Dr Clare Anyiam-Osigwe is one the UK’s top 20 natural beauty experts and the founder & CEO of Premae Skincare. She’s also the recent recipient of a British Empire Medal for services to dermatology. Premae Skincare is a boutique bricks and clicks business focused on making products to help the customer look pretty and feel confident. They launched in December 2011 and now have sales in excess of £135k.
Team is Clare and 2 part time employees (a wholesale manager, and an assistant). Plus another lady running her digital magazine.
In 2011, Clare was working as a makeup artist on the weekends and teaching English and Drama part time. She was also looking for allergy-free, cruelty-free skincare, because she’s a celiac, an allergy sufferer, and vegan. When she couldn’t find an allergist who was also an allergy sufferer and cared, she began making her own skincare products.
Since she was targeting such a small niche, she decided to get into eCommerce and sell online. She got her website up to scratch in December of that year, hit the publish button, and hoped for the best.
Listen to learn how Clare came up with the name Premae.
The Product
Eighteen months before opening, Clare began mixing and blending her own products and making small batches of it for herself. When her brother noticed that all her eczema rashes were gone, her family urged her to start helping other people as well.
She started testing her products more clinically and trying them at a local market for customer feedback. She then began working with formulators to make the products more sustainable, using essential oils as her preservatives.
Listen to learn how the customers are king and queen of a business.
Most Awesome Thing Right Now
Although Premae Skincare has been going for five years, they look like they’ve been going for fifty years. To Clare, though, it feels like she just started last week. The fresh energy is awesome. It’s also exciting that Premae Skincare is in the best position to take care of people as the industry catches up with vegan, allergy-friendly, gluten-free, cruelty-free skincare. She loves giving her customers the liberation to go out without trying to hide their psoriasis, scars, or hyperpigmentation. Giving them the freedom to bare their skin gives her great joy.
Listen to learn about Clare’s mantras and how it’s all about self-love.
Sustainability
Premae Skincare is already an ethical brand, not animal tested, and certified by PETA for being cruelty-free and vegan, but Clare still wanted to take it one step further. So 80% of their packaging is reusable, and 100% is recyclable. On top of that, if customers send back their empty bottles, Clare relabels them, sterilizes them with tea tree oil, refills them, and sends them back to the customer.
Listen to learn how Clare keeps the customer connection as her business grows.
Attaining Premae Skincare’s Amazing PR
For the first year of her business, Clare was aggressively on top of her public relations. In the second year, she fell back and collaborated with Glossybox and Birchbox to send samples to subscribers. Over the course of eighteen months, over 250,000 women in the UK received Premae Skincare samples. It was also a fantastic way to get her products into the hands of journalists and bloggers.
Listen to learn more about the importance of samples.
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience, for advertising and to analyse our traffic. You consent to our cookies if you continue to use this website.Got it!RejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
