The 10 year journey behind The Beauty Tech Group’s IPO

Emotions were running high on October 3 2025, when The Beauty Tech Group made its debut on the London Stock Exchange. Founder Laurence Newman stood on the balcony with his team to open the exchange amid the customary fanfare.

Newman looked a little nervous. There have been very few IPOs of consumer-facing businesses in recent years, and the process takes huge dedication and hard work, he pointed out in his short speech. He too was feeling emotional.

“We are proud people from Manchester,” he told the gathering. “We are resilient, strong people. The North West is an amazing part of the country and I’m delighted that this business’s home is in Manchester.”

The Beauty Tech Group debuted with a market capitalisation of just over £300m, generating more than £100m to invest in continued global scaling. For Newman, it marked not just a financial milestone, but the culmination of more than a decade of patient, and often difficult, growth.

The group has three main brands: CurrentBody Skin produces a range of LED face masks and radio-frequency devices for skincare; ZIIP Beauty offers app-connected handheld tools designed to address concerns such as acne; and Tria Laser focuses on laser-based devices for hair removal and anti-ageing, many resembling compact hair dryers.

According to banking and advisory firm Berenberg, the global at-home beauty device (AHBD) market is now worth between £9bn and £12bn. The Beauty Tech Group (TBTG) has positioned itself firmly within that growth.

Today, 90 per cent of TBTG’s revenues come through direct-to-consumer online channels, and around 80 per cent originate outside the UK and Ireland. The business has six warehouses globally and offices in Cheshire, California and Shanghai.

It is this global expansion that has generated excitement over future prospects. TBTG specialises in an emerging category that blends consumer technology with aesthetic treatments traditionally confined to clinics. While the company grew out of Manchester, it is now well-positioned to compete on a global stage, the result of years of steady scaling rather than overnight success.

TBTG’s headquarters are south of the city at Alderley Park in Cheshire, a science campus home to around 250 tech companies. Newman grew up in the area.

Having studied business at university with the intention of starting his own company, he gravitated towards health and well-being. His early ventures were modest: selling products such as creatine, protein powders and natural health products at car boot sales.

He moved into the aesthetics industry, working with clinics and supplying equipment. Along the way, one piece of advice from his consultant vascular surgeon father stayed with him: “If you can’t make somebody better, don’t make them any worse.”

That principle remains central to TBTG. As the company’s IPO documents underline, its performance depends on the quality and safety of its at-home devices. This is one reason Newman brought product design in-house in 2019 and works closely with universities and third parties on safety testing.

“Overnight successes are never overnight successes,” says Newman. “They are always 10 years or more.”

His own breakthrough came in an unlikely place: on cruise ships. There, he found a captive market and an ideal testing ground. Onboard spas offered facials and massages, but little in the way of after-sales.

Newman sensed a gap. Passengers were interested in aesthetic treatments but there was no way to continue them once they returned home. He spent a year visiting exhibitions, conferences and trade shows focused on medical devices.

Eventually, he found a manufacturer producing electrical muscle stimulators for athletes. Newman asked whether the technology could be adapted into a personal device for consumers. It could – and on cruise ships, he discovered he could sell it for around $500. This was his “eureka moment”, he says.

Customers could mimic the onboard treatment once they returned home. That insight led to the founding of CurrentBody in Manchester in 2009 alongside chief technology officer Andrew Showman, beginning Newman’s mission to develop the home-use beauty technology market.

LED face masks are TBTG’s best-known product, featured in millions of social media posts in part thanks to before-and-after photos and paid influencer campaigns. High-profile figures such as Kim Kardashian have worn the masks, but one of the brand’s most valuable moments came by chance. A CurrentBody mask appeared in the opening shots of the Netflix hit Emily in Paris.

From the outset, Newman structured the business around four core technologies: radio frequency, microcurrent, LED and laser/IPL (intense pulsed light). These, he notes, have underpinned aesthetic clinics since the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote them on a whiteboard as four pillars – a niche the business could own.

The early challenge was sourcing products globally for each category and selling them to a market that was, and remains, almost entirely female. Crucially, sales were made almost wholly direct-to-consumer online.

“I’ve seen companies fail in home beauty tech by putting their products into traditional brick-and-mortar retail before there is any awareness out there,” he says. “It’s almost a vanity project to put it into Selfridges, Saks or Lafayette. But there’s no point putting your product on the shelf if no one is going to pick it up.”

In an emerging market, education matters more than placement. Online channels allow TBTG to explain the product as part of the shopping experience. In the early days of scaling the business, the team worked from Newman’s home, then from a mezzanine office in a Manchester warehouse.

Looking back, Newman admits the start-up phase still makes his stomach churn because it was so stressful. It was hard to attract the talent he needed to scale the business, particularly in Manchester at a time when few people understood or cared about the sector. Things improved once revenues reached £5m, making the business more credible. But there were still significant challenges, particularly among investors.

Newman encountered a roadblock, one often faced by female founders – and being a man didn’t help. Many investors were middle-aged men who neither understood nor related to the beauty industry.

