Yuv: how a beauty-tech brand buys inventory without tying up cash
In short
Company: Yuv
Industry: Beauty tech — smart salon hair color
HQ: London, UK (expanding to the US)
Customer since: 2026
Use case: Financing inventory — paying suppliers upfront for components, packaging and color
Challenge: Healthy margins, but cash locked up in a long, multi-country supply chain
Outcome: Suppliers paid upfront and repaid from sales — a cleaner cash cycle as Yuv scales from the UK to the US
Why it works: One flexible facility that mirrors Yuv's own "pay for what you use" model
The challenge: cash stuck in inventory
Beauty products carry good margins. The problem is timing. Yuv pays vendors long before anything sells. Yuv runs a complex international supply chain: packaging comes from Asia and has to be paid for as it leaves the warehouse, with freight on top. From there it's shipped to a filling partner in Europe, then on to a warehouse — all before the first order goes out.
For a lean, fast-growing business, money committed that early is money that can't do anything else. And the easy fix wasn't the right one. Founder Francisco Gimenez had financing offers tied straight to his Stripe revenue, but he wanted something purpose-built for inventory — matched to the moment cash actually goes out the door to pay vendors, not a revenue-based repayment schedule he couldn't plan around.
The biggest benefit is structuring things so we can pay suppliers with the profits of the merchandise we bought from them. We're financing the gap while inventory becomes liquid. That's very impactful.
Francisco Gimenez, founder, Yuv
A different kind of fit
There's a neat symmetry to it. Yuv lets stylists pay for color after they use it. Treyd lets Yuv pay for inventory after it sells.
Yuv pays its suppliers upfront and repays Treyd from the proceeds — instead of sizing every order to that week's bank balance. Buy the stock, sell it, then repay. The stock that would otherwise tie up cash for months pays for itself.
It's stayed simple on the supplier side, too — payments land the way they always did, with no issues or questions from vendors. And getting started was just as painless.
The platform is so intuitive, so easy — it's a very user-friendly product. It's almost like we wouldn't have needed an onboarding session.
Francisco Gimenez, founder, Yuv
What it made possible
Treyd sits in one clear spot in Yuv's stack: it finances inventory — the variable cost of buying and reselling their hair color — while equity covers overhead. One facility, one job.
By releasing cash that would otherwise sit locked in half-finished stock, Yuv frees up working capital for everything else a fast-growing business has to fund: hiring the first support team, building the brand, preparing the next market. And because the Treyd limit replenishes as Yuv repays, the same facility is ready for the next order — and the one after that. Buy, sell, repay, repeat.
About Yuv
Yuv started with a question every hairdresser understands: why buy tubes of color and bin what you don't use? Its cartridge-based system mixes custom formulas, remembers each client's shade, and cuts waste — stylists pay only for what they use.
Francisco Gimenez has done this before, building at-home brand eSalon and selling it to Henkel. Yuv is the professional-side sequel — and history-making, with the biggest deal in Dragon's Den's 20-year run (£500,000 from Steven Bartlett and Sara Davies) and a waiting list past 2,000. Now scaling into the US. New market. New supply chain. Same flexible way to buy.
The scale of the US market is huge. Nobody else offers this idea that you pay for what you use. People keep signing up to our waiting list saying: whenever you come to the US, we're ready.
Francisco Gimenez, founder, Yuv