When Alexia Inge was 22, she was in a serious accident. Her father had been driving along a winding country lane near the family home in Somerset, with Inge in the passenger seat, when a car shot around the corner and smashed into them. It flipped upside down, killing both the driver and passenger. Christopher Inge was “a bit knocked about”. His daughter broke her back and sternum.
Doctors put her in a cast from her neck down to her waist. For two months, Inge lay in her childhood bedroom on pain medication, considering her future and being fed home-cooked meals by Rosie, her mother. She needed two years of physio in order to learn to walk again. It was too painful to stand for any length of time, so her career in modelling fell by the wayside.
Later, she received £45,000 (Dh218,864) in compensation.
After a chance meeting with Jessica DeLuca, an American management consultant, she had the idea for Cult Beauty.
The two women combined their skills — DeLuca’s corporate experience, with Inge’s insider knowledge of the beauty and fashion industries (her younger sister Olivia was also a highly successful model).
Together, they came up with a deceptively simple premise: a one-stop online shop for beauty products that actually worked, and made no overblown or pseudo-scientific claims. Inge invested her compensation money in the start-up.
“We started in Jess’s spare bedroom in her flat,” says Inge, 41. “It was probably about 18 months until we started paying ourselves, and then it was a salary of £500 a month.”
Cult Beauty’s sparkly new headquarters in Islington, North London has all white walls, tasteful flower arrangements and height-adjustable work stations that can turn into standing desks at the press of a button. The offices were designed by Pravin Muthiah, her architect husband. It has been quite a journey from that bedroom start-up.
“We’ve survived,” Inge agrees. “And survived really is the word. It hasn’t always been easy.”
Cult Beauty is now celebrating 10 years in the business. It is one of Britain’s fastest-growing private companies, employs 110 staff and now stocks 200 brands, from the established Charlotte Tilbury make-up range to new names such as Huda Beauty, the brainchild of award-winning blogger Huda Kattan. In 2017, their pre-tax profit was £3.6 million.
Each product on Cult Beauty comes independently recommended and has a full list of ingredients, so that consumers can make up their own minds about what they want to put on their skin or hair.
“It’s radical transparency,” explains Inge, who often spends her down time painstakingly typing out the ingredients. “And I’m dyslexic, so I have to put a thumb over each letter to make sure I’ve read it correctly.”
The most marked change in our beauty habits over the last decade, she says, is that we have all become a lot more informed — largely thanks to people sharing tips on social media and highly influential beauty vloggers who offer free make-up tutorials on YouTube.
“I call it the rise of the skintellectual: people who are so well-informed because they have access online and can hold companies to account.”
The other big trend, she adds, is “wellness make-up” — beauty products designed to make you look healthier and more natural. According to Inge, the exaggerated, highly-contoured, heavily made-up Instagram faces made famous by the Kardashians and currently seen on the contestants of Love Island are, like, so over.
“Whereas before, people would show their status by buying the right kind of handbag, now it’s about having a beautifully healthy glow as a social signifier,” she explains.
“It’s the glow that tells everybody: I have a reasonable amount of holidays, I can afford to eat really well, I have a personal trainer to be perfectly lean. When you have this lifestyle, you get this glow. Meghan Markle would, I think, be the perfect example of that. But now,” Inge grins, “there is make-up that means you can fake it.”
Over the next 10 years, she thinks we’ll begin to see women taking health supplements as part of their skincare routine. There’s an increasing awareness that external beauty starts from the inside, and one of Cult Beauty’s featured products is a Glow Inner Beauty Powder — which describes itself as “edible skincare” and contains probiotic “superfoods” that promote better gut health, which in turn promise to improve complexion.
Gosh, I say, that all sounds like an awful lot of bother. What if you just need a quick fix? Inge laughs.
“One of my go-tos is a Simple Human sensor mirror that magnifies to five times a normal mirror and emulates natural light, which you so often don’t get in modern bathrooms,” she says. Inge has two stubbornly recurring chin hairs which she has affectionately nicknamed Veronica and Doris. The mirror is “brilliant” at spotting when they need plucking.
Inge is such funny and self-deprecating company that it would be easy to overlook her phenomenal professional success. She is a female CEO and entrepreneur in an environment that is notoriously hostile towards women.
The Daily Telegraph’s Women Mean Business campaign was launched earlier this year because start-ups run by women in Britain receive just nine per cent of venture capital funding annually, despite the fact around a third of businesses in the country are female-owned. The glaring gender disparity highlighted by this newspaper has prompted the government to launch a review into the causes.
“I think it’s a great and necessary campaign,” Inge says. “It’s a confidence thing [when it comes to women asking for money]. I’ve always thought it’s a bit like dating: if you look like you’re desperate and really need the money, you’ll never get it.
“I’m talking in stereotypes, but the way that men have been brought up is to show confidence - to fake it till they make it and say ‘We’re great, you’d be idiots not to invest,’ as opposed to the more collaborative, female approach which is to say ‘This is what I’d really like from you.’
“In the early days, when I was recruiting, if we advertised a job with a salary of £30,000-£35,000 and you asked a female candidate what they would like, they would say £33,000. A man would say £37,000,” she continues.
“But it’s changing now and I do see younger women with a lot more confidence, partly because they have grown up with more female role models in business.”
Has she ever experienced sexism in business?
“Yeah, when we were trying to get funding, for sure,” Inge admits. “We’d walk into a room and all the men would end up like this...” she breaks off, slouches in her chair, spreads her legs and assumes a lecherous facial expression. “Their attitude was ‘What are you going to do for us then?’”
As it turned out, Inge didn’t need their help to build a multi-million-pound business. But I’m guessing those venture capitalists are kicking themselves now.