They were unfamiliar with the products and couldn’t grasp the opportunity. Some dismissed beauty tech as merely a passing fad, prioritising businesses with proven profitability and convincing EBITDA numbers, rather than ones with growth potential.

But Newman disagreed. He believed the data showed demand was building – a belief he still holds. Even today, he doesn’t fear or resent competitors. Instead, he sees them as validation of a growing market and believes his early start means he has the knowledge, contacts and scale to beat competitors on price.

When investment capital finally arrived, Newman had a clear strategy for what to do with it at each stage. The first major funding was in 2018 from NVM (a venture capital trust fund now owned by Mercia); around £5m before fees. BGF came on board the following year.

The capital was transformational. It enabled international expansion and shifted the business from being 90 per cent UK-focused to just 20 per cent. It also allowed Newman to transition from reselling third-party products to developing proprietary technology.

Product design happens in-house, while manufacturing spans China, India and the US. The result is a defensible “moat” around the business, which is difficult for competitors to replicate.

“It’s all about the supply chain and scaling the manufacturing,” explains Newman. That scale is hard-won. “Imagine making half a million LED masks, each with 236 or more bulbs in them,” says Newman. “Imagine the accuracy you need.”

Add to that complex regulatory issues across multiple territories, overseen by a dedicated internal team. Over the years, Newman has drawn on bank loans, private equity funding, high-net-worth individuals and public markets to fund growth, and has learnt consistent lessons along the way.

One is the importance of resetting the board at each stage. Early on, he brought in a chairman with FTSE250 experience, helping to move the business away from a lifestyle operation towards formal governance and reporting structures.

Another lesson was to run the business independently of the fundraising process. Newman was advised to continue operating as though capital might not arrive, ensuring resilience if deals fell through.

Perhaps most counterintuitively, Newman cautions founders against over-relying on external investor expertise. “It’s very rare for someone to come in and understand the business better than you do,” he points out. Strategy, he believes, must remain firmly in the hands of founders and CEOs, even as fresh capital changes the outlook.

Despite the scrutiny that comes with being a public company, Newman remains deeply involved in the operational detail. Newman is clear that the IPO process is far more demanding than many founders anticipate, particularly in terms of time. “It’s an incredibly arduous process,” he says.

A significant portion of that burden comes from the roadshow, when senior leadership travels extensively to pitch the company’s story to institutional investors. For Newman, this meant learning to articulate not just what the business does today, but how it intends to grow globally over the next decade.

The impact of the IPO process extends well beyond the CEO. For Newman, it quickly became clear that the finance function would be under enormous pressure. Chief financial officer Sam Glynn was required to balance the day-to-day running of the business with the demands of due diligence, investor meetings and regulatory requirements.

Knowing what lay ahead, Newman and Glynn strengthened the finance team around six months before the formal IPO process began. They recruited additional talent with experience of working inside listed companies, people who understood the cadence and discipline of public-market reporting.

“Making sure your finance team is fit for purpose is probably one of the most important pieces of advice I can offer,” reflects Newman. That need does not disappear after listing. Regular reporting, market updates and analyst expectations become part of the rhythm of the business. The IPO is not an endpoint but the beginning of a new operational phase.

Alongside the finance team, Newman also recalibrated the board once more in preparation for public life. Experience that had served the business well during its private scaling phase was no longer sufficient on its own. Governance, accountability and public-market credibility took on greater importance.

He sought directors who understood the responsibilities of a listed company and could help guide the business through its next stage of growth. He also leaned heavily on advisers who had been through the IPO process before.

If Newman assumed that ringing the opening bell would be a relief, he quickly discovered otherwise. Since listing, the business of explaining the company – and defending its strategy – has continued at pace.

Analyst briefings, investor meetings and conversations with the market are now a regular feature of his working life. That story must be consistent, credible and repeatable. Investors want reassurance not only that the business understands its market, but that it can execute at scale, manage regulatory complexity and maintain product quality across multiple territories.

For Newman, this constant engagement is another extension of a skill honed since the early days of the business: listening to an audience and adjusting the message accordingly.

Since going public, Newman has found himself increasingly approached by other founders looking for advice. He is frank in his assessment.

“Fundamentally, there are parts of an IPO that are unavoidable and incredibly costly, and for a lot of businesses it’s a prohibitive process,” he says. “The costs alone are prohibitive.”

If the UK wants to encourage more companies to list, he believes the process needs to be made easier and more accessible. But CEOs and founders must also shoulder part of the responsibility. They need to have a “solid business” that can run without them, because during an IPO the attention of the senior leadership is elsewhere. If it can’t, that’s a real risk.

Having navigated multiple forms of funding, Newman believes the value lies as much in the experience as in the capital itself. Over the years, he has raised bank debt, private equity, funding from high-net-worth individuals and now public-market capital. Each one comes with its own trade-offs.

“[Our story] ticks all the boxes of the difficulties and challenges around raising capital. And I’ve gone through all the different processes, which is probably quite rare. I can give the good, bad and ugly of each one of them. But I always say each business is different.”