How to Start a Makeup Business in the UK

Table of Contents

The revenue in the Cosmetics market is projected to hit £2.63bn this year, while it’s expected to grow by 3.8% each year between 2025 and 2029.

While this is dominated by the major brands, there’s still lots of opportunities for small businesses to make an impact, particularly on a local scale.

Want to be a part of it? Let’s take a look at how to start a makeup business.

Conduct market research

The key to starting a makeup business in the UK—indeed, starting a business in any industry—is to conduct thorough market research first.

This market research will inform what you sell, how you cost your products, whether there’s demand for them in your local area, and much more.

To do this effectively you should combine quantitative and qualitative research. In layman's terms, this means combining statistical data with actually talking to people to understand their beliefs, attitudes and motivations. Put even more simply, it’s about finding out what people want and how many people want it.

You should also be looking at what your prospective competitors are selling, and how they’re marketing themselves. This will allow you to identify gaps in the market. For example, your town might have multiple small businesses selling nail art services, but none that sell lipstick products. Differentiating yourself is key, but you can only do that once you understand the market you’ll be targeting.

How much does it cost to start a makeup line?

Launching a successful makeup line that provides a long-term income is going to require some initial investment on your part. Fortunately, the barrier to entry in the cosmetics industry is much lower compared to some industries—particularly if you start off operating out of your own home.

There’s no simple answer to the question, ‘How much does it cost to start a makeup business’, but there are several factors that will influence how much you need to invest. While the biggest expense would be the lease on a shop or manufacturing space, the quality of ingredients and packaging you use, the complexity of what you’re manufacturing and the area you want to sell into will also play a part. For example, a business making simple products that can be produced in your house and that you sell in your hometown will be a lot cheaper to get off the ground than if you want to sell your products internationally and manufacture them commercially.

Other factors to consider are whether or not you’ll need to hire anyone, the breadth of products you offer (we’d suggest starting with a smaller range and expanding) and the extent of your marketing investment.

Outline your business plan

Developing a comprehensive startup business plan will do more than simply help you to visualise what your business will do and how it will be successful—it will also help you to secure a bank loan (if you need one) or private investment, whether that’s from friends, family or a prospective business partner.

A business plan will also:

• Help you to stay organised and focused on what you need to achieve
• Ensure you have viable commercial potential as a makeup business
• Outline how you’re going to take your product(s) to market and get in front of the right people
• Outline your financial objectives and how you’re going to grow the business over time.
• Set your priorities and keep things on track

There are two standard ‘formats’ of business plans: ‘traditional’ and lean.

As the name suggests, the traditional format of business plan is the most common. It encourages you to go into detail about the business, including your goals, strategies and financial projections, while it will typically include an executive summary, company description, the list of products you intend to offer, sector and competitor analysis, your marketing strategy and financial plans and projections.

By contrast, the lean format leaves a lot of this detail out in favour of getting off the ground quickly. For these types of business plans to be effective you have to update them frequently; it’s a process of continuous improvement and iteration.

Business model

Your business model refers to how your company will operate in the eyes of HMRC and / or Companies House.

There are three common options here: sole trader, Limited Company and Partnership.

Sole trader

As a sole trader you are the business. It’s the simplest way to get started, but it does mean that you’re personally liable for all of the business’ obligations—including debts. This means your personal assets (such as your home) could be at risk if your business gets into financial difficulty.

You don’t have to register as a sole trader with Companies House, but you will need to register with HMRC for self-assessment no later than 5th October during your business’ second tax year. This means that if you start your business between April 2024 and April 2025, you’ll need to register for self-assessment by 5th October 2025.

Limited Company

A Limited Company is a business structure that is legally separate from its owners. This means their personal assets are protected in the event of financial difficulty for the business.

Unlike becoming a sole trader, setting up a limited company isn’t free—although it isn’t expensive, either. Registering a limited company will cost £12 if you apply online. Remember that you’ll need to provide an address for your Limited Company that will be a matter of public record, so you might want to consider a virtual office address to avoid your home address being made public.

Partnership

If you’re starting the business with someone you can register as a Partnership. Although registering as a partnership is an option, it’s relatively uncommon for businesses like this to do so but we’ve included some information below.

There are three types of partnership options available: General Partnership, Limited Partnership and Limited Liability Partnership.

• General Partnership—a business structure where two or more people share the profits, losses, and liabilities of a business.
• Limited Partnership (LP)—a business owned by two or more parties, including at least one general partner who runs the business and has unlimited liability for any debts, and at least one limited partner who has liability up to the amount of their investment.
• Limited Liability Partnership (LLP)—a business structure where partners are only liable for their own investments and personal guarantees.

