I started my coffee body scrub business with £450 – now it’s turned over £15m and Maisie Smith is a fan
GROWING up, Tasha Harris loved making her own skincare out of tea tree oils and other things her mum had lying around the house – but never in a million years did she think she’d one day be running her own beauty business.
The 29-year-old businesswoman, from Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, first started making her own coffee scrubs out of leftover grinds, coconut oil and salt to treat her eczema in 2012.
Having experienced first-hand how well it worked on her own dry skin, Tasha began dolling it out to all her friends and family for free – and they were also blown away by the results.
After being inundated with requests for more of the scrub, Tasha – and her partner Lloyd – decided to turn it into a business and only spent £450 to start it up.
In their first three months, Grounded made an impressive £15,000 when they were approached by Dragon’s Den producers – this amazing exposure took the business to a whole new level.
Tasha spoke to Fabulous Digital for our #BOSSINGIT series devoted to ordinary women who have launched incredible businesses.
- Dry Skin Buster Coconut Body Scrub, £15 from Grounded – buy now
Describing her struggles with eczema growing up, Tasha said: “I used to get really bad eczema around my neck, my arms, and my mouth – but nothing would get rid of it.”
As Tasha’s school wouldn’t let students carry lip balms or hand creams, she’d have sit and suffer with her itchy skin during lessons.
She added: “My doctors kept giving me steroid creams but it just made it more uncomfortable and horrible.”
However, Tasha noticed that her skin would only ever improve when she was on holiday and had her first experience with coffee scrubs at a spa in Bali when she was 22.
“The only time my eczema would get better is if I went on holiday somewhere really hot with the nice salty sea,” she said. “But it was always really, really bad.”
Noticing coffee scrubs as an emerging trend abroad (and were already wildly popular in Australia), Tasha and Lloyd tried experimenting with their own at home using his family’s leftover coffee grinds – but only ever intended for it to help with her own skim problems.
She recalled: “He went online and started researching ingredients and put in stuff that I’d already used on my skin – like coconut oil.
“But he also put in things that didn’t feel nice, like olive oil which made it all greasy and horrible.”
Whereas prescribed steroid creams often result in peeling, Tasha claims the scrubs nourish skin and leaves it soft and supple.
She explained: “With the coffee scrub, you’ve got coffee which helps blood circulation, then you’ve got salt which is anti-bacterial and then coconut oil which softens the skin and helps heal it.
“It also makes it really smooth so you’re not itching it all the time.”
After noticing a drastic difference in her own skin, Tasha – who was working at a local bank branch at the time – began giving her colleagues free samples of the scrub.
But it was only when she kept being asked for top ups that they started to take it more seriously.
Describing how she initially saw it as a hobby, Tasha said: “I was just going with the flow really but when people keep asking you for the stuff, you realise how good it is.”
After being inundated with glowing customer reviews, the couple decided to take the plunge.
“We started the company with nothing,” Tasha recalled. “We paid for the logo which was £350 and then we bought a box of bags for about £100. Everything else we needed to make the scrubs we already had in our kitchen.”
In order to kickstart the business, Tasha created an Etsy shop where customers could shop the £13 coffee scrubs – which were still being made from her and Lloyd’s kitchen table using leftover grinds.
Now that the company have their own in-house manufacturers, it costs them £1.50 to make a 200g pouch of coffee scrub – but when they were starting still out, it was originally £2.10.
On top of this, they also started travelling to shows across the country to promote Grounded and made themselves stand out from other brands by decorating their stalls with inflatable palm trees and vintage furniture borrowed from Lloyd’s mum’s store.
Ahead of each show, Tasha explained: “We’d spend £2,000 of our own savings on creating the product and then we’d put that straight back into the business.
“We made hundreds of coffee scrubs, put a bowl in the middle and got customers to test it out on their hands. We made £15,000 for three shows.”
Unsurprisingly, the tropical (and wildly popular) stall caught the attention of a Dragon’s Den producer who invited them in to interview for the programme – but their first reaction was to assume it was all just a big practical joke.
“We were just getting the stand ready with palm trees and stuff and then he went over to Lloyd and gave him his email,” Tasha said. “They asked if we wanted to interview for the show next week but we thought it was just a lie though.”
In 2015, the couple appeared on the hit BBC show and secured £30,000 funding from Sarah Willingham in exchange for a 15 per cent stake in the company.
After filming wrapped, Tasha got in touch with major retailers to get Grounded scrubs into stores – and three months before the show aired, Boots said they wanted to fast track the scrubs to hit shelves as soon as possible.
Delighted by the news, Tasha reached out to Sarah to get the funding and start making the £100k worth of product Boots has ordered – but was merely told “she couldn’t do anything at all until after the show had aired”.
In order to supply the enormous Boots order, the couple needed £20,000 and fast – luckily, they were able to borrow the money from Lloyd’s mum’s business.
As well securing the Boots deal, Tasha got the Grounded website up and running and the night the Dragon’s Den episode aired in April 2016, they has 85,000 visitors to the site.
And it would be selling short to say the scrubs were an overnight success – in that first month, Grounded made a whopping £50,000 and Tasha and Lloyd were working all hours of the day to keep up with the orders on the website.
After being overwhelmed with orders, Tasha added: “We had to turn off our website and redirect it all to Boots because we didn’t have any product left.”
Over three years on, Grounded is now the UK’s leading coffee-based beauty brands and they now count EastEnders’ Maisie Smith among their thousands of fans.
Naturally, the packagaing has also had an Instagram-friendly rebrand.
Tasha said: “When we started off, everything was quite dark and dingy. In Dragon’s Den, everything was brown for grounded coffee.
“But we wanted to make it a bit brighter and fun so we introduced some colours and developed a new logo.”
The company – which employs 30 people – now have their own manufacturers to make their products on site which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds – but it’s worth it for Tasha knowing that all the scrubs are up to scratch.
Trying to keep up with beauty trends has been another challenge for Tasha – and the brand has brought out CBD face oils, charcoal toothpaste and anti-ageing eye creams over the years.
Although the brand now boasts 20 products across their hair, body and skincare ranges, it’s their original coconut-scented scrub that continues to be a fan favourite.
In the past seven years, the brand has sold over half a million units of their best-selling coconut scrub – and now that microbeads are firmly out of fashion, Grounded shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
Tasha's top tips for aspiring businesswomen
- Always persevere – there were so many times we’d run out of money or we’d be making something and the whole batch would be wrecked.
- Take every opportunity you can – after all, we thought the Dragon’s Den producer was having us on
- Work with other smaller brands – even if it’s a small sell and you can’t be bothered to do it, just do it because it’s going to repeat in the future
- You have to keep on growing and growing – don’t be afraid of upscaling
- Surround yourself with people who have a good work ethic – it’s easier to give up when you’re surrounded by quitters
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For more inspiring Bossing It stories, Fabulous Digital spoke to the founder of Holly’s Lollies who set up her £300k business from her kitchen table.
And we also spoke to Florence Ledwith – who moved back into her childhood bedroom to set up her dream shoe business and now makes £350k a year.
Plus Caroline Sims was too ashamed to let her boyfriend see her problem skin without make-up – now her skincare supplements are set to make £4m.