A woman has revealed how she turned a £530 loan from my nana into a £10,000 an hour business with an idea people laughed at.
Chloe Walsh started her own Coco Cosmetics by Chloe beauty business back in December 2018 but faced nasty comments when she first started posting videos on TikTok. However the 25-year-old, who recently rebranded the company to Clomaná, is having the last laugh after turning over £5 million in sales in the past 12 months.
Her incredible success is in no small part to being ahead of the curve on social media. Clomaná has become famous for Chloe’s signature ‘marshmallow’ make-up sponge which has been a big hit in the beauty world.
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The former make-up artist, from Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, developed the sponge after being a long-term eczema sufferer, and needing a gentler way to apply foundation. Hover her success has not come without its struggles, not least when a trademark dispute forced her hand in changing the name of the successful brand she had built.
But now, as Clomaná, she has high hopes of doubling turnover yet again in the year ahead. Chloe told the M.E.N: “It all started back in December 2018, when my nana gave me £530 to start my beauty business which was literally with 100 pairs of fake eyelashes.
“I was a make-up artist at the time, and it seemed an easy thing to start with. That ticked along for around two years until I started going on TikTok.
“Everyone said it was cringey, I’m from a small town so everyone watches what everyone does. I’d make videos of me packing orders and little videos of days in my life.
“I got laughed at, but then one video went viral – and everything went crazy from there. It was a video of me packing an order and there was a sound of a woman saying ‘just support small businesses.’
“It really seemed to resonate with people. That was in 2020 and from then, it just became really supportive on TikTok. It was wild to have so many strangers so invested in supporting my little company, and that’s when I got a real taste of thinking, ok this is a real business now, not just a side hustle.”
At the time, she was still doing her own business alongside weekend work as a make-up artist, and a ‘regular’ job cleaning hot tubs for £10 an hour.
It was a couple of months after her viral video that she introduced her marshmallow sponge to buyers on TikTok. And by her own admission, at that point, “it went wild”.
She says: “I always wanted to make a really good make-up sponge, because as someone with eczema I have always struggled with the look of my skin. If you imagine a brush swirling around on dry skin it was not great.
“With traditional make-up sponges, there was nothing really special about them as such. But I realised there was a gap in the market for a make-up sponge that was super delicate on the skin, feels like a marshmallow and genuinely makes your make-up glide on.
“We went through so many samples of different sponges and materials, and I always remember I got to this one material that I was obsessed with, but the factory said it was really hard to make that one. But I really, really wanted that one! The softness was unmatched and my skin looked incredible using it, so we had to find a way to make it work and ultimately the factory had a mess around and we did it.”
Taking to Tik Tok to show off the new marshmallow sponge, the reaction was almost instant.
Chloe recalls: “When I showed the difference it made on my skin on TikTok people loved it, they liked the unique shape of it as well. It got people’s attention.
“We started selling out in minutes, our website would crash at every relaunch, because of the amount of people trying to buy them.”
Chloe reinvested everything she made on products sold back into the company and is proud that she’s never taken any loans or outside investments since that very first £530 from her supportive nana Sylvia. By 2021, the marshmallow sponges were selling so quickly she recalls making “£10,000 an hour” and selling out after every restock.
She says: “I reinvested everything I could, I never had loans or outside investments, it was all just put back into the company – I didn’t even pay myself for a while. In the early days I would sleep on the floor of the salon I used to pack orders, just so I could get a few hours rest before continuing packing orders.”
Chloe laughs as she recalls how her local post office ‘hated her’ when she’d come in with 20 sacks or more of products that she’d be shipping out in those early days. Now, she has two warehouses to cope with the demand.
In 2022 the business recorded a turnover of £2.4 million, and in 2023 that was up to £5 million. Despite the success, Chloe has also had to face tricky times too as a business owner after a trademark dispute.
She says: “As Coco Cosmetics by Chloe, we ran into some trademark issues in December 2022, which is very common in business. But it was really upsetting when I first found out what was going on but looking back now I’m glad it happened.
