£500 of savings, a kitchen table, and a £5m curly hair brand
Lizzie Carter could not find products for her own curly hair in 2016. She and her partner spent £500 on a sample run and packed the first orders at home.
Lizzie Carter · Only Curls · E-commerce and beauty · London
£5m
turnover in 2021
How it was funded
Bootstrapped on £500 of savings, profits reinvested
The numbers
- £500 of savings to start
- First orders packed at the kitchen table in 2016
- £5m turnover in 2021
- £8m turnover projected for 2022
- Founder went full time in 2018, co-founder in 2020
In 2016 Lizzie Carter wanted help managing her own curly hair and found that the UK beauty sector had largely ignored the category. She and her partner Hugo Lewis started Only Curls, a direct-to-consumer haircare line built specifically for curly hair.
They began with £500 of their own savings. That paid for a small sample run of hair towels and a website. Orders were packed at their kitchen table. Carter had spent more than ten years in fashion design at Abercrombie & Fitch and Nordstrom; Lewis had fifteen years in marketing and events at Red Bull and TechCrunch. Neither left their job immediately.
Profits went back in rather than out. Carter left full-time employment for Only Curls in 2018. Lewis followed in 2020. By then the brand had built a large following on Instagram and TikTok around a category the high street had been ignoring.
They told SME Magazine they turned over £5m in 2021 and were on track for a projected £8m in 2022, describing five years of building the business day and night.
“We started the business with £500 of our savings, which allowed us to produce a small sample run of hair towels and build a website.”
Lizzie Carter, speaking to SME Magazine
What you can take from it
An underserved category beats a crowded one
They did not try to out-market big haircare brands. They served a specific hair type nobody was speaking to properly.
£500 is enough to test demand
A small sample run and a website is a real test. It is not a business plan, but it tells you whether anyone will pay.
Leave your job in stages
One founder went full time two years before the other. The salary funded the risk.
Source
Reported by SME Magazine, 30 November 2022. All quotes and figures belong to the original interview.