Published: 04/21/2026
Last updated: 04/21/2026
Make-up artist Aimee Connolly launched Sculpted by Aimee in 2016. She was 23. Fresh out of college. No co-founder, no outside capital, no safety net. Just her life savings and a clear idea of what was missing from the beauty brands already on the market.
Ten years later, Sculpted by Aimee has over 160 products, around 100 employees, north of €40 million in revenue, and flagship stores in Dublin, Belfast and London. You can find it in Boots, Selfridges and ASOS. And the brand is preparing to soft launch in the US later this year.
From the outside, it looks like a glamorous Irish makeup brand with a charismatic founder who's great on social media. And that's most definitely true. But it's also a tightly run product operation with a supply chain anchored in South Korea, a cash flow discipline forged by bootstrapping, and a founder who still flies to Seoul twice a year to mix pigments with lab techs in person.
We sat down with Aimee on the Treyd Secrets podcast to find out what actually goes into building a product brand at this level. Here's what she told us.
The assumption that's always wrong
When someone new joins the Sculpted by Aimee team, Aimee always asks them the same question after their first two weeks: what surprised you most? The answer is almost always the same.
"Nine times out of 10, the feedback is the level of detail that we actually have to work on to bring a product to market. Because there's this assumption when you see it on shelf that someone maybe rang the factory, picked up the phone and then it arrived – actually there's probably like a hundred steps" says Aimee Connolly.
That gap between how a product looks on shelf and what it took to get there is, in many ways, the whole story of Sculpted by Aimee. At the start, Aimee was doing all of it herself – meeting manufacturers, writing product specs, pitching buyers, calling courier companies, figuring out pro forma documentation on the fly.
"I was the one-woman band who was meeting with manufacturers, talking to product specs, doing the sales pitch into buyers, calling courier companies, pretending to work for someone else to understand how I would actually bring the product in."
She loved it. She still does. The operational complexity isn't something she tolerates – it's something she leans into. That instinct turned out to be one of the most important things she had going for her.
Why South Korea
Most people assume Korean beauty is a marketing angle. For Sculpted by Aimee, it's a sourcing decision made nearly a decade ago – and it shapes almost everything about the product range. Aimee didn't start out planning to source from Korea. But she had a clear conviction early on: the skin had to come first. Peptides, hyaluronic acid, SPF – she wanted those ingredients in her foundations and primers, not just in a separate skincare range. And the best place in the world to do that, she concluded, was Korea.
"I deliberately sought out Korea like nine or ten years ago because I really wanted a skincare focus in my formula. It was very much just having a skin-first approach – for example, peptides, hyaluronic acid, SPF in my primer, in my foundations. Because for me the skin was everything. You get that right and everything else is so much simpler after."
Three weeks after meeting a Korean manufacturer at a trade show in Italy, she was on a plane to Seoul. That partner is still Sculpted by Aimee's biggest manufacturer today. Around 85% of the product range is now made in Korea.
"We do that deliberately – because of their skincare acceleration, their knowledge, their innovation, and because a skincare-first formula is genuinely something that we live and die by. It was not just a nice marketing tactic."
What actually happens in the Seoul lab
Aimee travels to Korea once or twice a year and typically spends a full week there. It's not a supplier visit in the traditional sense. It's closer to a working residency.
"Three of the days were literally spent with lab techs. Mixing pigments, formulas, going through stability testing, looking at different SPF levels, and really on-the-spot mixing together to see different formulas – be it existing formulas being updated or new products coming."
The rest of the week covers quarterly supplier reviews – lead times, on-time delivery rates, cost prices, raw material changes – and innovation sessions where the manufacturer presents new ingredients and formats based on what they're seeing in the market. The point, she says, is that there's no substitute for being there in person.
"There's nothing like sitting face to face in person and troubleshooting a component there and then, rather than getting it by post, sending comments and videos back – it goes back to them and it just adds weeks onto a process."
The cost of distance
Sourcing from Seoul when your customers are in Dublin, London and (soon) the US is not the easy option. Aimee is clear-eyed about the trade-offs.
