LA hairstylist Mariah Montes is a fan of The Smooth Company’s Mane Master
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
The half-time wedding
The half-time wedding
Aine watches influencer Molly-Mae use a Smooth Company product
Aine watches influencer Molly-Mae use a Smooth Company product
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
thumbnail: Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Sean Pollock
thumbnail: The half-time wedding
thumbnail: The half-time wedding
thumbnail: Aine watches influencer Molly-Mae use a Smooth Company product
thumbnail: Aine watches influencer Molly-Mae use a Smooth Company product
thumbnail: Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
thumbnail: Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Aine Kennedy’s phone is rarely quiet, but one day in February, hundreds of messages flooded through, forcing her to her stop in her tracks.
Her beauty brand, The Smooth Company, had made an unexpected debut on one of the world’s biggest stages – the half-time show at the Super Bowl.
“We were all just, like, screaming,” the 28-year-old entrepreneur says. “We were all writing to each other, saying ‘This is crazy.’”
Weeks before the Super Bowl, one of America’s biggest sporting events, Kennedy – who founded The Smooth Company four years ago – had sent Los Angeles hairstylist Mariah Montes one of her brand’s hairbrushes, the Mane Master.
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Montes liked the hairbrush and used it to prepare the hair of a woman about to be legally married during global superstar Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show, which hit a record four billion social media views inside 24 hours.
The light-blue hairbrush featured in Montes’s social media posts covering her work for the event. And customers were quick to let Kennedy know she’d made the cut on one of the biggest stages imaginable.
Big brands can copy our products, but not our brand’s story
Kennedy had no idea it was going to happen.
“Brands spend millions to get their products involved in the Super Bowl, to get their adverts for the Super Bowl,” she says.
The half-time wedding
The half-time wedding
The rise of The Smooth Company from a fledgling firm launched from her attic into a global business with warehouses in Ireland, the UK and the US has taught Kennedy one thing: in business, you must always expect the unexpected.
The company’s range of hair-smoothing products and tools, including its award-winning Smooth Stick, has grown faster than she ever expected, with sales in 92 countries and major retail deals with Brown Thomas and H&M.
Kennedy still pinches herself about the Super Bowl success, but there have been many stand-out moments. Last year, she was named the emerging entrepreneur at the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, something she still cherishes.
“I was stunned,” she says. “I couldn’t even speak for the first few seconds. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.”
Reflecting on her company’s rise, Kennedy says the biggest business boon was when UK influencer Molly-Mae featured her products in a social media post – again, without Kennedy’s knowledge. “Our UK sales just went crazy,” she says.
Kennedy has been emboldened by growth in the UK and is now in talks with retailers.
Mastering social media and staying relevant to the brand’s online followers has played a central role in her company’s success. Sharing everything, including the lows, has helped build the kind of loyalty many larger multinational beauty brands crave. Indeed, Kennedy has documented how her family helped the company grow, featuring her grandad Billy, who has become a TikTok star.
Kennedy believes her firm’s online authenticity helps it stay ahead of its much larger competition.
“It is hard, especially when you are competing with big global brands with multi-million-euro budgets that we don’t have,” she says.
“We look at what we can do that the big beauty brands can’t. And that is bringing our customers behind the scenes, showing the real image, what I’m doing as CEO. So people feel like they really know us.
“The big brands can copy our products, but they can never copy our brand’s story and how we do stuff,” she adds. “That is our competitive advantage.”
@thesmoothcompany GUYS our notifications have been non-stop all day, we cannot believe the Mane Master made it to the SUPERBOWL 😭😭😭 thank you so much to @Hairdressmess for using us in her incredible Smooth creation 🥹 and thank you to everyone who was tagging us in her video, we’re freaking out ☁️☁️☁️ #thesmoothcompany #smallbusiness #healthyhair #Super Bowl #badbunny ♬ DtMF - Bad Bunny
Kennedy hasn’t been afraid to act when it comes to protecting her products, no matter how big the opposition. The business launched High Court proceedings in late 2023 against Penney’s owner Primark, over an alleged brand infringement dispute. The case is ongoing, she says.
“I will do anything to protect the brand,” she says.
Protecting The Smooth Company from rivals is one thing, but the upheaval shaping the global economy is also something Kennedy is mindful of. Tariffs in the US have played havoc among businesses in Ireland. Kennedy says her company has also been affected by the levies, with a planned US retail launch put on ice.
Some people say the beauty industry is recession-proof
“Tariffs are a bit of a nightmare,” she says. “It is something we are monitoring closely, because it is eating into our margins significantly.”
Fears over the economy and consumer spending have also affected many consumer-facing firms. But Kennedy is confident that the firm can weather any potential economic storm.
She says she has seen the broader trend of people spending less as the cost of living increases. However she says the company’s sales are growing, despite wider concerns.
“Well, you know the Lipstick Theory,” she says, referring to an economic concept that consumers turn to low-cost luxuries during downturns. “They talk about that and about how the beauty industry is recession-proof.
“Now, I don’t know about that, but look, we always have to be cautious. It is something we have to be mindful of. You don’t know what the future holds.”
Business is in the blood for Lucan-born Kennedy. Growing up, she watched her father, Barry, help set up Irish Manufacturing Research, a not-for-profit, industry-led research and technology organisation. He has been CEO there since 2015.