“It was a blessing in disguise for me really, as rebranding was something I had wanted to do for a while but I was scared to do so. It went on for about a year and we had to get solicitors involved. It was very costly for us but it’s one of those things.”
Choosing the new name was also tricky as she had first thought to change it to ‘Clo’ which is her nickname – but she discovered that was also trademarked. So she came up with ‘Clomaná’ stitching together her nickname with maná, a word that means ‘positive energy’.
In trademark quirky style, Chloe decided to announce the rebrand by staging an extraordinary “wake” party for the Coco brand, and to introduce Clomaná to the world. She took over Manchester’s Victoria Warehouse and guests including Katie Price saw out the old name and welcomed in the new.
Although Chloe shares that some followers on social media got the wrong end of the stick when they saw “RIP” and thought she had died, rather than the brand.
Chloe says: “I’m very creative, so I decided to do it as a ‘funeral’ for the old name. But I didn’t tell anyone what was happening, I just wanted everyone to turn up to this party.
“It was also the fifth birthday of the brand so everyone thought they were coming for that but I asked everyone to be dressed in black. Go PR did the event and it was amazing, I had to walk down the aisle and I did a little speech, it was fun, it was a way to try and announce the news that we were having to change. But then there was a tiktok that went viral and people thought I had died – but I was literally at the event!”
Chloe left school after her GCSEs and instead of sixth form studied beauty therapy at college, where she developed a love for science. She has since undertaken an Open University course on advanced pathophysiology and disease and had always thought of going into medicine before her beauty business ‘blew up’.
Clomaná is already on Sephora, but TikTok still remains the biggest marketplace, accounting for “60 – 70 per cent of sales” in the past year, she says.
Chloe says: “Tik Tok is genuinely life changing for a lot of business owners. But I do genuinely believe it was all about timing for me.
“I started it when it was still seen as cringe. Businesses will have hype products, but with the marshmallow sponge I thought it would be a hype and forgotten about – but the hype is still there, we’re still selling out really quick, our new duo products we sold out in ten minutes, it’s wild.
“People get obsessed with them. I know it sounds biased, but coming from other make-up artists, once you genuinely try it, nothing is as soft as that sponge and gives you the same results.”
Now, Chloe is focusing on the brand hitting the higher end market after ‘a lot of interest from bigger retailers’ and expanding the range, which also includes the CMFRT pyjama brand.
She says: “We’ve doubled turnover every year, and we’re hoping for a possible double again because of all the new products we have. We are in a good financial position, but I’m not money motivated, I’m not constantly checking how much we made. I’ve always said to my accountant as long as we’re not going bankrupt I don’t mind.”
But the success of the business has meant Chloe can begin to enjoy some of the rewards. That includes being able to buy her first ever house last August.
She says: “It’s just a nice cosy little house. A lot of my friends have to get houses with their partners, so I feel proud that I’m independent and have my own things so I don’t rely on anyone, it was nice to be able to say I bought my own house on my own.”
Her team has now grown too – and includes her mum working as the staff manager, and her best friend as her PA. She says: “The team is always growing, we’ve got account managers and customer services people now. And I feel luck to be able to give my mum a job after she was made redundant from her old job of 18 years.
“She’s always looked after me, she worked non stop to keep a roof over our heads as kids. Now we can’t get her out of the warehouse! She’s there at 8am as she loves to work.”
As for future ambitions, Chloe says it’s to continue growing her brand, and also to help other business owners too. She says: “I’d love to be like Deborah Meaden [from Dragon’s Den] one day and help other entrepreneurs.
“My best tip I can give to anyone else starting a business is consistency – a lot of people start a business and if it hasn’t gone so well at the launch they’ll give up. But I feel like if you give up, it’s never going to happen, so you have to keep on going.
“I could have given up easily along the way, but if I didn’t have that passion then I wouldn’t be where I am now. You have to stay consistent and make sure you have a passion for your brand.”