"When you're looking at the actual transit of freight, you couldn't possibly find a further destination to bring it into this part of Europe. So that can definitely add complexity, particularly in the world that we're living in with these macro events that really impact – be it sea freight journeys, air freight pricing, raw materials, whatever it might be."
The Suez Canal blockages of recent years hit her directly.
"Sea freight that you've planned to arrive in three months is now six months because it's sitting on the sea and it can't move. And there is literally nothing you can do outside of forecasting way ahead of time to get it here."
The response wasn't to look for closer manufacturers. It was to get better at planning. That meant moving from reactive buying – ordering when stock gets low – to demand-led planning built on real data.
"When you're growing, you go from more of a reactive 'buy this' at the start to definitely more demand-led planning as you grow and scale. That gives you security, allows you to be a little bit more pragmatic in future plans, to manage inventory levels that you need, to foresee any issues that might cause delays."
In practice, demand-led planning means benchmarking new product orders against previous launches. If a new foundation launches, it gets forecast based on how a similar foundation performed – shade mix, sell-through rate, timeframe – adjusted for the fact that the business is bigger now, with more retailers and a higher average basket value. Then a human layers in the nuances the data can't capture.
"A data set will only tell you so much – we might know actually that this next one is the most on-trend product, so we actually need to double what the data is telling us because we believe in it."
Bootstrapping at scale
Sculpted by Aimee has never taken outside investment. That's not ideological – Aimee is open about the fact that it could change – but it has shaped how the business thinks about cash.
Buying from Korea means paying upfront, often months before the product lands and even longer before a retailer pays. That gap, combined with the seasonality of beauty retail, creates real cash flow pressure.
"You'll pay upfront, for example, to get ahead of Q4 – you'll get the cash in Q4. Q4 and Q1 are generally better in terms of the cash flow cycle and then, you know, it'll dip and drop. And you just have to be really prepared for that."
The discipline that bootstrapping forces, she argues, is actually one of its benefits.
"One of the best things when you are self-funded is that it teaches you discipline the whole time. So you just have to be rigorous in your cash flow management."
On the question of investment, she's nuanced. She's not against it. She just hasn't needed it – yet.
"As much as we haven't taken investment to date, that's not because I'm solely against it, by any means. It's more that it was the right decision for us. And I think for me, if ever that day comes, it'll be just as much about the partner that we do it with as it is about the cash that we take in."
Pricing: the accessible end of premium
One of the decisions that's defined Sculpted by Aimee from day one is where it sits on the price spectrum. Not mass market. Not luxury. The accessible end of premium – typically 30–40% more value than a comparable global brand, at a lower price point.
"Basically, you trade down to us from the likes of a bigger global brand and we would typically be 30–40% more value to you than that brand, but you don't sacrifice on quality."
The logic goes back to her years as a working makeup artist, when she had every brand under the sun in her kit.
"There is no way I could make something subpar and put it on my bride's face. It's the most important day of their lives when they're getting ready that morning. You can't be sacrificing or skimping on the level of formula or product or efficacy going on them."
That positioning – quality you don't have to apologize for, at a price that feels fair – is something she considers a USP worth protecting at all costs as costs around the world continue to rise.
What's next
Sculpted by Aimee is heading into the US. The plan is a soft online launch in Q4 this year, setting up local logistics and competitive shipping, followed by a retail partnership in the 24 months after that. Beyond that, two or three years of heavy product innovation, including new formats and more complex product engineering.
The founding principle hasn't changed. And her Treyd Secret – the hard-earned lesson she'd pass on to any founder – reflects exactly that.
"The devil is in the detail. The secret sauce is generally in that detail. And if you extract yourself too much from it, I think there's a real risk there. So it's a balance – the whole time making sure that you empower and delegate, but that you never become so far removed that you're actually losing that secret sauce."
💜 Did you find this useful? Share it with a founder or operator who's building a product brand.
💜 Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the Treyd Secrets episode with Aimee Connolly on Spotify.
