'Acne was debilitating for me so I set up a £40m business to help others'
The stories you don't know about some of the world's best – and little-known – brands
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Feature writer
Sun 4 January 2026 at 1:00 am GMT-5
6 min read
James Mishreki suffered from acne as a teenager growing up in Northumberland. A debilitating period which dented his confidence, he was nicknamed ‘pizza face’ for a year as he went through NHS treatments. It then returned in his 20s and led to another round of medications.
When it came to the entrepreneur co-founding dermatology service Skin + Me in 2018, Mishreki “knew how badly people wanted to get rid of acne”. In four years, the British firm, which provides skin treatment on prescription-grade subscriptions, accrued near £40m revenues since launch in 2020.
“I became fascinated in the skincare industry, this £140bn industry with 55% customer dissatisfaction,” he says. “I knew what it was like to go through the acne journey and it’s not like you can talk to your dermatologist on a regular basis.”
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We first talk through Mishreki’s early career, which comprised two years of playing poker professionally after completing his marketing management studies at Northumbria University in 2008.
Having tinkered with a few web-based startups, co-founding retail intelligence outfit Competitive Monitor led to him quitting poker full-time to join the booming e-commerce sector.
An idea was forged on scraping websites which could index and package to customers including John Lewis, which would use its information software to keep tabs on rivals’ pricing.
For a long period Mishreki paid himself £500 per month, but as one of the first movers the company didn’t double down on being enterprise first or raising private equity. “We ended up competing with bedroom operators in Russia and being undercut on price,” he admits.
After successfully exiting in 2018, Mishreki worked with co-founder Philip Wilkinson in setting up a personalised skincare recommendation service called Mr & Mrs Oliver, primarily to test what consumers valued and wanted.
Mishreki ventured to Space NK and Debenhams where he would chat to skincare advisors and ask if they wanted to earn extra money working on his startup.
Consumers were sent a treatment box for their skin goals and the founders learned that people placed high value on having credible specialists reviewing consultations and making recommendations.
Mishreki admits the business model was “flawed”. Shipping third party skincare products, consumers would then find cheaper brands elsewhere. However, the founders’ goal to build a personalised regime had been born, which proved a complex operation to set up.
Skin + Me had to build a regulatory-approved pharmacy, set up personalisation technology for prescriptions and create a brand “people loved and trusted”. Meanwhile, the founders set about seeking skilled consultants by sending over 200 handwritten letters to a third of the UK’s dermatologists.
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Mishreki also has a unique take on what he refers to as ‘rejection training’ as he sought to acquire investment.
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“Rejection is a good thing when it comes to being an entrepreneur,” he says. “The sooner you get a lot of rejections under your belt the sooner you stop caring and ironically the more you get, the less it happens."
After an exhausting pursuit knocking on investor doors, the founders changed tact after originally looking for £50,000 investment. They now looked to raise meaningful capital to build to scale from the get go and they soon acquired £8m seed investment.
“Everything goes wrong all the time. If I expect a no, it’s an opportunity to learn and get better. It was a bonus if I got a ‘yes’.
“The market doesn't care about your feelings. It has been highly stressful building the company but I am super proud. The UK population is much better off having access to this service.”
London-based Skin + Me went to market with 20 staff. There are now over 150 employees, with an office in Paddington and an operations team at a spacious factory in Acton. The business has reportedly been valued at £160m.
“I feel we have materially levelled up the expectations when it comes to personalisation,” stresses Mishreki.
“Beforehand, at best it means a quiz on a website and product recommendation. In our care we are literally making the ingredient and ripping up the green piece of paper [traditional prescription] and making a custom-made bottle and using a laser to etch the prescription bottle every time. We always challenged ourselves on how to make it a dramatically better customer experience.”
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Hailed as one of the UK’s fastest growing consumer health brands, Mishreki has moved from CEO to chairman and continues as Skin + Me’s main shareholder. He has since turned his attention to another startup, Life Supplies, a refillable oral care brand a few years ago which has quickly turned multimillion pound revenues.
“Either you stick at entrepreneurship and you expect that things will go wrong for many more years or you can hang your boots up. I chose the former,” he says.
Behind the brand: James Mishreki on…
Leadership
Everything boils down to the bar you set on day zero. It is so important to get those key early hires right and to delay the launch of your business to get those people right.
We’ve now set the bar for expectations and personalisation when it comes to comparing what you get at a pharmacy and the lack of interaction you get through the NHS, as they just don’t have the capacity.
Startup mentality
You have to work seven days a week building a startup and that's what I did. There is so much to get done. If you are working 9-5 five days a week, you will probably run out of your money or let a competitor beat you.
What keeps you awake at night?
Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO, wrote Only the Paranoid Survive which is all about a company which didn’t think it would ever lose top spot. But it was under threat at one point and then pivoted the whole business. The message is always be paranoid and I am always thinking what we can do to be even better to improve customer experience.
The threat of AI
What people really value is talking to a human being. We use AI to use the business more efficiently but the thought of it replacing what people really value feels like a stretch too far.
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