Meet Fiona Nicholls (Founder and CEO), the dynamo behind Swiss Toniq, an organic skincare line unlike any other that’s turning heads from Geneva to the global stage. This Stratford upon Avon, UK native swapped Shakespeare’s land for Swiss nature three decades ago and hasn’t looked back.
Once a professional horse rider who dedicated her life to show jumping and horse breeding, her world took a spin with a dramatic fall. Bedridden with a broken spine in 2017, she swapped horses for herbs, diving deep into the world of organic skincare. It wasn’t just a pastime—it was a calling as she was angry that the beauty industry cared more about money than women’s health and safety when she was unable to find any skincare products that kept skin young but didn’t contain toxic synthetic substances known to cause illness.
Following months of research into ancient medicinal plants and plant stem cells proven to reverse ageing she started whipping up homemade skincare wonders and collaborated with Switzerland’s most prestigious bio laboratory and voila, Swiss Toniq was born!
Think of Swiss Toniq as the rebel of the skincare world. No chemical nasties here and no useless filler substances—just powerhouse natural ingredients that pack a punch against ageing and embarrassing skin issues by treating skin at a cellular level. Specially designed for women over 40, an age at which skin starts to need more intensive care. Starting with a humble bar of moisturizing soap in 2017, she’s now dishing out serums, oils, hand and body creams, face masks, and more, turning back the years of sun damage to customers across Europe, and USA, and Asia.
It wasn’t all roses and face creams, though. With no business background, our intrepid entrepreneur dove headfirst into coaching courses, learning the ABCs of business and skincare formulations while juggling the demands of single motherhood. The early days were a whirlwind of work, study, and mom duties, with little time for rest.
Her secret weapons? A no-nonsense attitude to naysayers, meditation to keep the stress gremlins at bay, and following personal development/mindset mentors online to learn the power of using our thoughts to heal and conquer. The result? A thriving business with multiple skincare awards under its belt. A business that’s as much about empowering women as it is about skincare.
Swiss Toniq isn’t just a brand; it’s a testament to the power of reinvention and resilience. From showjumper to skincare guru, our hero’s journey is a masterclass in chasing dreams and making them a reality, one face cream at a time.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
My typical day starts with 45 minutes lying down meditation in my bed as soon as I wake up. I’m not one of those eyes open jump straight out of bed and into action people as soon as the alarm goes off, as much as I would love to be, so doing it this way gets my meditation out of the way while helping me to wake up gently.
The next 45 minutes is spent getting dressed and ready for the day while listening to whatever online coaching program or audiobook I am studying at that moment.
Most days are spent at the office with my team, generally running the business, putting out fires, and just trying to keep up with the never-ending tasks at hand. I’ll spend 1 entire day a week in my laboratory formulating, researching, and testing but other than that I have handed most of the formulating side of things over to team members and only spend brief moments in the laboratory each day. I dream of spending entire weeks in the lab but being a CEO has pulled me away from that in the last couple of years and sat me behind a computer instead.
Afternoons are often taken up with Zoom meetings with virtual team members, partners and collaborators, in between answering emails, writing blog posts and creating social media content and if there’s a rare spare afternoon, I will head to the video room and try to produce some video content for social media. Due to my awkwardness in front of the camera, mixed in with perfectionism, this usually means I can spend several hours in the video room and not always come out with any video content, to my huge frustration.
Five out of seven days I will sneak off to the stables and ride and spend time with my horse and my teenage daughter and her horse for a couple of hours at the end of the afternoon. Apart from keeping me fit and healthy, this is the part of the day that keeps me sane amongst all the pressure and stress of running a business. The days I am not with the horse I go to the gym in the evening.
My professional workday continues into the evening about four days a week when I will work until midnight or even two in the morning. This is the time I love to work the most, no one around, no phones, no distractions and an overactive mind that seems to go into Red Bull mode after dark.
I raise my daughter alone, so this is the hardest aspect of my day to balance, wondering if I am there for her enough is always on my mind, neither of us eats breakfast so we usually meet in the kitchen for a very quick lunch and then again later for riding and a quick dinner before I head back to my computer for the evening to finish up on work.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I’m a workaholic and a control freak with a monkey brain so ideas never stop coming. The hardest thing for me is to ignore most of these as I suffer from shiny object syndrome and can take off in 20 different directions on masses of projects at the same time so I am very aware of this and have to constantly control myself to stay focused on the task or goal at hand.
