Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

Who coined your company’s name and what is the backstory?

Skin In Motion’s founder, Gia Mills, coined the name.

It is a 'does what is says on the tin' name, it tells you instantly what the products are about – beauty products that are designed for moving skin. Put another way - skincare and makeup that is designed for exercising / moving.

The brainchild of professional celebrity makeup artist Gia Mills and Sophia Lahlou, a celebrated marketing head at Unilever who spent 17 years heading up global selfcare brands.

 

Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

What motivated or inspired you to start the company?

When Gia Mills discovered that 75% of women in the UK
are put off exercise by their appearance*, as a pro
makeup artist and fitness lover, she wanted to change
that stat. What could she do to encourage all women to benefit from the multiple benefits of exercise?

She saw that the wellness and fitness sectors were thriving and there were no well designed skincare and makeup products that withstood workouts and the super busy real lives of women. So she set to work creating products and a community that celebrated exercise, to encourage women to love what they are made of.

Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

Can you elaborate on your vision?

Our purpose is very single minded, to create a great range
of skincare and makeup products for pre, during and after exercise to help motivate women to keep fit. Products that work, can be trusted and fit for purpose.

 

Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

What specific actions have you taken to ensure your company’s success?

1. Created a highly experienced motivated team
2. Created incredible products that work
3. Understood what drives our consumers
4. Built Skin In Motion at a pace and scale that allows us
to learn, pivot and successfully grow
5. Have a single-minded and unique selling point that
stands out in a saturated market

 

Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

Who are your biggest competitors?

Mainstream beauty brands that are not designed for pre, during or after exercise but still used for that purpose by consumers. Something we are on a mission to educate our customers about - why it is important to use products designed specifically for exercise.

Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

Why do you think this company can beat the competition, and how do you intend to differentiate yourself?

 

We are the only brand in the market globally that has the perfect combination of :
- Trust: A celebrated professional makeup artist founder
- Performance: Products that are designed by award-winning cosmetic chemists and fit for purpose
- Unique: The only brand that offers makeup AND skincare for the wellness/fitness community.
- Purpose: In the world today, unless you are brand with an overarching altruistic purpose, you won’t succeed. Skin In Motion’s social purpose is to create a community that encourages women to exercise and give women the tools to accomplish that.
- Skills: A team of accomplished people with experience and form in building successful brands
- Scale: Oh boy do we have a vision for how big we can really be! So many other categories we can expand into, we have positioned ourselves and created brand values that can be so much larger than the sum of its parts (we don’t want to give away too much here).

Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

What is the biggest risk facing your company?

Cash flow – ensuring, as a growing company, that we have the accessible funds to scale and grow.

 

Gia Mills's story

Company Focus

What is your commercial strategy and how do you plan to become financially viable?

We started our journey on DTC, knowing that we always intended to expand our reach and our physical availability through selective distribution but also by introducing new innovative routes to market.
This will enable us to quickly scale up and be financially viable within 2 years from launch.

 

Gia Mills's story

Personal Focus

What makes this time auspicious for your startup to kick off?

In challenging times, such as we are living through with the global pandemic, it allows huge opportunity for clever start-up businesses to thrive and nimbly pivot, taking advantage of the shifting trends in consumer behaviour.

 

Gia Mills's story

Personal Focus

How many hours of sleep do you get per day?

Gia Mills: 7-8 – sleep is crucial to allow one to perform at ones best in the day

 

Gia Mills's story

Personal Focus

What keeps you up at night or what are you paranoid about?

Cash flow, knowing that 9 out of 10 startups fail because of money. But we have a strong proposition and great response from consumers so far so we are very confident for the future.

 

Gia Mills's story

Personal Focus

What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

A huge drive to feel happy, to succeed and make a positive difference to others lives in an altruistic way

 

Gia Mills's story

Personal Focus

In your opinion, what is the biggest challenge in running a startup?

Cash flow - always!
The challenge is to be still there after the 2 first years. We are half way there…

 

 

Gia Mills's story

Personal Focus

The Founder's Short biography.

Gia Mills:
- To build a community and beautiful tribe of followers who feel empowered to exercise and thrive from its benefits
- To never give up on the vision to achieve what we know we are capable of
- To lead by example

Sophia Lahlou:
- As one of my mentors always says, “Execution is Strategy”. So deliver our strategy flawlessly and consistently.
- Keep the brand true to what it is, a purposeful active beauty brand which does what it says at a functional level and in terms of social impact

 

Gia Mills's story

Investor Focus

Are you adequately capitalised, and when do we expect cash flow break-even?

In our quest to be adequately capitalised, we are commencing a sizeable crowd funding exercise. Our forecast of breaking even is in two years

 

Gia Mills's story

Investor Focus

Why do you think your company will be attractive to investors?

- We have a team of people investors can trust to respect the financial investment they have made in Skin In Motion and work smart and hard to deliver a very healthy return on investment
- We have a USP that taps into key growing sectors, wellness, beauty and fitness that stands out from their overcrowded sector
- The robust financial plan has been crafted by highly experienced financial analysts with achievable goals

 

Gia Mills's story

Investor Focus

What is your strategy for taking your company to the next level? When is your next funding round, and can you give an indication of how much you intend to raise?

Our strategy is “Intensify- extensify”
Intensify: We created a successful model for us, and we want to build on that momentum, and increase our reach and penetration. it is definitely a very scalable model as it a big and growing industry/category, and also because we are tapping into a real unmet need.
Extensify: we want

1-to complement our core model with new routes to market through selective and strategic distribution( with Gyms, online beauty retail for example in addition to our DTC),

2-our marketing model from mainly performance marketing to more influencers marketing, experiential/events…

3- widen our product range with a strong innovation pipeline to complete the beauty routine of our customers and last but not least

4- in the mid-term, expand our geographical footprint. That in mind, we need more money to deliver the above, so we are about to start a round of investment through crowdfunding. This should go live in the new year with a target of 350k. So stay tuned

 

Gia Mills's story

Investor Focus

How would you respond, or plan to adapt, if your product is completely disrupted or displaced?

Interesting question, when one encounters bumps in the road, I believed there is always a solution, a way forward. Whether it is going round, under or above the bump, there is always a solution

 

Gia Mills's story

Investor Focus

What do you think about our Startup's Diary Concept?

One of the key success factors of a business today is undeniably a reliable global network of like-minded
people.
The Start up Diaries Executives Diary is offering exactly that! The opportunity to safely engage and exchange with seasoned professionals. A platform to get to be known by your peers, to share experiences, and find synergies or simply learn from other entrepreneurs successes or challenges. What’s not to love!

 

From the diary of SKIN IN MOTION's story

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