Ep082 – Colette Laxton, Co-Founder, The Inkey List | Democratising knowledge to build a global beauty brand | SATT

·1 hr 6 min·4 clips

The Inkey List was built “to spread the beauty of knowledge to the world.”

1. Swim Against The Tide Episode 082 focuses on Colette Laxton and the rise of The Inkey List through education-led beauty branding. 2. Colette Laxton is the co-founder of The Inkey List, and Mark Curry is her co-founder, business partner, and husband. 3. The episode asks how a founder turns humility, retail training, and consumer knowledge into a global skincare company. 4. Colette says she had three jobs as a teenager, could not afford university, and paid her own way through a media and communication degree. 5. She says a module called “Brain and Behaviour” changed how she thought about “the psychology of consumers.” 6. She describes leaving university for Boots in Nottingham, where she earned £13,000 a year and worked on Boots.com’s toy section. 7. After six months in that job, she saw the product development team in Boots D90 and became interested in making products with a consumer in mind. 8. She says she spent 10 years at Boots learning buying, product development, merchandising, VM, and new brand development. 9. In Boots’ new brand team, she met entrepreneurs who worked by gut, moved fast, and did not fit into a corporate model. 10. She says one of those meetings led her to leave Boots, work for a founder’s company for a year, and then set herself up as a consultant on LinkedIn. 11. Mark Curry then messaged her, and she describes their first coffee meeting as the moment she realized she would translate his ideas for consumers. 12. She says their first business was not a single brand but a multi-branded model built to test gaps in the market across categories and channels. 13. She says the team tested lip, bath, and body concepts, used MVP-style real-world testing, and learned from repeated failures and near-bankruptcy. 14. She says one early bath salt brand sold well but showed that “use education wasn’t enough,” which changed how they thought about repeat purchase. 15. She says a PR agency landed coverage in The Daily Mail and The Guardian, which helped Unilever Ventures notice the business and invite them in. 16. She says the investors told them they hated the existing brands but wanted to back the founders because the pair had something worth following. 17. She says The Inkey List was built to “spread the beauty of knowledge to the world” by simplifying skincare and rejecting vague “magic potions.” 18. She explains the INCI list as the standardized ingredients list on products, which is transparent but confusing unless it is translated into layman’s terms. 19. The interview style is conversational and founder-led, with the host pushing for specifics and Colette answering in direct, practical language. 20. Listeners who like founder stories, retail, and beauty strategy will get the most from this episode, while people who want product-only skincare tips may skip it.

As heard by us

A plainspoken founder story about grit, speed, and retail momentum.

Colette Laxton's path reads as a straightforward lesson in grind and follow-through. She talks about a very modest upbringing, three jobs as a teenager, paying her own way through university, and being the first in her family to go.

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Why you'd press play

You want the real grind behind a beauty brand breakout.

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