WHY WOMEN take so long in the toilet is one of life's great mysteries to many men. But Neil Mackay and RichardStarrett,foundersofEast Kilbride-based Beautiful Vending, know exactly what goes on in powder rooms.

The young entrepreneurs, the brains behind a patented vending machine which sells 90 seconds' use of a hair straightening iron for £1 a shot, did much of their product research in ladies' loos.

"We looked at all the pampering products people wanted to use when they're out in bars and clubs and we figured hair straighteners were the only thing not in the beautifying process already. Everything else you could put in your handbag," says Mackay.

The duo, who have been in business together since they were 18-year-old studentsatStrathclydeUniversity, poured more than £100,000 of their own money into developing the right product at the right price to appeal to women looking for a quick and easy way to tame their tresses on a night out.

Beautiful Vending has an exclusive deal with GHD, the company which makes the world's leading brand of hair straighteners, and their product has taken the market by storm since it launched two years ago in the UK.

After successfully trialling the first machine in a Glasgow nightclub, they used their leisure industry contacts to roll out the product across the UK and now have 900 machines in Britain with a further 500 around the rest of the world.

"We knew the bar and retail market really well from our previous events and marketing business. We also knew how to promote to a young market segment and we knew there was a big rise in demand for pampering products," says Mackay.

According to Mackay, word of Beautiful Vending'ssuccesshasspreadlike wildfire and the phone rings constantly with offers to set up distribution deals across the globe.

"We made our first international sale in South Africa in December 2006 and now we're in Australia, Spain, Holland, Canada, Puerto Rica, the United States and Ireland and we'll add three or four more by next month," Mackay says.

"We're working on another 10. Hawaii, Russia and Ecuador are all interested. Frankly it's easier to list the countries who haven't called," he adds.

The pair, who are backed largely by their own money, but also have funding from the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme, achieved sales of £300,000 in 2006. This is expected to jump to around £600,000 in 2007 and forecast to rise to £2 million in2008asinternationalexpansion takes off.

Winners of a Shell Livewire award for their business idea, Mackay and Starrett have appeared on television and in glossy fashion mags around the world as women latch on to a product offering an end to bad hair days. They also won an award for Vending Product of the Year recently.

Starrett says that there are 17 million purchases of hair straighteners in the UK in the UK alone, making a ready market for their product. "Hair straighteners are mainly bought by the 16-30 age group - the same target market for bars and clubs," he adds.

The pair have branched out from the club scene to install machines in the toilets of shopping centres including Glasgow's Buchanan Galleries, Green's gyms and also offices, in fact anywhere where women might need a quick fix of the hairdo before hitting the town.

Have they gone into the male customer marketyet?Starrettsaysnotreally, although they have installed a machine in the toilets of the Polo Lounge, a predominantly gay club in Glasgow.

The pair took steps to protect their intellectual property (IP) and filed for patents at an early stage. This proved a prescient move which helped them to secure an interim interdict in the Court of Session in Edinburgh against Glow Studios, a rival business.

The interim interdict prevented Glow from using the intellectual property designed by Beautiful Vending in any of their machines and the court also ordered that any machines assembled using Beautiful Vending's software were liable to be seized.

Starrett says: "For us, right from the start the three big issues were IP, health and safety and getting the machine together."

He adds: "Our patent was pending at the time of the court case. Patents cost an arm and a leg and taking them Glow Studios to court cost a lot."

Beautiful Vending's patent has now passed the international stage and is going through the individual country stage.

"We've had copycat efforts in Spain," says Starrett, However, he adds that having won an interim interdict has helped deter imitators.

Mackay and Starrett are impressed with the help they have received as a young business both from Scottish Enterprise and Glasgow Chamber of Commerce. They used knowledge from an SE course to launch their product.

Mackay says the chamber contacted the company to offerhelpeventhough they were not members. It resulted in a fruitful mentoring relationship with Graham Watson, formerly a big hitter in corporate finance with Deloitte and a founder member of the globalscot initiative.

"We only saw Graham three times over two months, but we learned a few really key things from him," says Starrett.

"The most important thing he told us was, Begin with your end in mind,' and take decisions now designed to get you where you want to be in three years," says Starrett.

The pair are supported by a young team of 15 and operate in an informal structurewithasimilarlyinformal atmosphere in their modest offices on an industrial estate in East Kilbride.

But the pair, who own the business 50/50, are deadly serious about fulfilling their potential and confident that they will remain an effective partnership.

"We get on really well. Neil was best man at my wedding. If someone had said when we were students that we'd still be working together at 32, I would not have been surprised. We have a lot of mutual strengths," says Starrett.

They both had an entrepreneurial zeal from student days. "We've always run our own businesses and we've been business partners since we graduated," says Mackay.

"I had a minor lapse of concentration and got a job for a year early on but we still kept on our own businesses," he adds.

They deliberately chose the name Beautiful Vending to give them scope to diversify their product range and are preparing to launch a second hair-related product this summer, but are keeping details under wraps for now.

They are ambitious for the future. "The big idea is to have the Beautiful Vending brand as an integral part of washrooms globally," says Mackay.

Both are driven individuals blessed with an effective blend of business savvy and marketing nous. "Lots of people have ideas, but to make things happen you have to get out of your comfort zone," says Mackay.

Starrett admits that sometimes there are scary moments when you run a young company. "That's just because it's all so new. When we were 18 most people had never heard of hair straighteners," he says.

Their business is still only two years old but its catchy slogan of putting an end to bad hair days has captivated well-groomed girls from Glasgow to Cape Town. If they can keep up the pace, they may find themselves in a happy minority of people who actually make money from slot machines.