Suzanne Paul is fond of misquoting Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never, never, never, never give up.”

Her nearly 40 year career has spanned a cataclysmic series of booms and busts – the infomercial queen has more in common with the wartime Prime Minister than you might think.

Her trials are well documented: angry creditors are still owed more than $1 million from the 2004 collapse of the ‘cabaret-come-kapa haka’ venture Rawaka. Paul was declared bankrupt in March 2005. Her public pledges to pay have yielded few results and serve only to rile the Rawaka creditors more.

Through the liquidation of Rawaka, Paul could have walked away from her debts, but she requested that the liquidation be kept open to enable her to work her way back and pay what is owed. Rawaka liquidator Mike Lamacraft says they were happy to do it – but he remains sceptical anything will ever eventuate.

“It’s been a long time?.?.?.?I don’t know whether the interest has waned or not. If anything comes out of it I will be quite surprised.”

But while creditors have been scathing, her supporters stay fiercely protective. And recent high-profile triumphs include a best-selling book launched at Christmas 2008 and a public relations dream win on Dancing with the Stars in 2007. Whatever your opinion – and nigh on everyone will have one – you cannot help but admire the gall of the woman who picked herself up after what, for many, would have been a career-ending failure.

Ladies-mag darling she may be, but beneath the makeup and the dulcet tones Paul is an entrepreneur, with the pushy sales persona, in the business of selling her name and image.

Her story before arriving permanently in New Zealand at the age of 35 is not as well known as the tale of television, triumph, and torment that followed. A salesperson since leaving school at 15, and a travelling salesperson from 21, she learned the art of the sell the best way – by pounding the pavements.

“I realised I was good at it. I just instinctively knew the right things to say that would make the product sell.”

After several years, however, she found herself up against a brick wall in England.

“By the end of it I had done every town in England and every gadget that was going, and so that is when I thought I would try other countries, try further afield.”

In Australia, her money ran out, her visa expired and she was forced to return to England to work for several years before making enough to pay for an airfare back. It happened again in Auckland, when the launch of the vibrating massage pillow failed to float. Eventually, Paul hit the jackpot with a bronzing powder – Natural Glow – yet in many ways her life seems to have followed its previous pattern. After making a fortune, Paul proceeded to lose it. And now, nearly five years since her bankruptcy, new business ventures are once again coming to fruition.

The rented home in Greenhithe is large and airy. Paul’s dancing with the stars gong – a heavy blunt object – sits in pride of place near the front door. In person, her enthusiasm is palpable, but the moments where she drops her guard are few and far between. When asked what she learned from bankruptcy her reply is characteristic, if not entirely unexpected. She has a somewhat cavalier, roll-the-dice attitude to business.

“People always ask me, ‘What did you learn? Was it you learned not to trust people, or to do your accounting better?’ But I always say, ‘No, no – the only thing I learnt was you have to pick yourself up and try again, that’s all,’” she says.

When asked what got her through, her reply attests to a love of the finer things in life.

“When I lost everything I drew up the plans of the house that I wanted to build. I’ve got the shape of it, I know where all the rooms are going to be, the swimming pool and the outdoor spa and everything and I can see it in my mind in just a split second. I can see my gold Mercedes convertible, and so when things are really, really bad that is what I think about.”

So while the Rawaka debt is the proverbial elephant in the room, Paul has turned with gusto to the “shorty market” – designing her own line of clothes for women under 163?cm (5?ft 4), with shoes to match. ‘Suzanne Paul: Petite’ is the realisation of a New Year’s resolution and three years toil trying to find an investor to trust her.

Paul knows her target market back to front – or up and down as it were.The hard yards to pull herself out of bankruptcy and be discharged after only one year, instead of the usual three, were done back at square one with sales demonstrations in shopping malls. The mall environment, a blessing and a curse, gave her a unique insight into the psyche of the average Kiwi woman.

“I have sat here and cried putting my makeup on saying, ‘I don’t want to go out to the shopping mall for six hours selling,’ I was a multi-millionaire! I don’t want to stand in a shopping mall selling stuff. But I would say to myself, ‘Now stop it, put your face on, get yourself out there, it’s going to be great. Who knows who I might meet. I might get a good idea, I might see something.’”

