products in beautifully curated gift sets and expert advice. Join us as she shares her inspiration for a brand fuelled by mother nature, drawing on her three decades of beauty experience.
Onolla joins the dots between what’s going on in the physical world and how we can flow with it. The team works with best-in-class natural products and holistic health experts, brimming with time honoured self-care rituals and advice.
They champion female owned brands, producers and makers and with Suzanne's bulging contact book they have some of the best specialist health and beauty journalists and experts contributing to their stories, tips, advice and curations.
Website: Onolla | INSTAGRAM:@onollaofficial | @suzanneduckett1
“I am a well-known, respected Journalist and Editor who has for the last three decades held the post of Health and Beauty Director of some of the most successful magazines in the World – from Cosmopolitan to Good Housekeeping, as well as being the former Editor of the Tatler Spa Guide. I am currently Spa Expert for The Telegraph and contribute lead stories to The Times. I am also the author of Bathe. Whilst writing for the most prestigious, demanding publications, I also regularly appear on TV and radio, speaking and moderating at events and summits and consulting to big and small brands, hotels and spas as well as to private clients - helping people to be their most natural, successful self.
Where did your inspiration to set up Onolla come from?
My passion is syncing people back to the cycles and power of nature so have opened my first Onolla natural health and beauty concept store on White Hart Lane, Barnes - a gorgeous tight-knit neighbourhood in leafy south-west London known as Little Chelsea. Onolla is the authentic plant-based health and beauty hub, curating some of the best-in-class brilliant brands that blend nature and science. I am also passionate about the balance we need to strike between our physical and digital lives now.
How did you transition from writing and broadcasting to creating a natural lifestyle brand?
I am still writing and broadcasting – that is in my blood now! But adding the concept store was a natural progression (excuse the pun). I can write about all my recommendations ‘til the cows come home. but ultimately, women want the list of what to buy, who to book. Onolla is more than just a shop, it is a plant-based, seasonally centric health and beauty hub that curates and combines best-in-class products, practices and practitioners, giving customers an education and access to them. We also have a Makers Table at the centre of the store for the intimate gatherings and events with my favourite experts. I also offer my Duckett List which is a personal health and beauty edit, introducing women to the various experts and brands that I feel match their needs and help them invest in the right assets for their health fund. What’s the use of an abundant wealth fund in the future if you are too unwell to enjoy it?
What were the main steps to setting up your business?
Creating the website Finding new ways of working with brands, practitioners, experiences and getting the first bricks and mortar open – all to resonate and suit the needs of the times we are in.
What is Onolla’s mission?
To encourage and guide people everywhere to take more control of their wellbeing and live better, happier and hopefully, longer!
The secret? Syncing with the rhythms of nature and mirroring your health, beauty and life choices with the seasons, thereby cultivating a deeper connection between you and your environment. The planet needs it; we humans need it.
Onolla is an acronym for online now offline later, so we will be combining those two worlds ,not just from a retail perspective but educational also with events and ‘Master IT’ Classes and Workshops…
Onolla store
What are your future goals for the brand?
A franchise model with heart and soul as well as financial prowess to create more Onolla stores, rich with community spirit in special, engaged neighbourhoods in London. My aim is to achieve this with more Onolla entrepreneurial women who want to manage something, but don’t want to start their own business. To also support women who want to be part of an exciting venture, still be free to be creative and local and be involved in something that is doing good, as well as making money for all involved. It is about the micro and the macro.
What do you see as current key themes within lifestyle and wellness?
Personalisation, embracing nature and not just being concerned with sustainability, we are getting past that sadly, but regeneration. Regeneration is everything.
Who are your typical clients?
The more traditional Times reader to the on-trend Vogue readers - women aged between 30-50 and beyond. Women who are interested in more natural and organic beauty and self-care products that are divine to use, rich with potent, natural ingredients, sustainable and ‘clean’ but that have the all-important science and R&D behind them so that the product does what it promises. Though having said that, we are also attracting lots of dads interested in vanity and sanity too! They come in under the guise of buying something for their wife and end up asking more about their health and beauty needs. Everyone is welcome.
What are your most valuable business resources?
The ability to know how people are feeling (even when they are saying the opposite!) Having been a journalist for nearly 30 years, you have to know how to ‘read’ someone, to know what they need and want so you can offer real solutions to their problems. I guess you’d call it being astute, noticing things, picking up on the subtle signs and white flags we wave… often unnoticed.
Onolla store window
What are your 5 go-to tips for running a business?
Practice something daily that helps turn your mind off
For me it is meditation, twice daily for 20-30 minutes. Otherwise I’d have smoke coming out of my ears generated by constant ideas and the need to troubleshoot! You then get so close to everything you can’t see the wood for the trees.
Go with your gut feeling
If it lights you up, it will light others up. And you can ask for advice but you don’t always need to take it...
Don’t be scared that what you are doing is not unique enough
You are unique so you will have your unique spin on everything you do. How many independent coffee shops are there? They are all the same and yet all have their own energy, vibe, and way of doing things. This cannot be underestimated. In other words, don’t try and totally reinvent the wheel.
