WOMEN WHO LAUNCH
IN EVERY EDITION OF WMB, WE ARE COMMITTED TO ASSISTING WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS WHO HAVE RECENTLY LAUNCHED INTO THE BUSINESS WORLD

WORDS: LIV MORGAN

Self-confessed queens of overindulgence, Sinead Deegan and Lorna Clancy, refuse to apologise for having a good time and for looking good as they do it. It was this attitude that led them to creating ‘The Toxic Twins’, your answer to looking fabulous and not feeling the after effects of a night out on the town.

The Toxic Twins, a name bestowed on the girls by their ex-boyfriends when they spent nights partying hard in London and didn’t take days to recover, was launched in December 2005. Initially The Toxic Twins were one product — Dream On! patches. The patches that contain only natural ingredients are placed on the feet (what Chinese medicine calls ‘our second heart’) at night to draw out unwanted toxins and let the side-effects of 21st century living seep away. Depending on how much of a hell-raiser you’ve been the patches will change from clear to greyish-brown or if you’ve been really naughty then greeny-black.

The girls first came across this wonder product when Sinead was travelling through Asia on business. “I tried them and I thought they were brilliant. I get really bad hangovers and if I’ve been eating and then go out drinking my whole metabolisim slows down. Patches are a big thing in Asia, they are used to cure lots of different ailments and illnesses.” Lorna agrees on their benefits, “You get a better sleep and the recovery time after a weekend was better, you get back to normal with them rather than crawling out of bed on a Tuesday morning!”
Whilst still in Asia the girls contacted a number of different manufacturers for samples and then held a focus group to decide which patches were best. As the manufacturers weren’t in the European market the girls saw their chance and started to order the raw materials and work on the naming and branding of it. What started off as a sideline project led to Lorna selling her house for funding and Sinead quitting her job as Marketing Manager of a large firm. “We got 2000 customers online within the first three months, then Lorna’s contract was up in April/May of 2006 so she decided to sell her house to really make a go of Toxic Twins and when I saw how well our business was going I just said ‘right here we go!’”, says Sinead. Lorna: “I was doing interviews for jobs that I didn’t want so I was really in a catch-22 situation. I thought about selling my house but worried about my pension! In the end I started thinking about it in a different way and thought well this could potentially be my future. So we’re kind of living from hand to mouth now!”

The Toxic Twins has been a whirlwind of progress since then and the girls say they will definitely break-even this year, “By September 2006 we had taken on a distributor to start going in to retail shops so we’ve been cutting our teeth on the Irish market now for awhile. We’re in most pharmacies, salons, spas, Arnotts, Clerys, Avoca, you can buy it online, you can buy it through Pigsback.com, we’re in the minibars in the G-Hotel in Galway and we’ve just done a deal with Ryanair.”

Read more about The Toxic Twins in the December | January 2008 issue of WMB, subscribe now.

WEBSITE DETAILS
www.thetoxictwins.com