“A week in the life definitely features some sort of aeroplane,” laughs Aimee Connolly, speaking to The Currency from the back of a taxi in Nice. Although the trip to France is for pleasure, she says that “the majority of my travel at the moment is between the UK and Ireland.”

Connolly is the make-up artist-cum-founder behind fast-growing beauty brand Sculpted by Aimee, which she launched in 2016 by the age of 23.

Since then, the Sculpted by Aimee team has grown from just one woman (Connolly herself) to more than 100 people across the UK and Ireland, nine years later. The growing team requires her presence, she says, of her frequent travel.

In addition to London and the occasional holiday, Connolly has a trade show in Cannes and a factory visit to South Korea coming up in the next few weeks. Before Nice, she was in the US for several weeks to meet with retailers across the pond and attend a Harvard leadership scaling programme.

Connolly’s success has been regularly rewarded – speaking to The Currency off the back of her win, earlier this year, of the IMAGE PwC Overall Businesswoman of the Year 2025 award, she had previously won the Young Businesswoman of the Year category in 2022, along with EY entrepreneurship awards, and a spot on this year’s Future 50 global list of beauty brands shaping the future of the industry. That last acknowledgement came from BeautyMatters, a US-based beauty business publication.

The business has seen steady growth since the start, with huge early figures now stabilising a little.

“This year should see us at about 30 per cent growth versus last year, also remaining [in] profitability,” she said. “It’s funny, the business kind of went through like, 100, 100, 100, 75, 50, 30, 30 [per cent growth], so it’s been pretty consistent, which is great.”

The company’s 2023 financial statement, the latest available, reports over €22 million in sales for that year, compared to just under €15 million the year prior. Profits sat at just over €2.5 million, up from €2.1 million in 2022.

About 30 per cent of the business is online, and the rest is wholesale to retailers across the UK and Ireland, predominantly.

Choosing a factory, designing the products

Almost all Sculpted by Aimee products are made in South Korea. “It’s definitely our highest concentrated area of production,” she says. “The majority are the skincare complexion products, which make up a huge proportion of the business.”

Her business trips are very hands-on, which suits Connolly. “I love it, from a selfish point of view, because we just get to spend hours in the lab,” she says.

“You might be troubleshooting different raw materials. You might be looking at formulas that didn’t make it and trying to understand why. You might have a formula that’s going through stability that you’re waiting to see. We’d often do shade matching there.”

The degree of oversight she has on what goes on in the lab gives an insight into how on top of the details Connolly is, and why the multiple yearly trips to the factory are so important to her.

“In one of our foundations, there’s 30, 40 shades in it [the range],” she explains, “the varying change of that pigment is so minute that when you send a sample, you give comments, you swatch it, you send it back, your comments sometimes don’t even make sense.”

She gives an example of what a nonsensical comment from her might be like: “‘Be a little bit more yellow, then add some golden undertone, and make sure it’s neutral’ and it’s like, ‘come again?’” she laughs. “When you’re there, I can physically do the pigments to show them, so there’s lots of benefits.”

She says she is so hands-on because, for her, starting the brand was about “product obsession”.

Early product development

It was that obsession that led her to the relationship with the South Korean factory in the first place, at the start of the business. She was at a trade show in Europe and flew out to Seoul three weeks later. “It was a bit of a risk, or an investment, heading out there, but it was the only way that I was going to be safe and sound to proceed with the right person – and then obviously here we are nine, 10 years later,” she says.

It all started with an idea she had for a multipurpose primer. “Working with SPF [Sun Protection Factor] was particularly challenging,” she remembers. “I tried for like 10 months to produce the formula in Ireland, and this, again, was years ago, but we just couldn’t break through the white cast.”

She asked the Seoul factory. “Within about 10 days, they sent me a sample that, fair enough, wasn’t right, but oh my God, was it very nearly there,” she says.

Korean beauty is acknowledged to be cutting-edge, but while other brands use the same factory, they’re not direct competitors in the Sculpted space.

Anything not made in South Korea is manufactured in Italy (which is “known for mascaras and eye product formulations”) and Taiwan.

Christmas 2026 is already planned

One of the biggest challenges in the beauty industry, as in many industries where consumption is dictated by fast-changing trends, is forecasting what will sell years, sometimes, in advance.

Extending the number of colours or shades in a range can be relatively straightforward, but “a skincare product can take you anywhere from 36 to 12 months at the very best” to get to the shelves, Connolly says.

“Because the thing with skincare is you generally have to go to clinical trials,” she explains. “You’ll go into those trials. If that formula doesn’t pass it, you’re back to square one; if it does, great, but you have lots of other things to do.”

A foundation might take 12 to 24 months to develop, and a mascara around 24, she says. “But then you could have a palette that might only take 10 months.”