I have generally brought all my ideas to life myself. Not coming from a business background I felt I needed to do the A-Z of every task and idea in order to learn and understand how it all works. I have since learned the art of delegating the task of bringing my ideas to life to the respected experts which has taken time to let go but I thoroughly enjoy it now.
What’s one trend that excites you?
The fact that people are starting to understand that we should not be eating so much meat. I’m not a vegetarian but am aware of how much damage it’s doing to our bodies as well as our planet and how much many of these animals suffer and that we would all be better off if we either stopped eating meat or at least cutback.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
Using a work planning platform to track all my and my staff’s tasks. We use Teamwork and it works great.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Learn how to earn money, save money, invest money, and be financially independent early.
I came from a wealthy family and then had a wealthy husband so was always taken care of and had no idea how the world worked until my world collapsed when I was 40, and I found myself days away from being homeless with no money, no assets and no education, no government benefits as a single mother with a baby. I wish I had learned how to support myself in my 20s.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
That we can 100% heal our own disease and broken body with our mind alone. Most of us don’t know how to do this and therefore it appears impossible. I’m on a long path to learning how to do this and already see some results which is extremely encouraging. I study Dr. Joe Dispenza for this, you should look him up!
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Meditate. All my life I resisted trying this, convinced it was not for me, I didn’t want to know, until 9 years ago, and now I would not live without it.
Take an organic MSM supplement. A game changer for muscles, bones, and ligaments if you are a human or animal and any age from young adult to very elderly.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
It’s extremely rare that overwhelm or unfocus gets the better of me, but if it does happen I just put my riding boots on and head to the stables to ride and spend quality time out with my horse.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Having a top-class customer service in place, where our customers feel really taken care of.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
Being complacent about the number of online customers we had, therefore not putting time and money to acquire new customers. In an ecommerce business, this is the biggest mistake.
We needed to take emergency measures and focus all our energy on customer acquisition, this meant going back to the drawing board and ecommerce basics for growth we had naively skipped over previously.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Create a newsletter. Email marketing is a jungle of competition however newsletters are showing to crush it. Several have recently been snapped up for 8 figures each and these were created by one person and a homemade website.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Teamwork Desk. An online helpdesk solution. It brings all our emails into one place as well as all our team so that the right email goes to the right person and the customer service experience is a good one.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
As a Christmas present to my niece who lives in Portugal. She has a modest upbringing so $100 was a lot of money for her and seeing her count all the $20 bills with massive surprised eyes was priceless.
*It was euros but the change rate is very similar.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
I don’t feel I can make time to read so I’m an audiobook gal, this way I can indulge in my books daily while dressing, cooking, driving, waiting for meetings to turn up, walking, etc.
My favourite book in 2023 was 10x Is Easier than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Ben Hardy
My book that I love reading over and over is Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson. This helps me grow my ecommerce and motivates me especially when stuck in a rut.
And my all-time favourite book is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. No matter how many times you read it, it never all sticks and is eternally fascinating.
I have to add one more, it’s a YouTube video that is also a life changer and everyone should listen to it many times over if they want to improve their lives. The strangest secret by Earl Nightingale. I can’t go a month without relistening to this amazing 30-minute advice.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
You are what you eat, on Netflix. A study using 5 sets of adult twins put on two different diets for a couple of months to understand how differently their bodies performed.
I usually only watch TV when I am in bed sick as I was this week and found this so informative and shocking that I have decided to change some things in my diet.
Key learnings:
- Putting all the hours in that god gave us is not the way to work, work hard but work smart and don’t feel guilty about taking time for yourself, many of us are too hard on ourselves
- Plan your day or week ahead in detail to avoid the days and week’s events from pulling you all over the place
- Become good at delegating. Remember what you struggle with or don’t enjoy, someone else plays at and enjoys
- We are all capable of healing our own bodies using our minds. Take the time to learn how
- Try meditating if you never have before and especially if you are resisting it. Start with 5 mins, watch a YouTube video to learn how, and do it lying down if you feel like it, you don’t need to sit up cross-legged.