She may be relatively new to the e-commerce industry, but as CEO of Adore Beauty, she has quickly made her mark. Here's how O'Shannessy went from driving cranes as a uni student to running Australia's leading online beauty company.
The post Meet Tennealle O’Shannessy: #1 in this year’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce appeared first on Inside Retail.
Inside Retail’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce is an annual ranking of the most impressive and inspiring leaders in Australia’s online retail industry. Our 2022 report features C-level executives with decades of leadership experience, alongside start-up founders and digital specialists with a wide range of skills, from marketing to logistics. You can download it here.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing in-depth profiles of this year’s Top 10, starting with the person who ranked #1 – Adore Beauty CEO Tennealle O’Shannessy.
O’Shannessy joined Adore Beauty last year as the first non-founder CEO in the company’s history. She has led the business through a period of rapid growth, while creating a long-term expansion plan centred around customer engagement. Here is how she went from driving cranes as a uni student to leading Australia’s leading online beauty company.
Most retail professionals get their first taste of the industry working a casual job in a High Street store in their teens or early 20s. But Adore Beauty CEO Tennealle O’Shannessy took a slightly different route.
“I started my career as a stevedore driving cranes on night shift while I was going through university,” O’Shannessy told Inside Retail. “I worked for a company called Patrick, which is now Toll, here in Melbourne. I had my licence for crane, forklift, and straddle crane.”
It’s a world apart from her current role, running Australia’s leading online beauty company. So how did she get there?
First, she finished university with a Bachelor of Law, a Bachelor of Business, and an MBA. “I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted to do, so I just kept studying, hoping I’d have some kind of lightbulb moment of inspiration,” she explained. Then she took a job as a management consultant at A.T. Kearney.
A few years later, she moved to Seek and spent the next decade immersed in the world of digital. This included setting up a joint-venture with Swinburne University to launch an online education platform and running the company’s portfolio of tech businesses in Latin America.
“If you look at my career on paper, the industries and roles might look quite different, but the thread that pulls it together for me, and my personal north star, is that I really love work that focuses on the customer,” O’Shannessy said.
This is where Adore Beauty comes in. In 2020, co-founders Kate Morris and James Height were looking for an experienced executive to lead the business through its next phase of growth as a publicly listed company.
With her background in scaling and expanding businesses internationally, O’Shannessy was already a strong candidate. But it was her passion for understanding the customers and meeting their needs that convinced Kate and James – and O’Shannessy herself – she was the right person for the job.
“Adore Beauty’s aim is to help customers feel more confident and fabulous every day, and it does that by delivering a very empowering, engaging, personalised beauty shopping experience. That really spoke to me,” she said.
Since joining the business as its first non-founder CEO a year-and-a-half ago, O’Shannessy has been careful to listen and learn from her team as much as she has set new strategies and goals for them to achieve.
“This is a business that has been very successful, so I definitely didn’t come in with a mandate to fundamentally change things,” she explained. “It was more about understanding what was special about the business and what we wanted to preserve, and then creating a path to continue to grow and scale.”
This approach led to the launch of a mobile app and loyalty program in 2021 – two initiatives aimed at increasing customer engagement and, ultimately, frequency of purchases. O’Shannessy plans to continue to invest in content and personalisation to position Adore for success in the years ahead.
“When I look at e-commerce, it’s clear that the structural shift to online will continue. The winners will be those that remain deeply customer-centric and understand not only what the customer is looking for now, but also how they will shop in five or 10 years,” she said.
The post Meet Tennealle O’Shannessy: #1 in this year’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce appeared first on Inside Retail.