Create your cosmetics brand

Developing a brand that resonates with the target audience is always important, but it’s particularly the case for makeup businesses. 

To get started, you need to consider your brand’s values and what you stand for. Do you want to make and sell sustainable makeup products? Maybe your USP is affordability or you offer a certain unique aesthetic. 

These values and your mission can then inform everything from your brand name, logo, packaging design and tone of voice. It’s how you tell your ‘story’ and create a unique, consistent experience for your customers. 

When businesses get their branding right it can become even more powerful than the quality of their products—but this takes some time. At first, you’re going to have to work hard to live up to your brand values and produce cosmetic products that live up to the promise.

Product development

Whether you’re going to be developing your own products or reselling cosmetics manufactured by third-parties, you need to carefully consider your suppliers and whether or not the ingredients required are safe and legal for sale to UK consumers.

Find your suppliers

To create your makeup products you’re going to need suppliers that you can rely on. This will include companies that can provide raw ingredients, packaging companies and shipping companies. You might also need to find manufacturing partners if you want to create more complex products that can’t be produced at home.

Shop around to make sure you’re getting the best quality products, but also the best price for each stage of the process, but remember that building good relationships at this stage is crucial. Don’t upset anyone by negotiating their prices too low. If you’re just starting out, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to lowball too much anyway. 

Established suppliers might already have good business contacts that can help you get started and grow quickly, so ask if you can leverage them for your startup.

Ingredient safety

Choosing the right ingredients is essential to ensure the quality of your makeup products, but more importantly they need to be safe, so research ingredients and suppliers thoroughly. You can even get third-party companies to carry out safet audits on manufacturers first.

When sourcing ingredients, consider the following:

• Are they approved for use in skincare in the UK?
• Are you planning to use preservatives to increase a product’s shelf life?
• Does the supplier have a good reputation for quality and safety?
• Are any of the ingredients you want to use common allergens?

Working with experienced cosmetics manufacturers will make this easier, but if you’re planning on creating your own formulations you need to take extra care to ensure product safety.

Legal and regulatory requirements

Labelling requirements 

In the UK, you need to include the following on your beauty products:

• Name and address of the ‘Responsible Person’ (who must be based in the UK)
• Country of origin if the products have been imported to the UK
• Nominal quantity of contents, in weight or volume
• Best before date or how long after opening the product can be used for
• Warning statements and precautionary information
• An identification number
• Purpose of the product, if it’s not obvious from the packaging/product
• All ingredients used in the product

Note that different countries and regions have different requirements, so if you want to sell products internationally your packaging will have to meet those standards.

Register business

As discussed above, you will either need to register your company with Companies House, or register as a sole trader by 5th October during your second year of trading, depending on the business structure you want to use.

Find out more about how to register a small business in the UK.

Liability insurance

Although liability insurance isn’t a legal requirement for a cosmetics business, we highly recommend taking out Product Liability Insurance. This will ensure you’re protected against the cost of compensation in the event of physical harm caused by faulty products or unforeseeable circumstances that quality control systems couldn’t identify.

Our customers can save 15% on customisable insurance products from Superscript, which covers over 1,000 types of business, big or small.

Data protection

If you’re planning to sell your products online you’ll also have to comply with relevant data protection regulation, as set out in the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018.

The DPA is the UK’s implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) following the UK leaving the European Union.

If your business wants to process personal data to fulfil orders, or use it for marketing purposes, you must follow these principles:

• The data must be used fairly, lawfully and with transparency
• The data must be used for specified, explicit purposes
• The data must be used in a way that is relevant and limited to what is necessary to fulfil the specific purpose
• You must keep data up to date and ensure it’s accurate
• You should not keep data for longer than necessary
• The data must be handled securely, and you must take steps to avoid unlawful or unauthorised access.

Note that there are particularly strong legal protections for protected characteristics, such as race, ethnic background, religious beliefs and sexual orientation.

Sales and marketing strategies

When you first launch your new makeup brand, no one is going to know what you do, what your brand stands for or why they should purchase your products. With this in mind, you’re going to need to invest a lot of time and money in your marketing to get things moving.