Get a family member or friend involved early
Someone who can help you create a profit and loss spread sheet that you understand, that you can input and update, and then beg, steal or borrow their time once a month to run the numbers. It really isn’t as scary as we think it is, especially for creatives. We have a thing about number’s but they are just numbers - many simply need that helping hand.
Get your daily routine nailed from the start
Dedicate admin time, creative time, finance time and all the other time needed slots to help compartmentalise things. I tended to just go for it for the first 12-18 months which is exhausting because you have to keep changing gear, which in turn can create a jerky ride for all involved.
What do you wish you had known before you started?
That I was going to burn through my entire savings! I wasted a good few thousand pounds on unnecessary things because I was going from week to week, rather than being honest with myself about the big picture and therefore the big picture costs.
Stress and finance can be unfortunate bedfellows – what techniques or practices do you recommend to help combat the impact of stress on our health and wellness?
Meditation again. It is key to just let go and surrender whatever is going on. It actually teaches you to do that while you are working on and in your business too – you learn that shit happens and sometimes you need to just let go when it is all going wrong, stand back and make a cup of tea.
Get some perspective. Daily. Work on your self-worth and self-esteem, key factors as I mention later. If you don’t feel worthy as a person, money can add to the problem. Without this foundation, it can go and often does do one of two ways:
people can become obsessed with money and try to use it to validate themselves to others or they feel they don’t deserve to have money and spend their lives working super hard for others, putting gold into everyone else’s treasure chests but theirs.
W E A L T H
Describe your relationship with money and personal finance in three words?
Complicated. Inadequate. Improving. My maiden name derives from the word ducat which was a gold or silver coin used as a trade coin in Europe from the later Middle Ages until as late as the 20th century. So, making peace with money is imperative for me now from an ancestry as well as financial point of view.
How do you define wealth?
To get to a place where you stop chasing it and is starts flowing with ease. Recurring income doing things you love, that benefits others and that is effortless and joyful for all involved in the exchange.
What is the best financial decision you have ever made (business or personal)?
I don’t think I have made it yet!
What did you learn about finance and money when you were growing up?
Oh goodness, not great lessons. My father earned fast and spent faster and my mother had nothing to do with it (though she could spend pretty well too!). My father also got very ill through working too hard, so I regularly have to remind myself there is benefit to money too! For many years I though money was the root of evil. I don’t anymore but the scars are still healing and some never will. But those ones will be the little reminders how far I have come, how much I have been willing to risk, sacrifice and learn and to stay humble and grateful until my last breath.
Who manages the finances in your household?
Ashamed to say, mainly my husband right now but we are currently on a new regime now and I am learning to take understand it all 100% and take 50% responsibility. I am learning fast. My skill is the gut feeling – knowing where to move to, how to develop a property to help get to the next rung and given our properties are our main asset, I have definitely played my part in creating asset and wealth but with zero process. I am working on the process and the systems now.
What was your first investment, and where is it now?
Our homes which we have developed while living in, moved, repeat! We are still living in and developing our latest home and see that process as part of our portfolio, rather than a personal sideline to get stressed about. Because it has increased our assets, you need to see and operate it with less personal attachment too.
What tools do you use to manage your personal finances?
A great accountant, organised and constantly updated Excel spreadsheets, Fathom for forecasting
Which area of finance do you wish you knew more about?
Shares, investments and pensions. Just a few little ones!
What’s your guilty pleasure purchase?
Restaurants. I love eating great food out in great places with great energy and diners. But I have expensive taste, so I class it as a hobby now.
What’s your money secret?
It’s an inside job, so to speak! You need to believe you deserve money and that you have value in order to earn it, get what you are worth and have the confidence to turn every £1 into 2 or 3 or more. That is a big part of business school that no one teaches.
We women are terrible at doing things for not only less than what they are worth, but often for free, to keep people happy. I see it so often and we need to teach them from young. For instance, I would not pay my daughter zero to do a chore that genuinely helps me (tik toks/ social etc). I am not talking day to day family help, I mean other things over and above to help her have extra pocket money.
If I paid her nothing, I would be teaching her it’s okay to be exploited. That messaging sucks and it sticks.
Suzanne Duckett, Founder of Onolla
What is your typical wellness routine?
That all depends on the season! I change my routine to sync in with the season’s energies. The basis of everything though that remain are daily meditation (yes again), daily sometimes hourly stretching the body, purposeful, focused movement in nature three times a week, daily gua sha massage, baths with all sorts of oils, salts and muds, lifting weights of any sort 3 times a week for 15 mins or more.
Who is your role model?
This might sound topsy turvy, but it is my daughter. Yes she is only 13 but she has a wisdom, a capability and an ability to know what she wants and how to go about achieving it, that I am still trying to master. She is also really funny and witty but caring too – a rare, fabulous mix.
What’s next for you?
Getting the Onolla business model just right, finding the right investor so I can repeat, tweak to incorporate the locality’s personality, energy and needs. Essentially opening more stores in key neighbourhoods with inspired local women and developing the Ecom side.
What are you currently reading and listening to?
The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollen
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