‘What crazy things can we do?’ Inside ex-bikini mogul Erin Deering’s political move and new fashion venture

Fashion mogul Erin Deering reveals why she is running for office and ‘having a real crack’, as she unveils the follow up to her mega successful swimwear brand, Triangl.

There’s something different about Erin Deering. It’s not just the still-fading scar on her right cheek, a reminder of the removal of a stage one melanoma discovered two weeks before her wedding last June. It’s a change on the inside.

In 2018, the entrepreneur retreated from the high life, which included running her multimillion-dollar bikini business Triangl; her relationship with her longtime partner Craig Ellis, the brand’s co-founder; and her luxury home in Monaco.

Her intention: to began a cycle of deep introspection and personal growth. Or, as she calls it, “the work”.

Back in her hometown of Melbourne, and a newly single mother given she had recently split from Ellis, Deering tried it all: therapy, hypnotherapy, crystal dreaming, acupuncture and kinesiology.

It was an all-out assault to try to reconnect with herself and find ways to chase freedom after pretending to be happy for so long. Ultimately, it was energy work that saved her.

Erin Deering, the founder of bikini brand Triangl, has opened up about her run for office in Melbourne and new fashion brand, Deering. Picture: Damian Bennett for Stellar

“You surrender yourself completely to that space. You are like, ‘I’m broken. I’m here,’” Deering tells Stellar. “At a time when I couldn’t believe in myself and I was struggling to find self-worth, it did really help for people to sit opposite me and say, ‘You’re amazing. I know you don’t feel it and see it, but it’s there and you can get there.’

“I really liked the hope and the promise of this: ‘It will be hard and it’s going to be painful.’

“But I wasn’t afraid of that. It was a big investment but worth it because it laid the foundations for the person I am today.”

As well as not being afraid of hard work, Deering – who turns 40 next month – is also not averse to reinvention. She traces this intrepid streak back to her childhood, during which she attended five primary schools and thrived on having to prove herself to fit in with each move. That moxie, which she dubs “new-girl character building”, gave her the motivation to co-create an e-commerce swimwear juggernaut from nothing.

That practice still runs like a thread of consistency throughout the narrative of her jam-packed life – including her foray into politics.

Picture: Damian Bennett for Stellar

Deering admits she surprised even herself when she accepted an opportunity to take a tilt at the coveted deputy lord mayor position for the City of Melbourne in October, running on a ticket with former acting mayor Arron Wood. But politics, she insists, is on-brand, and aligns with her desire to reach people and make a difference, something she’s been manifesting through writing (she released her memoir, Hanging By A Thread, last year), her podcast (advice-rich show The Work), her consulting business and her e-newsletter Erin’s Love Notes.

“It comes back to being of service,” Deering says of her latest pursuit.

“It’s so ingrained in me. When this got presented to me, it was just so obvious that this is a way to essentially mentor and have an impact on the entire city of Melbourne for the greater good. It’s a combination of that and using my business sensibilities.

Zoë Foster Blake is the latest guest on the Stellar podcast, Something To Talk About. Listen to the full episode below:

“It’s the ultimate marriage of the two things I’m most passionate about. So that’s actually kind of my dream job.”

If elected, Deering says she’ll be part of a fresh wave of younger politicians trying to shake things up across Australia – vibrant, independently successful, new to the game and not afraid to ask the questions that will get things moving.

“One of the reasons I’m excited to run, and hopefully encourage other younger people in business to run, is that when you get that momentum going, other people feel compelled to step up,” she explains.

“I’m a big-picture thinker and I’m a creative person, so I’m going to go in with a million ideas. What crazy things can we do? I’m wanting to get in and change Melbourne for the better. And that really thrills me.”

And Deering will be doing it all in style. Around the time she felt the lure of political life, she planted the seeds for her own fashion brand, Deering – the eponymous label of elevated daywear she launched last week.

‘I wanted to … have a real crack!’ Erin Deering on the launch of Deering, the follow up to Triangl. Picture: Damian Bennett for Stellar

“I wanted to back myself in and have a real crack,” she says. “I love fashion and I love business and I just thought: it’s time. You only get to live once and there’s no point having a quiet year. That could be the last year. You don’t know.”

It certainly hasn’t been a quiet year on the home front, either. She happily co-parents sons Oscar, 9, and Oly, 6, with Ellis, who still lives in Monaco (where the boys spend time with him during school holidays), and she has two children – daughter Beatrice, 4, and Bobby, 2 – with project manager Zac Keane, whom she married last year.

With husband Zachary Keane, left. Picture: News Corp Australia

Erin Deering with her running mate, Arron Wood (right) – who is campaigning for the position of Melbourne’s lord mayor, with Deering as his deputy. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

“He’s just an incredible man,” Deering tells Stellar. “You’d have to be to take on two older boys that aren’t yours. He’s the man that made me believe there are great men out there.”

Keane was by her side through her cancer scare last year, when a discreet mark on her right cheek turned out to be a melanoma. The operation to remove it left a large scar from under her eye to her jaw. While she admits she wasn’t quite prepared for it – “one of my flaws is that I often don’t process things” – she’s chosen to embrace it.

“It’s not me, it’s just my face,” she says. “That was really liberating to think like that, because I’m someone who – and a lot of women are – we’re looking at our faces with judgement. I had to learn how to show up as me and not as the exterior. So I was really grateful for it because it gave me a lot of learnings, a lot of growth, a lot of opportunity to talk on these things and hopefully have a positive impact for other people.”

Zoë Foster Blake is the latest guest on the Stellar podcast, Something To Talk About. Listen to the full episode below:

She’s employing the same open-book approach with regard to cosmetic surgery, both in sharing her sudden decision to get breast implants in 2022 and her choice to return to the same surgeon a year later to have them removed.

“I talked a lot about self-worth and the person I was,” Deering says. “And I felt perhaps it seemed a bit disingenuous to be getting breast implants, so I wanted to be honest about that whole process.”

At the same time, it provided a forum for Deering to publicly play out one of her admired traits: the ability to change her mind. As quick as she is to act on her visions, she’s just as willing to course-correct when things don’t work out.

She came to this life-defining insight the hard way, clinging to her previous existence long after the gloss had worn off because she couldn’t see a way out, and ended up seeing her mental and physical health suffer as a result.

It took all her might to trust her instincts and move on, but it was a fortitude that has paid dividends.

“I definitely have that trait of, ‘I don’t just want to be good and have a nice life – I want to have the absolute best life,’” Deering says. “I’m still working out what ‘best’ means, but I’m striving for it.”

See the full shoot with Erin Deering in the latest issue of Stellar. For more from Stellar, click here.

Originally published as ‘What crazy things can we do?’ Inside ex-bikini mogul Erin Deering’s political move and new fashion venture