Kate Prince: How Ancient + Brave went from kitchen table to £54m turnover

Kate Prince launched her wellness brand in 2018 with £70,000, four products and a trade show stand she had to run on her own. “I remember I had to unload the whole thing. I had to ask the girl on the stand next door to cover me if I went to the loo,” she says. “It was very much just me in the very beginning.”

Today, Ancient + Brave has been listed on the UK’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2027 by the FT and The Sunday Times 100 2026. Its products are stocked in Selfridges and Harrods and it turned over £54m last year (but Prince has her sights set on £100m of sales by 2028).

Speaking to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast, Prince reflects on the year her business grew tenfold without an HR team, why she now hires for the company she wants to become and how she has built a purpose-led brand without slowing down. In our interview, you will learn about:

• Why the people who take you to £10m may not take you to £100m
• The single C-suite hire that closed a risky gap between operations and finance
• Why 84 per cent of direct-to-consumer sales come through subscriptions
• The mantras Prince uses to keep a scale-up thinking like a start-up

From the City to the kitchen table

Prince began her career as a trainee at a top-10 City law firm before moving in-house at Endemol during the early days of reality TV. She credits those years with giving her the commercial backbone she still relies on.

“I’m not afraid of contracts, I’m not afraid of negotiation, I’m not afraid of debate and I’m not afraid to lean into difficult conversations,” she says.

Her first proper venture was Prince & Sons Tea, a British tea brand she ran with her husband. It quickly became clear their temperaments differed. “My husband is very laid-back and quite horizontal as a human being, which is brilliant for me,” she says. “He was a bit like, ‘Oh, you need to chill out.’ And I was like, ‘Well, then what I really need to do is start my own business.’”

The idea for Ancient + Brave came while she was taking a wellness course and sourcing ingredients from the US that were not available in the UK. Design mattered from day one. “It became very important to me that you wouldn’t put it in a cupboard, that it would look like a rockstar in its own right and you’d have it in your kitchen,” she says. The packaging has not changed since launch.

The brilliant and awful year for Ancient + Brave

Prince bootstrapped the business and paid herself nothing in the early years. Around two years in, with turnover at roughly £250,000, she brought in high-net-worth investors through a corporate finance boutique. Private equity house Piper followed in 2023.

That same year, sales jumped by 700 per cent to £10m and the team grew from 10 to around 40. “We had this great growth, which was brilliant and kind of awful all in the same year, because growth can do that to you,” she says. “We had no HR, we had no in-house finance, we barely had a bookkeeper, and I didn’t know what a monthly board report was.”

Decisions were made on instinct. “It was all slightly flying by the seat of our pants and a lot of gut feel: ‘Do we have money in the bank? Great, let’s go and buy more stock and keep going.’”

How Ancient + Brave hired for the business it wanted to become

Rapid growth exposed gaps in the team. “The individuals that take you from £1m to £10m may not be the same ones that take you from £10m to £100m,” Prince says. Among her first 10 hires were a director of nutrition and innovation and a director of science and education, because scientific credibility was something she knew she could not provide herself.

Senior hiring has been harder. Prince admits some past leaders were “absolutely brilliant people, but probably weren’t right for the company in terms of its growth, the pace it was going at, or moving very quickly”.

She now looks for “someone who loves the journey of growth and gets the spirit of the business”, ideally with international experience. And she acts faster when it is not working. “If my gut is shouting after a couple of months, it probably isn’t going to get any better.”

One structural change stands out. Operations and finance were not always talking, which can lead to some “hairy moments”. Her fix was to merge the two into a single chief operations and finance officer role. “That has been one of the best moves we’ve made,” she says.

Processes have had to arrive with scale, though she keeps them out of the creative team. “Too many processes can slow down your pace,” she says. “Your gut takes you a long way, but processes are definitely needed at scale.”

Why Ancient + Brave doesn't do discounts

Ancient + Brave became a B Corp within two years of launch, and its ingredients carry certifications from bodies including the Soil Association and the Vegan Society. Prince insists product quality comes before margin. “We would never cut ingredients or go for a lower quality ingredient to hit a specific price point,” she says.

The model is built on daily ritual. Around 84 per cent of direct-to-consumer sales are subscriptions and the brand refuses to compete on price. “As a brand, we don’t really ever discount,” she says, which means some retailers are simply not the right fit.

She would also welcome tighter regulation in a sector she says can feel “a bit like the Wild West in terms of transparency about ingredients, sourcing, and active levels”.

The business is drawing up a Wellness Charter of 10 principles it hopes competitors will sign. “Nobody who is doing it right fears regulation,” she says. “The only people who fear it are those blatantly ignoring it.”

International expansion came with a reality check. “When I first met private equity, I remember proudly saying, ‘I’m in 23 countries.’ What I really meant was I was in about one store in 23 countries,” she says. Her investors wanted something different. “They want you to prove the model.”

Rather than testing one market, Ancient + Brave launched in Germany, Spain and the US in quick succession. In each, the first hire was a nutritionist, followed by a local marketing lead.

Kate Prince’s four lessons for leaders

Fail fast. “I used to be a perfectionist, but now I focus on keeping moving forward, because standing still is still a choice. If you freeze, your team freezes.”

Keep the start-up mindset. Her mantra is that constraint is the mother of innovation. “You get more creative with a constrained budget, and it brings everyone to the party with more ideas.”

Hire for the next stage, not this one. Bring in leaders with the pace and experience the bigger business will need, and move quickly when the fit is wrong.

Be honest about the sacrifice. Scaling demands grit and constant energy. “There’s no such thing as working for yourself giving you better work-life balance,” she says.

Watch the full conversation with Kate Prince on the Business Leader YouTube channel.