Ten years ago, Lisa McGowan was a largely unknown woman from Offaly celebrating a Best Dressed win at the Galway Races. A decade later, she is a familiar name across Ireland — and a multimillionaire.
Her rapid rise, however, has brought more than wealth and recognition. Like many public figures who climb quickly, McGowan has found that success comes with scrutiny.
She commands a large and loyal fan base. She also attracts critics. And then there are the followers who seem to treat her updates with something close to devotion.
But who are the 196,968 people closely following Lisa McGowan and her every post?
According to a report by influencer marketing group LDRS, her audience is overwhelmingly female — 97.93 per cent — with most followers aged between 35 and 44, and the vast majority based in Ireland.
Dublin accounts for the biggest share, with 20,314 followers, followed by Cork on 14,242, Galway city with 6,868, Kilkenny on 3,904 and Belfast with 3,181. Northern Ireland alone makes up 23,206 of her followers.
Her reach also extends beyond Ireland, with followers in the United States, Spain, Australia and the UAE — a diaspora audience still drawn to a strong sense of home.
One source, speaking without malice, characterised her audience as “women who need a bit of excitement in their day and Lisa gives it to them”, adding that many might be described as women working in council offices who see McGowan as aspirational.
For while Lisa herself has cultivated a carefully-designed lifestyle – the big house built on the outskirts of Tullamore, the designer wardrobe, the luxury hotel stays – her followers are rather more Penneys than Prada.
They are women who admire the aspiration without necessarily sharing the budget for it.
Lisa McGowan, from Tullamore, Co. Offaly, who was named best dressed lady, pictured with racegoers at the Galway Races in Ballybrit, in 2016. Photo by Cody Glenn/Sportsfile
Indeed a detailed analysis of Lisa’s digital footprint bear this out.
Her followers’ top brand affinity is Primark, followed by Zara and River Island.
Walt Disney registers strongly too, confirming that mothers make up a substantial slice of her base, as does Guinness, suggesting they also enjoy a night out.
Luxury goods as a category registers at just 13.88 per cent of her audience. For all the aspirational content, Lisa’s core following is emphatically not the luxury market.
They are ordinary Irish women with ordinary Irish tastes, which is precisely why she speaks to them so effectively and why the brands keep coming back.
Her fans buy her style and beauty recommendations in their droves. Her critics roll their collective eyes. One of them told MailOnline: ‘She sells the s**te out of things, that wan.’
Yet even the critics cannot quite bring themselves to deny the allure, with the same source saying: ‘Look, I wouldn’t be a fan. I used to follow her but everything was buy this, buy that. But in fairness to her, whatever she recommends sells out immediately.’
That is the Lisa McGowan paradox. You may not like her. You may have unfollowed her years ago. But you cannot argue with the numbers.
However, of late there appears to be a growing trend of what can only be described as Lisa fatigue, with her engagement rate falling. A detailed analysis of her account, described in the report as a classic legacy influencer profile, lays out the good and the bad in unsparing detail.
The good first, because there is plenty of it. Her Irish regional targeting is, by any measure, exceptional.
Some 73.4 per cent of her followers and 77.8 per cent of her likes come strictly from within Ireland, with Northern Ireland adding another 11.8 per cent.
For Irish brands seeking to reach a precise domestic audience there is, as the report puts it, almost zero geographic waste.
Her reel plays average 140,000 views, a strong figure. She has a proven commercial track record with reputable brands including Arnotts, Spotlight Oral Care, Dermalogica, Carraig Donn, ChloBo Jewellery, Lucy Nagle and Daniel Wellington.
More than 51 per cent of Lisa’s hashtags centre around her own brand, such as her Lisa & Co make-up range
More than 51 per cent of her hashtags centre around her own brand, while 60.5 per cent of mentions direct back to her own business handles.
She is, in short, using her personal influence to funnel traffic directly into her own product ecosystem rather than relying solely on third party sponsorships. Whatever you think of her, it is a clever piece of business architecture.
But then there is the bad, and it is significant.
The report flags a dramatic drop-off in recent sponsored post engagement.
Earlier posts pulled impressive numbers – a Lucy Nagle Cashmere post generated 7,773 likes and 9,409 comments, a ChloBo Jewellery post racked up 3,293 likes and 5,199 comments.
Fast forward to recent months and the contrast is stark. A February 2024 Dermalogica post managed just 717 likes.