It is this critical eye that has been such an asset for Paul – her ability to spot a gap in the market or see a flaw with a current product.

“I am always trying to look at what’s in the market and think to myself, how can I do it better, cheaper, easier – you have got to have something different to offer people. There will always be new opportunities – like last year when I invented ‘The Big Blue Puff’.

“You would think that every bronzing product on the market would already have been invented, but I always see things and think, yeah, that is good – but it’s not perfect, there is still something there.”

Paul says the “vertically challenged” market is well established overseas. In the UK, Marks and Spencer and Topshop both have dedicated short clothing lines. She estimates close to 50 per cent of Kiwi women are under 163?cm – including herself at 158?cm.

“That’s a lot of shorties uncatered for.”

Launched in August, the line has had initial success and is now sold in retail outlets including Ballantynes, Smith and Caughey’s, and Scarpa. Paul now faces another uphill battle convincing more retailers to pick up the line. She is incredulous that others can’t see what she sees.

“I am really frustrated with certain retailers, that they can’t see what is so obviously staring them in the face. It is frustrating as all hell when you get hit with brick walls, but that’s what being an entrepreneur is.”

“You come up against a brick wall and you have got to go round it or under it or through it or over it or something – but you don’t stop.”

If the ability to think outside the confines of the status quo makes Paul an entrepreneur, what makes her a rebel?

“I would always consider myself an entrepreneur, a rebel – wow – is that a bad thing though? I am definitely going down a different path. I have, right from the beginning, right from when they all said to me that nobody will buy makeup with luminous spheres in.”

Those luminous spheres and her iconic infomercials underlined her early success. She fought hard for both. In the 1990s, Kiwi television executives told her there would never be any demand for TV after midnight. The goodnight Kiwi applied to young and old. Between the hours of 12 and 7?am, the sum total of entertainment was the colourful test signal.

They told her the accent was too odd for TV. They told her no one would buy makeup from a two-minute television commercial without first trying it. Eventually, they were talked into giving her a shot. Prestige Marketing, the company built on the back of those nocturnal infomercials, grew to employ 150 staff in New Zealand and 130 in Australia. It was sold in 1996 for $39?million.

Paul Meier, Paul’s business partner for Prestige Marketing, had a parallel business trajectory.

“We built it up together and then he went his way and I went mine, and I lost all my money and he lost all his money,” Paul says. “When I was thinking about starting again and thinking, ‘this is impossible and I don’t want to do it’, I looked at what he was doing and he was starting again and he really inspired me.”

Meier has come back with another bronzing powder – ‘Thin Lizzy’ – but Paul shrugs it off. “You can’t copyright a bronzing powder. Every company – Estee Lauder, Elizabeth Arden – all of them have a bronzing powder. I would just happen to be the first and then everybody copied me, there is nothing you can do about it.”

If nothing else, Paul is the consummate salesperson. She says the key to selling is simple.

“I never sell anything that I am not really passionate and enthusiastic about,” she says. “I was in the malls for 15 years demonstrating Natural Glow – 15 years, three days nearly every week. To be able to say that same demonstration over and over, it is really bloody difficult to sound passionate and excited about it, but that is the only way people will buy off you – if you sound as though you are saying it for the first time.”

For many, she will be forever defined by what she failed to do with Rawaka. Paul takes a more philosophical slant.

“The main thing that people must know is that they will fail,” she says. “If you are going to go into business or be an entrepreneur, at some point you are going to fail. You can’t have great success without great failure. It is impossible.”

This year Paul will take But Wait There’s More, her best-selling autobiography-come-self-help book, to the world. And there really is more – a series of motivational CDs to accompany the books will go to England, Australia and America.

It’s yet another new direction from a woman who refuses to stay down and who has an enduring vendetta against the tunnel vision of the status quo.

“You see how people can believe things, but it might not be true. All the TV stations said ‘nobody watches TV at night’. Well, maybe that’s because there was nothing on. At the moment a lot of retailers are saying ‘we don’t think there is a need for us to sell clothes for short people because we never have’. But, you know, they are blinkered.”

Paul remains a misfit, a rebel, a round peg in a square hole. She’s been glorified and vilified, but she can’t be ignored.