A mother-of-three who started a multimillion-pound beauty company from her living room and made £20,000 within six minutes of launching DIY salon-quality eyelash extensions.
With just £200 in the bank when she started, she said her mission is helping women feel “beautiful and confident” in their own homes.
Lucy Pearce, 32, the CEO of Amor Lashes – who lives in Bristol, left school aged 16 and subsequently started working for her father, managing his office and business accounts.
She launched some smaller businesses of her own as she loves being creative, although they were not profitable, personalising clothing and making picture frames and notebooks, all while raising her children – Billy, 11, Tommy, nine, and Elsie, five – who were “toddling around (her) feet” at the time.
Lucy had a business partnership, which focused on selling wholesale clothing and had an accessory line of eyelash extensions, but she then decided to leave and go solo in 2020.
She wanted to purely concentrate on selling eyelash extensions, but since she had “no money”, she had to borrow £1,000 from her partner to launch Amor Lashes.
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She started off buying and selling strip eyelash extensions in her living room in 2020, making her own stickers, labels, and tissue paper, and was fearful her new business venture would be “a flop” – but it “blew up” one day in 2021 when she expanded her products to include DIY eyelash extensions.
“I did some videos on myself at home and my cousin did a couple, putting them on. They went viral and we had 10 million views on videos online,” she told PA Real Life.
“I thought I’d do this launch at 8pm and maybe a few people will buy them, and I literally sat there in tears because within six minutes we’d made £20,000.
“I only had £200 in the bank that day.”
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Since then, the business has gone from strength-to-strength, introducing eyelash extensions vending machines, having products stocked in Sephora UK, and turning over around £3.5 million.
I literally just kept reinvesting and reinvesting every time we had a sell-out. Every penny would go back into more stock until we got to a stable level.”
Although Lucy has struggled with burnout and anxiety, and balancing work with being a mother, she wants to encourage others to “fight through the challenges and never give up”.
“Being a mum at home, you can feel trapped, that you don’t have your own identity, you don’t have time for yourself, and I think that’s the key for me – to make women feel beautiful in their own way and confident in their own home. They don’t have to spend money to go into a salon,” Lucy explained.
“I feel like why this business has worked so well is because the team and I, we are the customers, we are the girls that know how other women out there want to look and feel.
“That’s why we’re so passionate about it because we’re a group of girls doing it for groups of girls just like us.”
Lucy said she thought she would work for her father “forever” after leaving school, describing him as her “inspiration”.
Watching his determination to succeed and improve his businesses, she knew she wanted to launch her own company one day, but she never thought this dream would become a reality.
After leaving a business partnership “with no money” in 2020, Lucy decided to go solo and she set up Amor Lashes from her living room after borrowing £1,000 from her partner.
In order to keep costs down, she created her own logo and made stickers and tissue paper at home, and then started going about forming a community on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Lucy wanted to create “an experience” for her customers, not just “a product in a box”, but given costs for stock and packaging were so high, she nearly gave up on her dream.
“I didn’t even have enough money to buy big stock in, let alone all the other bits that I wanted,” she said.
“The market started to get really saturated, eyelashes were being sold everywhere, so I did nearly give up many times.”
Lucy reinvested every penny she made from selling strip lashes back into purchasing new stock, but she soon discovered DIY eyelash extensions were becoming popular in the US.
She wanted to bring this to the UK, and after ordering stock in, she and her cousin posted some tutorials online in 2021, which went “viral” with 10 million views.
With just £200 in her bank account and £500 worth of stock, she then launched the DIY lash products online and made £20,000 within six minutes – which she said was “so surreal”.
“I literally just kept reinvesting and reinvesting every time we had a sell-out. Every penny would go back into more stock until we got to a stable level,” she said.
“That’s when it just took over the house.
“I had no living room for about six months, we literally would have to sit in the kitchen or in our rooms at night because it was full of lash products.”
She added: “My life had just gone from being a mum and doing little bits in my little office and working for my dad, to suddenly my life was out of control.”
Lucy’s father provided a storage container to house stock in January 2022, but this soon became full to the brim, and she therefore purchased a unit in Bristol in September 2022.
She now has a second unit, which is used as a warehouse.
Lucy loves being busy and said the business’s success has been “amazing”, but she has struggled with burnout and anxiety – and it has only “hit” her recently.
“I’m in here every single day, I haven’t been abroad for 10 years, I hardly have holidays – I might have a weekend with my kids – but this is literally my life,” Lucy said.
“Initially, I couldn’t find time for my friends and family, I could hardly text my friends back because I was just so consumed with business.
“It’s been amazing, everything that’s happened, but it does take its toll, and I have had to take that step to say, ‘My children will only be young once’.”
Amor Lashes turned over £1 million within one year of launching the DIY lash products and is now making around £3.5 million, which Lucy said is “crazy”.
She even arrived at work recently to discover they had made more than 600 sales before lunchtime.
While it has been challenging, Lucy wants to keep learning and progressing as she wants to be “the best in the DIY lash industry”, and she hopes to break into the retail sector.
Most importantly, however, she hopes she can continue making her customers feel confident in their own skin.
“For me, it’s not about the turnover,” she said.
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“I love the customer reviews and people tell us, ‘Your lashes have changed my life’. That is just the most amazing part of business.
“Some people will think, ‘Oh, it’s just eyelashes’, but it’s not just eyelashes to a lot of people.”
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