“All you have is your name in this business.”
From insurance broker to style influencer, the woman behind ‘Lisa’s Lust List’ appears to have life nailed. Yet Lisa McGowan has had to overcome personal tragedy and social media trolling. Even so, it’s her online family that has inspired her next step, she tells Marie Kelly.
Influencers can attract a lot of scorn, but usually this takes the form of offline eye-rolls and silent sniggers among disingenuous followers and industry rivals. But for 48-year-old Lisa McGowan, the founder of Lisa’s Lust List, a multi-platform fashion and lifestyle blog, which boasts an enormous combined following of well over 300k, it manifested itself in a far more sinister guise.
Last year, the mother-of-one secured a High Court order requiring Facebook to provide her with information that would allow her to identify anonymous trolls who were defaming her online.
Taking on a bully is a terrifying prospect. Whether the individual sits opposite you in the office, or is an anonymous online troublemaker, the effects on the victim can be profound. Anyone who has the wherewithal to take on their tormentor rather than shrink away in despair, cower and cry, has my respect, so I’ll admit I was predisposed to like McGowan when we began our Zoom interview.
The first time I posted an outfit on Facebook, I received fewer than 10 likes. I stepped away from it immediately
Make-up free (unlike me), hair scraped back and wearing a plain blue sweatshirt, McGowan immediately strikes me as a woman uninterested in putting on a show. There is no staged Zoom backdrop here either; no strategically placed fashion bibles, aspirational artworks or curated bookshelves to make me feel bad about my slightly shabby home office, or my life. Just two small botanical prints hang inconspicuously on the wall behind her. So far, so un-influencer-like.
The Co Offaly native tells me she’s nervous about being interviewed, and certainly she appears a little fidgety at first, but if her body language belies an inherent uneasiness, her demeanour does not. McGowan is warm, effusive and open from the off. Her accent, which is midlands via Co Cork, where the family relocated for six years when McGowan was a teen, is what I would describe as neighbourly; it’s as inviting and hospitable as a hot mug of tea.
I read recently that true influence is about leveraging authenticity. At a time when the influencer industry is being held accountable for a culture of smoke and mirrors — The Guardian recently reported that influencers selling a pipe dream are losing their allure — McGowan believes her continued success is entirely down to trust. “No product goes on any of my platforms unless I love it myself, and I return at least 70pc of the gifts I receive [from brands] because they don’t align with my brand. I want to be here for the long haul,” she explains. McGowan relies on an honest-to-goodness formula of “quality at the right price” and it has been an enormous hit with women in their 30s and beyond, the length and breadth of the country.
McGowan has no formal training in fashion. She is, in fact, an insurance broker by profession and has worked for the company her father established 40 years ago since she was in her early 20s. She still devotes at least half of her working week to the family business, as well as overseeing her blog, social-media feeds, regular outfit try-ons, brand partnerships and messages from followers. She’s also a devoted mum to 18-year-old Daragh. Both of McGowan’s brothers run their own businesses, she tells me, while she herself segued into the role of self-starter pretty smoothly.
Smoothly, but not seamlessly, as she reveals she had “no self-belief” when she began blogging seven years ago. McGowan may not have a qualification in fashion, but she clearly has an instinct for it, winning several Ladies’ Day best-dressed competitions over the years, including at the Galway Races in 2016. If I’m being honest, in my experience as a fashion editor, a Ladies’ Day win doesn’t necessarily equate to an enviable understanding of fashion, but having googled McGowan’s winning looks, there’s no question she understands great style; from the basics of fabric and silhouette to the importance of detailing and the nuances of colour. Nonetheless, she tells me that, “The first time I posted an outfit on Facebook, I received fewer than 10 likes. I stepped away from it immediately,” she says, laughing.
She persevered, however, and found her feet on the platform, attracting a significant following and building trusted relationships with fashion brands. It was these clients who encouraged her to extend her reach onto Instagram a couple of years later, and after a two-day ‘tutorial’ from her son, she tentatively made the leap.
Lisa McGowan in her Lisa & Co loungewear set in fern print
“I tried it, didn’t like it and didn’t post again for six months. But I realised quickly that women want to see a dress on an Instagram story rather than just in a still shot. That way, they can view it from every angle and watch how it moves.” Her community travelled over to Instagram with her and in a matter of months, she’d amassed more than 100,000 followers.
McGowan has since grown her business beyond fashion into beauty and wellness, has two full-time employees, one of whom is a long-time friend. Before Covid-19 they staged regular Lisa’s Lust List Live roadshows with 300-strong audiences. The success of Lisa’s Lust List seems to me to be down to its unpretentiousness. McGowan doesn’t over-style anything. She doesn’t try to be too ‘fashion’, and she sticks to affordable, decent-quality clothes that can mostly be found on the high street. She’s not trying to be a sartorial innovator or a fashion forecaster.
She offers style solutions to those women who often feel forgotten by fashion, providing them with easy looks that are chic and wearable. And her followers are hugely appreciative. “They’re like family,” McGowan says. I imagine this bond she feels with her community made it all the more shocking when she began receiving abuse online. The bullying kicked off in 2016, with personal insults about her skin, a “fake Hollywood smile” and “atrocious” make-up.
It developed into far more menacing behaviour, with anonymous phone calls made to her father and other family members, a suspected monitoring of her movements and accusations of fraud. McGowan’s roadshows frequently have a philanthropic element to them — they have helped raise more than €100,000 for a variety of charities — and she was falsely accused of pocketing this money.
“Personal insults are one thing, but my integrity was being questioned,” says McGowan, clearly still shaken from the ordeal. “All you have is your name in this business.” She went to her 80-year-old father for advice. He told her she had to protect the business she’d worked so hard to build, and so with the support of her family, she faced down the trolls and Facebook in the High Court, funding the case herself. Following its outcome, Facebook did reveal the names of the offending account owners to McGowan. To date, she hasn’t taken any further action, although she says, “This is with my legal team.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the keyboard warriors backed off. “When word came out about the judgment, you wouldn’t believe how fast a slew of anonymous accounts were shut down.” McGowan has been through tough times before. She separated from Daragh’s father when her son was just 14 months old, and that same year, her brother Chris was tragically killed in a car crash. More than 15 years later, the devastation is still visible on McGowan’s face when we speak about it — I imagine this emotion is usually well-hidden behind her upbeat attitude. “But we all got through it,” she says stoically.
McGowan has bounced back from her bullying ordeal with a new string to her business bow. This summer, she launched a collection of nightwear, Lisa & Co, manufactured in Ireland and available to buy exclusively on her website. It was born quite simply out of demand. “Women were constantly asking me why I didn’t create something myself instead of always selling other brands’ products.” The pyjamas are designed around McGowan’s love of ferns — she has botanical prints adorning the walls of her home — and her fascination with flamingos. Each pyjama set comes with an eye mask and scrunchie and costs €59.99.
When word came out about the judgment, you wouldn’t believe how fast a slew of anonymous accounts were shut down
McGowan says the feedback from other brands she works with is that the items she showcases on her platforms sell out quickly and have a low level of returns — her website is booked out beyond the end of this year with commercial partnerships. No doubt, the same will be true of her pyjama collection, and McGowan is already confidently progressing a line of T-shirts and dresses. The slurs of the past few years have not broken her spirit. In fact, she seems fired up for this next chapter. There may be a winnowing of the influencer industry right now, but McGowan has nothing to fear. After all, she’s not trying to sell you a dream. She’s simply offering you a better-dressed reality.
Originally published in the Sunday Independent Life magazine, July 2021