A Spotlight Oral Care post in September scraped 1,247. The report’s conclusion is pointed: brands paying current rates based on her headline follower figure of 197,000 are getting significantly less reach and engagement than they would have a few years ago.
The report also flags what it calls high artificial inflation via giveaways. The overwhelming majority of her high-comment posts are competitions, a handbag giveaway pulling 13,331 comments, a Win €1,000 Gift Voucher post generating 9,400. Non-giveaway sponsored content gets a tiny fraction of that.
The report is blunt – a large chunk of her active community is incentive-driven rather than genuinely engaged with brand recommendations or daily content. Her overall engagement rate stands at 0.3 per cent, less than a sixth of the 2 per cent the industry considers the baseline for a healthy active audience.
But despite the contrary social media stats, MailOnline has learned that Lisa currently has no fewer than 22 brands on a monthly retainer, each shelling out a minimum of €5,000 a month for the privilege of a post or two on Lisa’s Lust List.
That is a minimum of €110,000 a month in retainer fees alone, before a single product has been sold.
Whatever they are paying, the brands themselves have been slow to walk away.
Her affinity score data perhaps explains why. Arnotts has just 4,767 of Lisa’s followers but an affinity score of 363, meaning her audience is 363 times more likely to shop there than the average person online.
For a brand’s marketing department, that number matters far more than raw follower counts.
Back to the money. Lisa’s Lust List Ltd was incorporated in November 2017. In 2020, the company posted post-tax profits of €397,966. The following year that rose to €603,912. In 2022, she paid herself €939,024 in directors pay alone, an average weekly take-home of over €18,000 before tax. Most people in this country will not earn that in six months.
By 2023, her total package, including pension contributions, was €1.29 million. She has since set up a second company, Jentro Ltd.
The cosmetics side of the business has been equally impressive. Her CC cream Skin Silk and mascara Fake It Til You Make It sold out on launch.
A Dunnes Stores deal saw Skin Silk on shelves in ten stores and sold out in half an hour. She turned over €2 million in cosmetics in the first nine months.
Lisa is now a guest judge at Ladies Day at the Galway Races, pictured in 2025. This year’s festival takes place next week. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile
She has said she wants to be the Trinny Woodall of Ireland and, given Trinny’s beauty empire is valued at hundreds of millions, it is an ambition that fewer people are laughing at than they once were.
So what does one do with a €1 million salary in Tullamore? You build a house. Not just any house – the building on the outskirts of the town has become something of a talking point.
It’s large and modern, the kind of house that would not look out of place in a gated development in south Dublin or, as several locals have suggested, a particularly affluent suburb of Beverly Hills.
Whether it sits comfortably in the Offaly countryside is a matter of ongoing local debate. Planning permission was granted so legally there is nothing to say. But planning permission and popular opinion are two very different things.
Online trolling has followed her throughout her career. In 2019, a handwritten letter arrived at her office bearing the words ‘RIP B**ch’. She posted it publicly.
In 2020, claims began circulating online – largely coordinated through Tattle Life, the UK-based anonymous forum that has made an industry out of targeting influencers – that Lisa was pocketing charity money.
It was categorically not true. She funds her annual Christmas raffle herself and has raised over €1 million for good causes.
She went to the High Court, secured an order requiring Facebook Ireland to hand over the IP addresses of the accounts behind the campaign, and the trolling stopped.
‘It 100 per cent stopped it,’ she has said. It was the first case of its kind in Ireland.
Away from the business, there is real substance to her story. She lost her brother in a car accident in 2005 and raised her son Daragh alone after her marriage broke down. She built everything from nothing while carrying both of those things.
It would be easy to be cynical about Lisa McGowan. Some people are, and they are not always wrong.
The relentless content, the 22 brands on retainer, the sell-out drops, the charity raffles that also happen to be excellent for brand visibility, the below-benchmark engagement rate that the brands on those monthly retainers might want to examine a little more closely – it is all very deliberate, very polished, very much a machine that runs on Lisa being likeable.
The machine works. The products sell. The followers stay. The brands keep paying.
And Lisa McGowan, the insurance broker from Tullamore who went to Galway for the day, is paying herself €1 million a year and building a house that has the whole county talking.
You can roll your eyes if you want. Most people do. Then they click, scroll and shop anyway.
