Last year products from her brand SOSU Cosmetics were pulled from shelves over a safety concern and in February Suzanne was issued a warning from the consumer watchdog
Suzanne Jackson(Image: Instagram)
Suzanne Jackson has said she learned a lot about herself after a difficult year for her business.
Her brand SOSU Cosmetics was pulled from shelves last year over a safety concern, as they issued an announcement on their Instagram page, citing concerns over the safety of an ingredient used in one of their eyeshadow palettes.
The brand noted that although the palette is from a previous collection and there have been no reported health concerns, they felt it was their responsibility to issue a recall notice and offer refunds to any affected customers.
In February, Suzanne was hit with a compliance notice by the Irish consumer watchdog. She was issued with a compliance notice from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) after failing to properly label that she was paid for multiple posts on her SoSueMe Instagram account between December 2024 and February last year.
“You know what?” she said of the difficult year. “I just feel in business you’re always going to get your peaks and troughs, and for us it was just one of those years. But I really do feel like that’s when you learn a lot about yourself. The only way you can fall forward is if you learn from whatever it was. I have more clarity. I know where I’m going. I’ve learned. It’s OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to fall, it’s OK, just pick yourself back up, fall forward, learn from it, move on.”
Speaking to the Sunday Independent, the former blogger opened up about how a major change in beauty trends post-Covid caused difficulty for the business.
“Pre-Covid, everyone was glam,” said Suzanne. “They were contoured, they were out on their nights out, fully dressed, fully tanned up, fully lashed up, contoured. And then Covid happened and everybody kind of reverted back to bare minimum make-up, out doing their jogs. It was extremely stressful because we were doing big quantities pre-Covid, and then overnight it flipped to Clean Girl. We had all this stock coming in, with orders from pre-Covid, lots of orders on the sea from all different manufacturing partners in Europe, in the UK, in the Far East, Korea, you name it.
“I didn’t know where to house it, and I was just burnt out trying to fight fires constantly. No one was probably going to buy it because it was lashes, and contouring, so there was all this stress around it. I navigated that with a few of my team through the whole of Covid.”
She temporarily stepped back from the business after becoming burnt out.
“At that point I just said ‘I feel maybe I’ve brought the brand as far as I can bring it, and I’m going to step down, and let somebody else come in with a different strategic mindset to drive it even further for scale.’,” she said.
“I actually enjoyed it at the time. Because I felt like I’d really lost my creativity. I was in the logistics and the finance and the shipments and the conversations around what are we going to do with all this stock and that just killed my passion, my drive, my energy. And also because the trends changed overnight, that was a big financial… it was difficult. But we navigated it because the tan took over.”
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