A lightbulb moment on a work trip to New York originally inspired Thea Green’s brand, Nails.INC. The entrepreneur – then working as a fashion editor – spotted nail bars offering quick, cheap manicures for busy professionals and raised £250,000 from private investors to open one in London. A decade ago, the business was turning over £22 million and had 59 stores. But this year, the last Nails.INC nail bar – in Selfridges – twisted the lids onto its nail varnishes for a final time. 

“We served hundreds of thousands of customers, and it helped us build our brand, and trial and test our products in nail bars before we launched,” Green says. “But the market changed. Many of the department stores we were in, like House of Fraser and Debenhams, aren’t on the High Street anymore. Low price nail bars opened all over the UK – it’s a different industry today.”

The company now spans five nails brands including Nails.INC, Holler & Glow, and  INC.redible. Some 72% of its $39 million annual sales now come from the US – where it’s sold in retail giants including Target and Walmart – and it’s launched noisy collaborations, including a cheese-scented polish tie-up with US dairy brand Velveeta and another with McDonald’s.

A tie-up with perfume brand Jo Loves is coming later this year, following on from M&S’s Percy Pigs, Magnum ice cream, and Fruit Loops. “Collabs create huge brand awareness, collectability, talking points – and are commercially successful too: sometimes via licensing, sometimes a profit share.” 

Why did Green sell up? Partly it was a need for more funds for a US push: “we were stocked in Sephora, Target and Walmart, but didn’t have any boots on the ground and knew we needed an American team who knew all the retailers and could go in and out of stores with a different level of marketing budget to break the US properly,” Green says.

“It was also a chance to give investors who’d been in the business a long time a chance to exit and realise their ambitions, and to take some money off the table for me.” Staying at the helm, the entrepreneur adds, was a “no brainer” but her advice for other founders considering an exit is: act quickly.

“If I was ever doing it again, I’d do it faster,” Green says. “Any delays just make lawyers even richer. I’d cut through a good section of the dating period and make it faster. You want a process where companies get to know each other, but we got distracted by things going on in our business, [the buyers] were too – you need a short, set timeframe to get everyone very focused.”

Nails.INC – which now has 35 staff in the UK and 46 in the US – has soared in the US: the country that Green originally took inspiration to build the brand has thoroughly embraced its wares, selling $1 million-worth of nail varnishes in an hour on a single QVC TV show.

Is it harder today to run a business than when Green started? “You can get something up and running more easily today, thanks to social media, and AI means you can build a website and write socials at very low cost – but it’s now much tougher to make money. “Consumers are being pinched, in the UK it’s particularly hard: rising wages, manufacturing and logistics cost more, plus US tariffs are very tough: our manufacturing is mainly in Europe so we are hit right, left and centre. But I still love this business.”

Read more about Nails. INC via their website and read more of our scaleup stories here.

Founder of Nails. INC Thea Green