Beauty is serious business
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Beauty is worth more than thirty billion pounds to the British economy. It is growing at four times the national rate. And until this year, the government was still classifying hair salons alongside funeral parlours. That, in a single statistic, is the story of an industry that has been hiding in plain sight for decades — and the reason Millie Kendall has spent the better part of her career spoiling for a fight.
Kendall is the CEO and co-founder of the British Beauty Council, and she has little patience for the assumption that beauty is somehow peripheral. The industry, she points out, was already larger than automobile manufacturing when the Council launched. If a car plant closes, governments mobilise. If a cosmetics factory shuts, nobody in Westminster notices. The reason, she argues, is sexism. An industry that is 86% female-owned and over 90% female-staffed is not taken seriously by the same institutions that would move mountains for sectors built by men. Even within beauty itself, the ten per cent of men in the workforce disproportionately hold the senior roles.
What makes Kendall such a compelling voice is that she has worked almost every corner of the industry — shampoo girl at thirteen in her hairdresser father's salon, through makeup retail, PR, brand building and, eventually, policy. She co-founded Ruby and Millie with 365 product lines at a time when that seemed like the obvious thing to do. Her advice to founders today is the opposite: launch one exceptional product, build slowly, and resist the pressure to chase every challenger brand that appears on the counter beside you. The same logic applies to heritage brands — stop proliferating, and go back to your icon.
The lipstick effect — beauty's long-observed resilience in economic downturns — remains real, driven now largely by fragrance. And the wellness boom, for all its marketing noise, has done something structurally useful: it brought men into the conversation, and with them a broader base of consumers.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why Britain's beauty industry is one of the country's most undervalued economic assets — and how structural sexism, not market performance, explains why it has been overlooked by government and investors for so long.
What heritage brands must do to survive the challenger era — and why the answer lies not in launching more products, but in doubling down on the iconic ones that made them.
Which technologies are quietly set to transform the industry — from biotechnology's geopolitical resilience to the coming fusion of aesthetics and makeup that could make certain products obsolete entirely.
Watch the episode on YouTube below, or listen via your preferred podcast app.