Kennedy’s aunt, Rhona O’Sullivan, was also an influence. She owns some Esquires coffee shops, including one in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim.
“I saw the freedom she had and used to be like: ‘Aw, that is so cool. That is what I want to do.’ It was the same as my dad, having that freedom of being your own boss.”
Initially, Kennedy didn’t study business at school, but a sweet-selling venture during transition year, inspired by the movie Mean Girls, changed all that. Her group of friends used to travel into Dublin, buy boxes of candy canes for €2, and sell them for a profit to classmates.
If their schoolmates wanted them to deliver a candy cane to someone in another class, the entrepreneurial group would up the price to €3.
“We made loads of profit,” she says. “I think we made like €300 each. I just loved business after it – we didn’t have as many overheads selling candy canes.”
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Aine Kennedy. Photo: Frank McGrath
Kennedy studied entrepreneurship at Maynooth College while working with the make-up brand Benefit. After college, she worked with TanOrganic as the company’s marketing, PR and digital marketing manager. She played a role in launching a vegan self-tanning product, which provided many lessons.
Kennedy had caught the entrepreneurial bug, and she knew she wouldn’t settle until she’d launched her own business.
She’d noticed many girls were using a toothbrush and hair gel to slick their hair back. She was never a fan of this method and was convinced there was a gap in the market for a product that could do it better, without the mess and the hassle.
After two years of research, Kennedy invested €10,000 she’d saved into her Smooth Stick product. Full of nerves, she launched in February 2022 with an initial goal of selling 1,000 units.
“I was only talking to my boyfriend about this the other day; he is so supportive. I remember him saying at the start not to be upset if they didn’t sell. I just didn’t want to go back to my job.
"I knew I had the safety net there – but I just really didn’t want to. I didn’t have a plan B. I only had plan A.”
Kennedy needn’t have worried.
Aine watches influencer Molly-Mae use a Smooth Company product
Aine watches influencer Molly-Mae use a Smooth Company product
She started posting relentlessly about the product on social media, secured influencer partnerships, packaged products for delivery, and handled all the customer-service emails. The work was “relentless” she says. But the overwhelmingly positive customer reviews convinced her that the company had gained traction.
Documenting the launch journey on social media paid off dividends. At the time of writing, the brand had over 4.4 million TikTok likes and over 138,000 Instagram followers.
“If I had launched The Smooth Company 10 or 15 years ago, before social media, we would not be where we are now,” Kennedy says. “It has absolutely accelerated the business.”
Kennedy hasn’t taken her foot off the gas either. Initially operating as an online business, she soon launched products through retailers. Winning Brown Thomas as its first retail partner was a big moment.
“That was a huge win for us,” she says. “For any business to get into Brown Thomas is a huge milestone. It is such an amazing retail store. That would have been something I dreamt of before I launched the brand.”
Kennedy believes the business has the foundations in place to push the brand further.
She is in talks with retailers in the UK and beyond about launches and recently launched in De Bijenkorf, a Selfridges-owned chain of high-end department stores across the Netherlands.
New products will also be a feature. She has long-term plans to launch more hair-care products, as well as to move into cosmetics and skin care.
“First of all, the hair section has so many opportunities in it,” she says. “I think one of the biggest misconceptions about The Smooth Company is that we are only smoothing products or hair products.
“That is not the reason I called it The Smooth Company. The reason was to bring out products that help our customers’ days run more smoothly.”
“Wherever we see a gap in the market, that is where we are going to go.”
Raising investment isn’t in her firm’s immediate future, says Kennedy, despite interest being shown. She has concerns over how any investment could place too much pressure on the business.
“You see it happen so many times with businesses. They get investors and suddenly have all this pressure to hit all high targets, so they start bringing out all these products, stuff starts going way faster, and then they lose what made them so good. They lose the quality.
“That is why I want to grow this business sustainably and keep it in-house. That’s the way we want to do things. Not to be under pressure from outside to reach certain targets or milestones.”
Kennedy monitors the latest trends with a deft eye, eager to ensure the company is ready to take advantage. With her name on the products, she is extremely careful about what the business releases.
Her biggest fear is bringing out a product people don’t love. Being deliberate about each release has been the plan from day one.
Kennedy says she always planned the Smooth Stick to be her “legacy product”. She didn’t launch too much at the start to stay focused.
“Generations are going to use it,” she says. “I will not let our brand be a flash-in-the-pan brand, popular for a year or two, and then it goes.
“That is why I am trying to carefully monitor how we scale this business, so we don’t do mass distribution, and it peaks and then falls off. We are being very strategic about who we partner with and the products we bring out.”
Kennedy believes The Smooth Company has unlimited potential. With the foundations in place for growth, she believes her firm hasn’t even scratched the surface yet.
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“I literally feel like we are only now starting,” she says. “It is going to be big.
“I am not going to stop until I get it as big as some of the top global beauty brands in the world – 100pc. It has all the foundations to be that.”
Curriculum vitae
Name: Aine Kennedy
Position: Founder and CEO of The Smooth Company
Age: 28
From: Lucan, Co Dublin
Education: Maynooth College
Favourite hobby: Going to the gym
Favourite book: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
Favourite film: Mean Girls
Business lessons
What has been the most important lesson you have learned in business?
“Ask for help. You can’t get there by yourself.”