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Beauty entrepreneur, CEO and Overall Businesswoman of the Year 2025 award winner, Aimee Connolly reflects on how versatility and determination has driven Sculpted by Aimee to new heights.
“I’m still getting lovely comments from people on the street, strangers congratulating me on the award, it’s been surreal,” says Aimee Connolly following her Overall Businesswoman of the Year win at the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards 2025. “I’m not usually shocked – as CEO, I oversee everything, so there are normally very few – but this is one of the biggest surprises ever.”
A former Young Businesswoman of the Year Award winner, Connolly set up Sculpted by Aimee in 2016 when she was just 22, following a career as a freelance make-up artist. “I am a beauty fanatic. I love the industry, I love the product. I love the connection with the customer, and I love teaching the subject.”
After founding her own make-up academy and finishing a degree in business, she began thinking about how she might take her passion to the next level. Frustrated with how contrived the make-up and skincare industry had become, with conflicting information and overly complicated routines, she wanted to make beauty more accessible, both in terms of knowledge and product quality. “It was really that obsession with getting that energy from the customer from the very beginning that spurred me on to say, ‘Okay, let’s mix business and beauty together and start the brand’.”
Despite all her ambitions, Connolly admits even she couldn’t have imagined the heights the business has reached in just nine short years. Including skincare, complexion, make-up and body care products, Sculpted by Aimee has become a massive national and international success. Expected to double profits in 2025, from €26.5 million to €46.5 million, it is stocked in over 700 retailers worldwide, including Australia and the UAE and has imminent plans to launch into the US market. “Did I think I’d be sitting here at the stage that we’re at? Absolutely not, it has just grown far beyond anything I could have planned, and we’re still hopefully only getting started.”
Taking things day-by-day as she began to scale the business, Connolly has matured into an astute and perceptive CEO, harnessing and moulding Sculpted by Aimee’s unique strengths to capitalise on the ever-changing nature of the beauty industry. The brand has kept pace with the changing technology far better than even the largest multinational beauty conglomerates, mobilising AI as a tool to connect and educate customers, while maintaining the digital community that is at the foundation of its success. “Digital is obviously moving fast, but we also see that those face-to-face, real-life moments are really having a comeback, which is amazing to see. It’s all about finding that balance and that blend.”
Photo, left, by Kieran Harnett
Experience can carry you so far, but if you have that inherent will to succeed and passion for the cause, that trumps everything for me
The fast-paced nature of the business’s growth has forced Connolly to learn as she leads. Without any corporate experience before founding the brand –she admits she has never even sat for a job interview – Connolly has relied on her own resilience and acute entrepreneurial instincts to hone every aspect of the business, from formula development to packaging and social media. “You’re firefighting all the time, anything from stock delays to change in manufacturers. It’s been a testing road, but I’ve gotten good at managing those issues and staying solution-focused, which I think is one of the most powerful things that any entrepreneur or business leader has to have.”
As the Sculpted by Aimee team has grown – establishing brick and mortar shops in Dublin, Belfast and London, as well as expanding into retailers like Boots, Arnotts, John Lewis and ASOS – Connolly has seen her role in the business mature too. “It’s a lot, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t weigh on my shoulders,” she confesses. Moving from a one-woman start-up to a multi-million euro business has meant relinquishing control of the day-to-day and shifting to a future-proofing focus. “I would say it’s always a work in progress for me,” she explains of many hats she juggles. “Suddenly, I’m not the doer anymore, I’m the overseer and the planner.”
Now employing upwards of 50 employees across Ireland and the UK, Connolly highlights the importance of an empowered team in allowing her to look forward. When it comes to the hiring process, Connolly often finds herself drawn to those who reflect her own beginnings, prioritising a cultural fit over education or work history. “Experience can carry you so far, but if you have that inherent will to succeed and passion for the cause, that trumps everything for me.”
With plenty more to come, Sculpted by Aimee and its founder are still nowhere close to cresting the peaks of their potential. “We’re busy plotting and planning for market entry into the US and beyond,” she says, as well as launching a new complexion product in September with an innovative South Korean formulation that has been “a long time in the making”, as well as awaiting the next stage of the notoriously difficult B-Corp sustainability status. It’s apparent that, while Connolly, at just 32, is one of the youngest recipients of the Overall Businesswoman of the Year accolade, there’s plenty yet to come from this inventive industry leader.
We’re interviewing each of our outstanding winners from this year’s IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards. To hear more about their career journeys, expert insights, and more, visit image.ie/pwc.
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