I’m 23 and started a £3.5million side hustle from my parent’s house – now I make £300K per month and here’s my top tips

MANY of us will often think about businesses we want to start - but there’s very few people who actually put those plans into fruition.

But things all changed for one young woman, 23-year-old Lucie Macleod, from Pembrokeshire, Wales, when she came up with an idea for a beauty brand.

At the age of just 20-years-old, in October 2020, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the savvy University student launched her brand, .

What began as a side hustle in her parent’s house, which was started with just £600, money she had made from her job at an ice cream shop, quickly snowballed into a viral phenomenon on TikTok. 

Lucie told Fabulous: “I used my wages from working in an ice cream shop. 

“I spent about 10 hours a day packing. I was up every night until 2am. It was very stressful, and obviously with my degree it was very, very hard. 

“Now, we are selling tens of thousands of units every month and make about £300,000 a month.

“We’re projecting a £3.5million turnover in the next year.”

If you don’t use TikTok and haven’t ever heard of Hair Syrup, Lucie explained: “Hair Syrup is a digital brand and we sell a small range of pre-wash oil treatments.

“They're really great for loads of different scalp and hair concerns, so good for things like hair growth, they can really help with hair loss, if you've got an itchy, flaky scalp, if you've got breakage, that kind of thing - there’s something for everyone. 

“They're all 100% natural and are essentially just natural raw oils - essential oils, nut oils, seed oils, argan oil, papaya seeds, pomegranate seeds, avocado, apricot, peach, rosemary, thyme, loads of natural cold pressed oils and extracts.

“And what you find a lot with these kinds of natural products is that they are often very overpriced and don’t cater to the mass market. 

“So the idea was to take these simple, yet highly effective products and to make them more mainstream.”

Lucie revealed that she was just 20-years-old when she launched the brand, but actually never intended to sell her homemade products.

She added: “I was actually 20 and in uni when I first started the business. Basically, I used very similar products on my own hair for a few years, from 2018, because my hair used to be seriously dry and damaged, and I ruined it with heat and bleach. 

“So I made my own home-made syrups and used them on my hair, with no intention of selling them. 

“Then I posted a video about them in 2020 on my TikTok page, which had about three followers and in this video, I was talking about the oil and giving people the formula details and the full recipe and saying, ‘oh guys, you need to try these out, this is what they did to my hair, they’re amazing’ and the video went viral. 

“And despite the fact that I’d given the formulas out, I was still bombarded with requests from people saying, ‘please can you post me a bottle, I'd love to try some, I’ll give you 30 quid.’

“In the beginning, I didn't do that, because I thought it was completely wacky, but after a few months I was still getting a lot of comments and messages from people, with many saying to me that I should really consider selling this stuff. 

“Then about four months later, when I was on summer holiday from uni, I decided, well, why not? 

“I wasn’t working at the time because of COVID and I just thought it'd be a nice little side hustle whilst I was doing my second year in uni.”

What started from a small TikTok clip soon spiralled and the business has been growing ever since.

Lucie continued: “So I got all the products certified and ready for sale and I genuinely thought it would be a tiny little side business that I could do whilst I was studying and that was it.

“I thought ‘this would be fun to do from home’ and because of COVID I couldn't get a normal job, and then within about three months, it had just gone completely crazy.

It was literally just me packing and sending everything out. When it was busy, every week was a 90 hour week.

“Within six months it was going really nuts - literally just from TikTok. It was a real from the ground-up marketing strategy, which has been really, really effective and helped build a lot of brand credibility.

“The sales started coming in really quick and in the first month, I'd hit 100 sales, which is a lot considering it was something I was doing out of a conservatory.

“It was literally just me packing and sending everything out. When it was busy, every week was a 90 hour week.

“I spent about 10 hours a day packing, I was up every night until 2am. I nearly had a breakdown - it was very stressful, and obviously with my degree it was very, very hard. 

“The orders quickly snowballed into 30-40 orders a day which then snowballed and went up every single day - with 70 orders a day, so then we had to do restocks, because we couldn't keep the shop open all the time because we couldn't keep up with the demand. 

“We started to do restocks once every week so we'd make the allocated stock and then do one restock a week, where we’d get 500 orders.”

Since January we’ve been averaging between £250-300,000 a month. 

Now Hair Syrup has expanded from just Lucie in her parent’s conversatory to 16 members of staff.

She shared: “There's 16 of us at Hair Syrup now and I have two offices and a warehouse in Pembrokeshire.

“Now, we are selling tens of thousands of units every month and make about £300,000 a month.

“Since January we’ve been averaging between £250-300,000 a month. 

“From April until January, we turned over £1 million.

“Our best month of sales was £350,000 in December 2022.

“We’re projecting a £3.5million turnover in the next year.

“Grows-Mary and Rapunzel, some days, we'll sell £30,000 worth of just those.”

Thanks to the success of her business, not only does Lucie now own her own home, but she also splashed out on a Tesla and has a lot of fancy holidays planned.

She explained: “I bought a Tesla. I went to Greece last summer, and hopefully I’m going on a safari this year, which I’ve wanted to do forever, but they're obviously really expensive and were out of budget. 

“Hopefully I’ll be spending a month in Italy this summer too which would be really nice.”

For those looking to start their own business, Lucie has shared her top tips and advice.

She advised: “I would say - go for it and don’t listen if anyone's trying to put doubt in your mind or trying to discourage you. I would definitely say to ignore that and go for it. 

“I would definitely say social media is your best friend when you're trying to start something like that out, because you've literally got the whole world at the click of the fingers.

“You definitely need resilience and you can’t have a fear of failure or things going wrong.

“You also can't be scared of rejection, because you get so much of that when you're doing this.

“Not everyone's gonna like what you do, not everyone's gonna like your brand, not everyone is gonna like your products, so it's really important, as hard as it is, to try and be objective about it.

“You need to be resilient, you need to be hard skinned. You need to be able to take criticism, you need to be able to not take things too personally. 

“And you also need to be a hard worker, you've got to be passionate about what you're doing. 

“You've got to be willing to put in late nights. I've put in two and a half years of gruelling, unrelenting, late nights.

I had loads of people doubting me when I launched. There were a lot of people who weren’t overly supportive of the idea and didn’t believe in me. 

But this won’t be the last you’ve heard about Hair Syrup, as the brand has big plans for 2023.

Lucie revealed: “We have a lot of interest from very, very big retailers, so watch this space. We've got six new retailers starting, hopefully in the next six months. 

“We’re with Beauty Bay and Asos, and soon there will be many others online.

“We've been lucky enough that we've had really consistent growth, the growth has actually been the hardest part of it because it's been so rapid. 

“Whenever we speak to financial advisors or accountants, they nearly fall off their chair when they look at the growth graph. 

“One accountant said to us that this would take a normal business 15 years to scale like this, and we’ve done it in two. 

“The growth is astronomical. So if anything, the growth has actually been quite hard to deal with, but luckily, touch wood, no slow months.

“I had loads of people doubting me when I launched. There were a lot of people who weren’t overly supportive of the idea and didn’t believe in me. 

“They weren’t sold on the idea and thought it wouldn’t take off, so it’s nice to prove them wrong.”