nge Theron is at the airport about to catch a budget flight to Malta, where she’s scheduled to visit a packaging factory in search of sustainable options for her new skincare line. “Oh, the glamour,” laughs the founder of FaceGym, one of the fastest-growing and most innovative wellness businesses on the high street.
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In the space of just four years, this can-do disruptor has turned the beauty industry on its head by devising a non-invasive face lift, harnessing age-old techniques for exercising the facial muscles and scaffolding - with a thoroughly modern spin. In fact, FaceGym is more about fitness than beauty, hence why the treatment is described as a workout rather than a facial.
From a pioneering start with a small concession in London’s Selfridges four years ago, Inge, 43, is at the forefront of the new natural wellness wave and about to open her eighth studio (note: not spa or salon) in Notting Hill with plans to roll out more both in the UK and abroad. There are already two studios in New York – one in Saks 5th Avenue, and the other, a flagship in NoHo - with an LA branch due to open in September.
As an entrepreneur, it wasn’t South Africa-born Inge’s first big idea – she’d cut her teeth on creating a board game, called Hollywood Domino, which quickly gained a cult following among A-listers such as Charlize Theron, Penelope Cruz, Demi Moore and Salma Hayek. The game’s success was short-lived, however, and by 2008, burnt-out and disillusioned, she found herself looking for new challenges. Almost by chance, she fell into the role - that of “spa junkie” columnist for the Financial Times How to Spend it – that would lead to her next lightbulb idea.
Over the next six years, she visited more than 50 spas around the world, undertaking endless fitness classes, anti-ageing treatments and detoxes, not to mention attending countless health and nutrition conventions. She also began designing hotel spas on the side, and there was little she didn’t know about the industry, constantly logging new techniques and trends. But it wasn’t until she was left house-bound for three months after a series of disastrous cosmetic surgery procedures, that she finally felt compelled to act – and develop her own unique concept.
Here, London-based Inge, who has two daughters, Tesse, four, and Assisi, two, by her Italian financier fiancé, explains what it takes to be a female entrepreneur and how a quest to be both successful and healthy led to her latest lightbulb venture.
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