From £10 Million to Starting Over: What Building a Big Brand Really Taught Us

When Elsie Rutterford and her business partner Dominika Minarovic started out, they weren't founders. They were bloggers — back when that word still felt new, before TikTok existed, before anyone had really coined "clean beauty" as a category. They were just two women who could see something coming.

"The wellness space was flying in the US, a couple of years ahead of us," Elsie recalls. "Clean eating, natural ingredients, what's actually in your skincare — we could see it moving towards beauty, and we thought, let's build something that sits right in the middle of that."

That something became BYBI. Launched in 2017, it grew into a globally distributed brand stocked in Sephora, Target, Boots and Holland & Barrett. They raised just under £10 million in VC and private equity, with Unilever Ventures among their investors. By most measures, it was a serious success story.

But success, as most founder mums know, is rarely the whole story.

Building while pregnant. Twice.

The years between launching BYBI and exiting it in 2024 weren't just years of building a brand. They were also years of having children — two each, for both Elsie and Dominika — in the middle of investor rounds, US expansion plans, and a global pandemic that cancelled Elsie's planned move to New York at the last minute.

"There's zero recognition from your cap table for maternity leave, or your postpartum wellbeing, or any of that," she says, matter-of-factly rather than bitterly. "They just want to see a return. The expectation to come back to the business quickly — to keep growing, keep scaling — that pressure was very real."

The era they were building in didn't help. "It was very much grow at all costs. Nobody was talking about profitability. It was spend, spend, grow as fast as you can, and get out." That playbook has since shifted dramatically. But at the time, it shaped everything.

What the exit actually felt like

They did get out — selling in 2024. Elsie was pregnant with her second child when the deal process kicked off. "Literally a week or two after giving birth, we were holding pitch calls."

She's measured about what came next, and careful not to say too much. What she will say is that it wasn't what they'd hoped, and that they came away from the process with a very clear sense of what they didn't want to repeat. "We just want to build quietly, sustainably, enjoyably. We don't want to navigate the political landscape of investor relations for another decade. We want to actually have fun during the process."

Watching the brand change hands again — to owners they've had no involvement with — is its own kind of strange. "I directed that photo shoot. We formulated that product. It's weird to see."

The pivot to what actually works for them

Post-exit, Elsie and Dominika launched DE London, a growth consultancy for early-stage consumer brands — founders at sub-million revenue trying to reach that first million mark. "It's been really enjoyable. It's refreshing to get your head out of your own business after being so deep in one for so long."

They also started Two Tired Mums, a TikTok and Instagram channel they'd originally planned as a founder-focused space. "The content we thought would land was about our founder journey. But what actually flew was the stuff about flexibility, the motherhood penalty, the mental load."

They weren't surprised, exactly. They'd lived it. "Somebody's career has to flex," Elsie says simply. "That's just the reality for most families. We've built our lives now so that we have the flexibility we didn't have at BYBI. It was very intentional, and it came directly from having children and needing things to be different."

And then there's rayro

They swore they'd never do a consumer brand again. And then they did.

rayro launched about a month ago — a children's personal care brand built around a simple idea: take the daily moments kids push back on (moisturising, bedtime routines, being ill) and make them genuinely enjoyable. Products that look like toys. Textures kids actually want to use. Safe, natural formulations that do what they say.

"It's about replacing the boring, sticky, adult-looking stuff with something a child wants to pick up themselves," says Elsie. "If you can turn a moment of tension into a moment of fun, that's the whole thing."

The current range — a moisturiser, a magnesium sleep balm, and a eucalyptus chest rub, all in stick format — is DTC for now, with TikTok Shop launching imminently. A sun care range is planned for spring. They're building it sustainably, thinking carefully about profitability from day one, and deliberately not sprinting.

"We've got a lot of scope in terms of where we can go with new products and categories. So we're here for the next few years. This feels like the plan."

After everything, maybe that's the point. Not the exit. Not the cap table. Just building something good, on your own terms, in a way that actually fits your life.