NAPA, CALIFORNIA — As The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2025 drew to a close on Tuesday night, guests were excitedly awaiting the reveal of this year’s The Business of Beauty Global Beauty Awards winners.
At the farewell gala, after guests listened to insightful and moving talks from the likes of founder and creative director of Rhode Hailey Bieber and co-CEO and founder of Pattern Beauty Tracee Ellis Ross, the members of the Global Awards jury were ready to unveil their selection.
The jury included Ali Goldstein, president of mergers and acquisitions at L’Oréal USA; Carolyn Bojanowski, executive vice president of merchandising at Sephora; Robin Tsai, general partner at VMG Partners; Marianna Hewitt, co-founder of Summer Fridays and Isamaya Ffrench, makeup artist and founder of Isamaya Beauty, alongside The Business of Fashion’s editor in chief and chief executive Imran Amed, and executive editor of The Business of Beauty Priya Rao.
Below, meet the founders of the three winning companies in our Breakthrough Track for businesses generating up to $10 million in annual revenue — Akt London, Ruka and Yse Beauty — and discover what set them apart from the competition.
Andy Coxon and Ed Currie, Akt London
Winner in Creative Execution, presented by Ali Goldstein, head of mergers and acquisitions, L’Oréal USA
For many performers, making it to a world stage like in London’s West End would be a dream. But in 2020, it became a nightmare for the London-based actor Andy Coxon, whose lead role in West Side Story came to an abrupt pandemic halt, putting him and fellow performer Ed Currie out of work for the foreseeable future.
But the break gave the pair time to spend on their side project, a natural deodorant brand cooked up in Currie’s kitchen after a co-star in ‘A Chorus Line’ at London’s Palladium told him (not so gently) that his high-intensity performance had created a body odour situation.
By May 2020, they had a full-fledged business with “deodorant balms” designed to stand up to intense stage conditions. “Akt,” pronounced “act,” comes in colourful, plastic-free aluminium packaging and upscale fragrances, and its deodorant balms can be worn anywhere where one doesn’t want sweat to appear, including the face.
“We wanted to make deodorant sexy,” said Coxon.
Now known beyond the theatre world with a collection of body care, Akt is projected to make between £16 and £17 million ($21.6 to $23 million) in revenue this year, with $10 million in total funding.
When they first launched, the co-founders turned to their theatre community and Kickstarter, giving out samples to fellow actors. This initial publicity led to a rave review in Vogue in their first three weeks of business.
Celebrities have since flocked to the brand. “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo has publicly hyped it up and wore it under her makeup when she hosted the Tony Awards on June 8, which Currie and Coxon missed to present at The Business of Beauty Global Awards. Other celebrity fans include Rosamund Pike, Florence Pugh and Jonathan Bailey.
Last year, Akt raised $7 million from Felix Capital, joining a portfolio including Mejuri and Anine Bing. The investment “changed the game” for the brand, said Coxon, and was followed by a new chief executive, angel investor Darryl Adie, and more plans for expansion.
With 90 percent of sales still DTC, retail is Akt’s next big growth opportunity. The brand entered Credo Beauty earlier this year and promptly became the retailer’s top-selling deodorant brand; it also launched in US department stores like Bloomingdale’s and New York’s Printemps. Europe and Australia are next.
Theatre is still intertwined in the brand’s DNA — its new deodorant is called Hay Fever, named after the classic Noël Coward play — and comes through in design touches like its marquee type face and boisterous brand voice, which put a fresh spin on the growing “performance body care” category.
The brand remains “very famous in the creative industries, and we want to stay famous. That’s our lane,” said Currie. “We’ve won more awards for the deodorant than we ever did performing.”
Molly Sims, Yse Beauty
Winner in Business Innovation, presented by Priya Rao, executive editor of The Business of Beauty
When the actress Molly Sims set out to pitch her own skincare collection, she knew what people would say: Why do we need another celebrity-fronted beauty line? “I got asked that question 23 times,” Sims told the jury of Global Beauty Awards judges. But Sims is in a unique position to answer it. In the decades that Sims has been famous, modeling for Sports Illustrated, appearing on primetime dramas, and recently producing her own films, Sims has been contracted to sell everything in beauty from skincare to supplements. Why wouldn’t she start a brand of her own?