The uncertainty in the market presents “the biggest challenge when it comes to Christmas gifting”. “We have already signed off on 2026 gifting,” she tells me, “and we haven’t even sold 2025. And that is a challenge because you don’t even know what has performed.”

Sculpted by Aimee has been somewhat insulated by this, she says, because the brand’s USP has always been “trusted staples”.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, there are trends that change and that she needs to be mindful of, “but we’re less so that kind of hit-and-run, transitional product versus the there-to-stay product, so I think that does help.”

Even so, she recalls launching a skincare set last Christmas that sold out in three days. “That sounds phenomenal, but at the same time, when you’re trying to keep momentum for 10 weeks, it was like, ‘sh*t’.” There was nothing she could do.

“Christmas gifting as a whole is obviously a special price point for people,” she says. The company needs to be particularly mindful of keeping costs low, which involves planning as far in advance as possible. There’s only so much that can be achieved at a competitive Christmas price, “so doing anything in a rushed manner, or rushing the stock order or air freighting it in versus sea is just not possible”.

In the end, she said: “We were able to bundle things together and create a nice offering for people [online], but for our retailers, it was sold out.”

Consolidating the customer base

The main wholesale customers are Boots UK and Selfridges UK, which also owns Brown Thomas and Arnotts in Ireland. A recent partnership with online retailer ASOS has extended the brand’s reach online.

ASOS is a good partner because the target customers align with Connolly’s own. “We’ve had a very generational customer in Ireland,” she says, “so we’d often hear lovely stories of the daughter buying for the mom, or the mom robbing from the daughter’s make-up bag.”

But appealing to a broad range of customers has its downsides in terms of trying to get in front of more eyes. “Your budgets have to be stretched that little bit,” she says, “we’re trying to be tactical in terms of how we approach that as we scale.”

Sculpted by Aimee has a digital-first marketing strategy but with about 70 per cent of its products sold in-store, the marketing must “service the full channel strategy”, she says.

Connolly’s growth plan is two-fold: growth in products and growth in geography.

She’s planning to add more products – there’s a launch of a new skincare complexion product coming soon – but also expand the customer base in existing lines.

“We have very nicely and kind of quickly expanded across the UK in terms of retailers this year so there’s huge opportunity there now to kind of double down on where we are next year,” she says, “and also keep growing in Ireland.”

Any other expansion will be planned in the background while consolidating the brand’s position in those markets. Although having said that, Connolly confirms she has her sights on the US – “probably the biggest mountain to climb, slowly but surely!”

Like almost every other Irish retailer with ties to the US, Connolly says that the uncertainty is a challenge. Then there’s the task of getting Food and Drug Administration approval for many of the product lines. “It’s not a challenge, it’s just something we have to do,” she says, “there are different requirements in terms of labelling, we’re going through the motions there.”

And of course, there’s the scale-up needed to manage a much bigger market: growing the team, the warehousing capabilities, those kinds of things. She’s in discussions with different logistics partners over there at the moment.

When I ask for a launch date, however, Connolly says it’s still too early to say.

Time to refine early decisions

For now, it’s silly season in retail, that manic period that starts on September 1 and ends on December 31. “It’s our busiest time of year, but actually, I love it,” says Connolly. But the excitement won’t stop once January comes.

“We’re going through a bit of a refresh or reset, actually, on the branding note,” she says. “We’ve introduced some little aesthetic changes that will continue to roll out over 2026, so I feel like we’re really starting that year with this refresh mindset, to just go to the next level now.”

This is a bit of a correction, feels Connolly, taking me back to the early days of the business and the trade-offs a new founder has to make.

At the start, the branding came second to the product. “I was so product-focused, which I have no regrets on, because you have to be, you’re a product business, the product has to live up to it,” she explains, “but I wish I had maybe spent a bit longer on the brand aesthetics or the branding.”

It’s a tip she would give her younger self.

“When people are watching the cash at the start, they think, ‘Oh, I don’t need that,’ and actually, it’s so powerful that I wish I’d just given it more time at the beginning.”

Without necessarily regretting the way the brand grew organically, this is a chance to refine it now.

In the meantime, there’s Christmas to get through, talks with US retailers, and the complexion product launch in Korea.

And a holiday to finish. Safely deposited by her taxi in the sunny south of France, Connolly gets ready to sign off.

I just have a few more questions, and one involves investment. She hasn’t taken on investors so far, having grown the business from scratch herself. It’s still self-funded, she says. Given her talk of taking things to the next level, is now the time?

“We have huge ambitions, and that may require capital,” she responds. “So, I would stay open-minded, but right now we have no plans to change our current structure, so we’ll see how it goes, but who knows.”

This is the third in a series of articles written in collaboration with The Currency. Chief Executive of The Currency, Tom Lyons, was a judge at the annual IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards.

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