Beauty Bay

Retail ran in the family long before beauty did. Arron and David Gabbie were the sons of an entrepreneur who built a pharmacy chain in the 1980s and a string of stationery stores in the 1990s — a childhood spent around margins, stockrooms and shopfronts that turned both brothers into instinctive merchants. When they started their own venture in Manchester, though, they bet not on a shop but on the internet, at a moment when buying cosmetics online still struck most people as faintly absurd.

The first incarnation sold scent, not skincare. The site traded as a fragrance specialist before the brothers spotted the bigger opportunity in the mid-2000s and re-pointed the whole operation toward makeup, skincare and hair, stocking the cult and hard-to-find labels that high-street giants like Boots and Superdrug were too slow to carry. The edge was always timing and taste: the company read social-media beauty culture early, courted a young, online-native audience, and rode the influencer-palette boom of the 2010s to a claimed peak of around five million customers.

The house label arrived once that audience was captive — a private range spanning color cosmetics, tools, body, hair and skincare, built to be affordable and of-the-moment rather than clinically pedigreed.

The turbulence came later, and it came hard. Mounting costs and a tougher retail climate pushed the business into administration; in early 2026 the site briefly went dark behind a "back soon" holding page before a pre-pack rescue handed it to a new investment owner, with dozens of staff transferred across. The lesson is the one digital-first retail keeps teaching: curation and speed can build a five-million-customer audience and still leave a company exposed when spending tightens. As a skincare source, the house range remains a budget, trend-led option — judge its acids and cleansers on plain value, not on research the brand never set out to fund.

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