The mindset behind Skin + Me’s rapid rise

For James Mishreki, the founder of skincare brand Skin + Me, building a high-growth business has never been about following a linear path. From selling CDs at school to playing poker professionally, his early experiences shaped a mindset that now underpins how he approaches entrepreneurship.

“The best learning from poker is that you have to make decisions within incomplete information,” he says. “Everything also goes against you all the time and it builds resilience.”

That resilience proved essential when launching Skin + Me in 2020. The idea itself did not come from a long-held plan, but from a combination of personal experience and market insight. Having struggled with acne as a teenager, Mishreki was drawn to a sector that was both highly competitive and deeply flawed.

The numbers are striking. The skincare market is worth around £140bn globally, yet, as Mishreki points out, it suffers from “55 per cent customer dissatisfaction.” That gap between demand and outcomes became the foundation for the business.

Rather than compete on branding or celebrity endorsements, Skin + Me focused on a different approach: personalised, prescription-grade treatments delivered through a subscription model. Crucially, this was not based on assumption, but experimentation.

“We set up this online service and what we learned was that people place a lot of value on the personal touch from a human being,” he explains.

That insight shaped everything that followed. From building an in-house factory to designing bespoke dispensing technology, the company invested heavily upfront to create what Mishreki describes as a “10x improvement on the customer experience.”

It was a bold move. After initially failing to raise funding, the team regrouped, rebuilt their plan and returned to investors with a significantly larger ambition. The result was a stronger foundation and ultimately, faster growth.

“I think some businesses just don’t stand a chance of winning unless you raise,” he says. “First of all, you need to decide, do you want to play to win?”

That clarity of intent runs through Mishreki’s approach. He is explicit that not all ideas are worth pursuing indefinitely. His experience with a later venture, Life Supplies, reinforced the importance of focus.

“I’m better and better at, what are the two to three things that will move the only needles that matter,” he says. “Delete 80 to 90 per cent of what you’re working on.”

This discipline is often overlooked, but it aligns with broader evidence. A 2025 McKinsey report found that organisations that prioritise a small number of high-impact initiatives outperform peers on growth and efficiency, highlighting the cost of spreading resources too thinly.

Another defining feature of Mishreki’s journey is self-awareness. Despite founding Skin + Me, he stepped back from the CEO role, recognising that his strengths lay in building and launching businesses rather than running them at scale.

“It’s so liberating… you don’t have to be good at everything,” he says.

That willingness to adapt extends to how he views failure and rejection. Rather than avoiding setbacks, he actively seeks them out as a source of learning.

“If you force yourself to get rejected and learn to enjoy it, you become unstoppable,” he says.

Underlying all of this is a strong sense of purpose. Mishreki rejects the idea that success should lead to slowing down.

“Would you have said to Ronaldo, ‘you’ve made a lot of money, why don’t you stop?’,” he asks.

For him, building businesses is not a phase, but a long-term pursuit, one driven as much by curiosity and challenge as by outcomes.

The result is a model built not on shortcuts, but on experimentation, focus and continuous iteration and a reminder that growth is rarely accidental, but the product of deliberate choices made over time.