Eleanor Pendleton: influencer and digital beauty queen

Eleanor Pendleton has become one of the nation’s most influential online editors.

Digital influencer Eleanor Pendleton in her Sydney office. Picture: James Croucher

Eleanor Pendleton is the poster girl for the changing face of Australia’s $4 billion beauty industry, having ridden a wave of digital transition through which female entrepreneurs are creating multi-million-dollar empires.

The 28-year-old is the proud editor of Gritty Pretty, Australia’s first online magazine dedicated to beauty, which also boasts its own e-commerce store. Pendleton is a new breed of digital entrepreneur, joining the ranks of Zoe Foster-Blake of Go-To skincare and Lara Worthington of The Base — Australian women who have rejected traditional bricks-and-mortar beauty counters to launch lucrative businesses online.

The entrepreneur spoke to Weekend Professional at her Sydney office, dressed for Myer’s spring campaign launch. Pendleton is a social media influencer and commands a following of 70,000 people on Instagram, which enables her to charge brands for sponsored posts. A frequent guest at international fashion shows and industry awards, she has worked in partnership with brands such as Chanel, Balmain and Clinique. However, digital influencer is a term she initially was reluctant to use.

Inspired by her newsagent father, Pendleton wanted to be a writer. She began a journalism degree but was snapped up by Cosmopolitan magazine before she completed her studies. She quickly rose through the ranks at ACP and Pacific Magazines to become Australia’s youngest beauty editor at Famous, aged just 20.

Pendleton credits her journalistic background with enabling her to think beyond the Instagram square. “I’ve been able to take my experience in magazines, all those skills and all those contacts, to the business that I’ve now built. I don’t think Gritty Pretty would be successful if I hadn’t had that time.”

After quitting her magazine job to freelance, Pendleton decided to resurrect her neglected beauty blog Gritty Pretty, which still received traffic despite lying dormant for several years. She saw an opportunity to apply her journalistic skills online and “when brands I had been working with as a magazine editor started reaching out to me, I knew it had the potential to become a business”. By this stage the internet was awash with beauty blogs and she knew it was going to take something special to stand out from the crowd. That’s when she had her “light bulb moment” to create Gritty Pretty, a “beautifully curated and free online beauty magazine”.

The magazine, whose pages feature brightly coloured lipsticks dancing across the screen and glittery compacts spinning in nifty cinemagraphs, launched in late 2015, and models Worthington, Miranda Kerr and Hailey Baldwin have graced its cover. It won ReadyMag’s digital magazine of the year award just a month after its launch and boasts 100,000 unique visitors a month.

While you “can’t beat the smell of ink and paper”, running a small digital business affords Pendleton some freedoms that traditional magazines can’t. She turns down 50 per cent to 65 per cent of her commercial offers. “I would never endorse a brand I didn’t believe in,” she says.

Another advantage of her digital operation is the ability to read her audience. “If a woman had gone into a hairdresser with a magazine article I had written, I wouldn’t have known. With Google Analytics I know for how many minutes readers looked at an article, what they clicked on afterwards and if they bought something. That data is so satisfying and helps us to curate our content and target our audiences.”

Pendleton agrees social media has afforded her a great lifestyle, but says it’s becoming increasingly hard for budding Instagram stars to build a profile. “There’s never been so many entrepreneurs and start-ups because of social media, but it’s only getting harder to grow a following because of changes to algorithms. I’m also a little bit wary if someone wants to become an influencer. It’s a privilege and a responsibility.”

Asked if she is surprised by her success, Pendleton is contemplative but critical of the “ego” of traditional media. “I’ve really lived that shift from print to digital. Print looked down at digital and that’s been to their own detriment,” she says. “Magazines closing down are a sign of that and now digital is absorbing more eyeballs than they ever had.”

Pendleton also says the online world is a particularly supportive space for young businesswomen.

“The No 1 reason I love my job is because I get to work with amazing women every day. I have experienced so much support in the online space, much more than I ever did in publishing.”

As for Australia’s rapidly growing beauty industry, the biggest change is the way consumers shop. “Consumers are much more health-conscious and educated about beauty products. They’re much more savvy and not afraid to search for the best,” she says.

Thanks to the wellness trend, opportunity within Australia’s cosmetics and beauty industry is booming. Despite fierce competi­tion from chains such as Sephora, a slew of Australian online beauty businesses are attracting an international consumer base.

“Ten years ago it was about bricks and mortar,” Pendleton says. “But now brands are being created by incredible entrepreneurs like Zoe Foster Blake, Emily Weiss, Lara Worthington and they’re all launching online.

“As for the future, I know that if I focus on today we’ll never evolve, grow, profit, so I have to think about tomorrow, and the next year and the year after that.”