When the pandemic swept in like an overzealous security guard at a club, Ning Cheah braced herself for the inevitable shutdown of her beauty empire, The Beauty Crop. It was like watching a slow-motion train wreck; Superdrug, the high street giant, decided to ghost her product launch, and US orders just fizzled like a soda left out in the sun. “Scary doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she admitted, especially since she’d put her home on the line for a business loan. Talk about living on the edge of a very sharp cliff.
“Survival became my middle name,” Cheah recalled, scrambling to find the proverbial pennies just two days before payroll. “I was like, ‘This is it; I’m not just losing my business, but I’ll also be homeless.’” Imagine that existential crisis! Chasing payments and doing a financial tango with suppliers became her new normal. “It was literally down to the wire—like a suspense movie but without the popcorn,” she quipped.
At 42, the former investment banker had launched her plant-based “skincare meets make-up” business in 2014, after her skin threw a tantrum—thanks to chronic eczema and high-pressure acne from her finance job. Nothing says “I’m thriving” like a face that looks like a pizza.
Fast forward to today, and The Beauty Crop has grown from her kitchen experiments to an actual team of 30 in Chiswick. The company raked in about £11 million last year, with a pre-tax profit that made her financial worries look like a bad dream. But she didn’t get here without a few curveballs along the way.
Cheah, born as the daughter of Chinese immigrants in Malaysia, practically had entrepreneurship in her DNA. “If you want to make it big, you need to own your business,” she concluded at a young age. After jetting to London for a chemical engineering degree, she found herself sidetracked by a cushy investment banking gig—which, of course, was more soul-sucking than soul-fulfilling. Six years in, she was practically a pioneer in the field of “looking for the exit.”
By 2012, Cheah’s skin crisis was in full swing. Finding makeup that didn’t trigger a dermal apocalypse was like hunting for unicorns. “Organic skincare was in, but colour cosmetics were a minefield of bad ingredients,” she mused. Then came the “light-bulb moment,” which was less about illumination and more about turning desperation into creation. Thus, The Beauty Crop was conceived—supposedly not a skin condition-induced hallucination.
Once she decided to create a solution, it was like a frenetic game of business hopscotch. Cheah asked everyone and anyone for guidance and hit trade shows like Cosmoprof Bologna, determined to make her presence felt. “I was practically a ghost in business attire, insisting I was a CEO when it was just me,” she joked. Eventually, she linked up with a tiny Italian lab to whip up prototypes, fortifying her brand’s dubious science.
By 2014, while still juggling a full-time job, she had plowed £20,000 of her own savings into this labor of love and deception—after all, who wouldn’t want to sell beauty products without the alleged risk of an explosive reaction? Then came the part where she tragically miscalculated friendships into partnerships. Unsurprisingly, mixing business with friendship is like mixing oil and water; visually appealing but fundamentally flawed. Alone again, she trudged on. She took a detour into fintech with dreams of learning about the magic of small business management before diving headfirst into the beauty world.
Thanks to some cold-pitching marathons, her fortunes turned when Urban Outfitters in New York noticed her. “They ordered five products, which was both shocking and unreal,” Cheah recalled. The Beauty Crop notched up sales of £1 million by the end of 2016 and kept scaling upward, reaching nearly £3 million by 2018—all fueled by the boom of make-up subscription boxes. As if that wasn’t enough, Cheah decided to become a mother during this wild ride. “I remember replying to emails while breastfeeding—a multitasking queen,” she laughed.
But life in the fast lane also came with legal drama starring trademarks and logos—because who wouldn’t want to add soap opera to their CV? “We lost a trademark dispute in court and had to change our logo, which was a painful lesson,” Cheah confessed. “Now we trademark everything—hard learned but invaluable.” After nearly sinking from an “all hands on deck” lawsuit over working with unsafe ingredients—who knew titanium dioxide could be a liability?—the company emerged with more grit and determination.
The golden moment? Discovering TikTok and using its algorithm like a secret weapon to skyrocket sales. “We turned into an overnight sensation,” Cheah said. Suddenly, one viral trend could pull in sales that would require months of traditional marketing. And speaking of pushing the envelope, she’s now poised for serious growth with a launch on Amazon, with expectations to double revenues by 2026. The brand’s products are now finding their way onto the shelves of well-known retailers like Boots, all thanks to a whirlwind of TikTok sales.
As Cheah ambitiously aims for omnichannel expansion—with dreams of physical stores—she’s seen the beauty industry’s competition intensify overnight. Yet, with impressive resolve, she insists her brand will remain affordable and relevant to those with chronic skin conditions. “Running a business is a wild ride, but at the end of the day, when our customers share how our products change their lives, it makes it all worthwhile,” she admitted.
In the wise words of Cheah, “Don’t wait for perfection; just start, learn, and improve as you go.” Because if running a beauty brand teaches anything, it’s that resilience can give even the most unlikely products a glow-up.