With everything else you’re going to have to focus on, such as creating your products and fulfilling orders, you might decide that marketing is something you should outsource to an expert consultant or agency. However, if you do want to take this on yourself, you’re going to have to create a marketing strategy that includes:

• Who your target market is—this is more granular than just ‘people that wear makeup’, and should include demographic information, what they want to achieve with your products, any objections they might have and how you can get in front of them.
• What ‘channels’ you want to promote your brand on, for example social media, makers markets and trade shows.
• How much you can spend on marketing per sale to achieve profitability (your cost per acquisition).
• How do you want to sell your products—for example, will you have a brick-and-mortar store, create a custom-made website, use a Shopify template or Etsy shop (or similar), or simply sell your products at craft fairs?

Where to sell

Deciding where to sell your beauty products is going to be one of your most important considerations. For startups, securing a spot at a craft fair and setting yourself up on Etsy is the quickest route to market, but if you want to grow a larger, more notable brand you’re going to need to create your own online store—even if that’s using a platform like Shopify, rather than developing a completely bespoke website.

Once your brand has reached a certain level you could even sell it into some of the major retailers, but you’re going to need to be able to show high levels of demand before they’re willing to place orders.

Social media

Social media marketing for cosmetics brands could probably be an article in itself, and it’s ideal for visual products, which makes it perfect for cosmetics brands, and it will be an essential channel for your makeup brand, although the specific platforms you should prioritise will depend on your target market. Younger audiences, such as Gen Z, might be easier to reach on TikTok, while Instagram might be best for reaching millennials.

When you first get started you won’t have an audience which will make gaining ‘organic reach’ (that is, getting in front of your audience for free) difficult, so you might need to commit some of your marketing budget to paid ads. The good news is that these ads can be highly targeted, making it easier to reach the right people with your marketing messaging.

Launching your products

Once you’ve set up your business and formulated your products you need to take them to market. There’s quite a lot involved in this process, but below are three of the most crucial steps.

Test your online order process

The most important thing is to make sure your online order process works. Test the full checkout journey to ensure each stage is working as it should. The worst thing to happen as you launch your business is customers being unable to actually buy your products.

Send products to influencers

It takes time to build brand awareness organically, but beauty influencers can offer a shortcut to generating buzz about your products.

Identify the influencers that are most suited to your niche, and reach out to them to see what they can do to help. Although a few might offer to promote your new brand for free, it’s much more likely that you’ll have to pay to secure a sponsored post. However, if an influencer is speaking to your target market and has a large audience, it’ll be worth it.

Start posting on social media channels

Start posting content to your social media platforms as soon as you launch. 

Consumers—particularly those under 30—use social media as a search engine more than the likes of Google, so you need to be discoverable on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, and you want to make sure there are active channels for them to find.

Managing your inventory 

Managing inventory as a beauty brand can be tricky, as you’ll have to stock a lot of products and ingredients to ensure you can fulfil orders—but they don’t necessarily have a long shelf-life.

With that in mind, you’re going to have to keep track of sell-by dates (for finished products and ingredients) to ensure what you’re selling is safe. It’s inevitable that you’ll have to dispose of some inventory due to shelf-life at some point, but keep track of what it is and how much of it you’re getting rid of so you can adjust future orders. You’ll also need to make sure goods are stored in the right conditions to maximise their lifespan and not be damaged.

The key is to stay organised, particularly if you’re not working with a third-party fulfilment centre.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to think about if you want to start a successful makeup business, but the financial opportunity and rewards of working for yourself make it worth it.

To find out how The Hoxton Mix can help you to start a freelance makeup business, whether that’s with company formation, setting up a business bank, securing a dedicated business phone number or creating a virtual office, get in touch with our friendly and experienced team today. 

FAQ

How much does it cost to start a makeup line in the UK?

The cost varies based on factors like product range, packaging quality, manufacturing scale, and marketing efforts. Starting small with home-based production can cost less, while large-scale manufacturing and international sales will require a higher investment.

What legal requirements are needed to start a makeup business?

To sell makeup in the UK, you must meet specific legal requirements, including proper product labelling, safety compliance for ingredients, and registering your business with Companies House or HMRC. Liability insurance is also recommended.

What is the best way to sell makeup products?

You can sell products through craft fairs, online marketplaces like Etsy, or by creating a custom website using platforms like Shopify. Expanding to retail partnerships or major retailers is possible once your brand gains traction.

How can I market my new makeup brand?

Social media is essential for visual products like makeup. Focus on platforms like Instagram and TikTok to reach your target audience, and consider partnering with influencers to promote your brand. Paid ads can also help build initial awareness.

How do I create a unique makeup brand?

Start by identifying your brand values, such as sustainability, affordability, or a specific aesthetic. Use these values to guide your branding choices, including your name, logo, packaging, and tone of voice. A strong, consistent story will resonate with your audience.