Her position stemmed from her own issues dealing with cystic acne throughout her 20s and 30s, coupled with pregnancy-induced melasma that emerged in her 40s; the combination led her on a path of destruction lined with skin-stripping acids, CO2 lasers and hydroquinone. “I’m walking the Victoria Secret’s show, and I’m truly the girl who was ‘no-makeup makeup’ until I wasn’t,” Sims said. “Even with all the money and access in the world, my skin was really, really bad.”
In her endeavour to create something for herself, Sims broke ground on a white space for clinically efficacious skincare targeted toward women in their 40s, who have historically been reached only by luxury or doctor-led brands; Sims answers them with results-oriented formulas wrapped in upscale but conversational branding that reflects her own enthusiasm for the skincare arts. Her hero products, the Your Favorite Ex exfoliating pads, are soaked in a cocktail of gentle acids that induce glow without compromising the skin barrier. (Sims, a beauty OG, is a former fan of the now-outlawed Biologique Recherche P50 Lotion with phenol.)
The brand, which charted nine figures in revenue in 2024, is at an inflection point, and will nearly triple its sales this year as it enters a partnership with Sephora. After bootstrapping the brand, Sims found a friend and partner in Kimberly Kreuzberger, the former VP of Brand Marketing and Sales for Goop and current partner at venture capital firm Hannah Grey, who is now an investor in Yse and board member.
But the brand’s true business innovation is in the community she has built and leveraged, full of solutions-seeking women like herself. “My girl,” as Sims likes to call Yse’s shoppers, “wants that instant gratification, but she wants it to work.” The enormous success of Sims’ podcast Lipstick on the Rim, which she has hosted since 2021 with her friend Emese Gormley and uses as a platform to candidly discuss beauty products and treatments, serves as a useful top-of-funnel, but also provides a direct line between Sims and her audience. So does her Instagram, where the actress posts diary entries and Get Ready With Me content. As the landscape for celebrity beauty brands becomes more crowded, only ones with strong connections between their founders and audiences will survive.
Sims recognises a change in how famous faces are talking about beauty. “Back when I was thinking about the line, there was a lot of gatekeeping,” she said, but that’s changing — Sims noted Kylie Jenner’s recent casual admission of her breast implant recipe.
“I believe in sharing what I do, when I do it, and how I do it,” Sims said, “and that is why Yse is successful.”
Tendai Moyo, Ruka
Winner in Positive Impact, presented by Carolyn Bojanowski, executive vice president of merchandising, Sephora
Sustainability conversations in beauty often tend to focus on packaging or product refills.
Ruka, a London based start-up, however, is tackling the issue in the very (literal) fibre of its being: wigs, weaves and extensions. Its human hair alternative product is plastic-free, hypoallergenic and biodegradable, and still delivered at an affordable price, as co-founder Tendai Moyo wants to remove what she calls “the Black woman tax”, wherein Black women are forced to outspend their peers of other races on beauty treatments and products.
The idea came to Moyo during the Covid-19 pandemic, when salons across the nation were closed by a government lockdown. “I was realising, ‘there’s no stylists around, so how can I do my hair?’” said Moyo. Seeing how quickly sales of hair dyes and styling products soared, she began to conceptualise a product range that could serve the textured hair community. “People were really starting to question what kind of hair extensions they really wanted, and what their real texture was,” she said.
The business has raised almost $10 million in numerous rounds of venture capital and angel fundraising, which it funnelled towards product development and expansion. However, as the business grew, Moyo and her team realised that while sales to salons could be a huge boon, a very small number of UK-based salons could confidently style and care for textured hair, dampening their chances of success. Education thus became a key focus, and the business has set up styling academies and courses with businesses like Schwarzkopf, and also opened a first-of-its-kind retail space in London’s Selfridges.
“We’ve definitely had to fill a lot of that education gap ourselves, and we’ve got to be as fast to start educating stylists and the consumer so that they can make better purchasing decisions,” said Moyo.
While its key products are the bundles themselves, including a new forthcoming interaction with an updated protein fibre that can be dyed and has a “shape memory” technology allowing for better restyling, it also has a booming business in care and styling products — its hair perfume is Moyo said is a best seller.
Moving forward, the brand is keen to keep innovating, especially in solutions for women suffering from hair loss, and keeping technology at the heart of what it does.
“We’re the classic Apple of hair care,” said Moyo. “We’re always moving to our next iteration.”
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The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2025 is made possible in part by our partners Front Row, Unilever Prestige, Citi, McKinsey & Company, Getty Images, Grown Alchemist and Stanly Ranch and our awards partners L’Oréal Groupe and Sephora. If you are interested in learning about partnership opportunities, please contact us here.
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