The Gel Bottle Inc founder tells Eve Oxberry how social media savvy, calculated risks and a lot of hard graft have helped her achieve such rapid growth for the nail product brand

There’s no denying that The Gel Bottle Inc has caused something of a stir in the nails market.

Having launched just four years ago, the gel-polish brand is now in almost 70,000 salons, has 15 distributors worldwide, and counts celebs such as Kim Kardashian and Dua Lipa as fans.

For founder Daisy Kalnina, it’s a huge leap from her first business, which she started from her spare room in Brighton in 2012, as a home-based nail tech. “At the beginning, it didn’t bring me much but I had small children and I fitted it around them,” she says. It wasn’t long before she branched out, opening her first salon less than a year later.

“I took the plunge without having much finance available but it was the best decision I made,” she says.

“I had 200 customers waiting for me to open, and that came from the marketing I did. I like when a company pays attention to you and actually treats you as a human, so that’s what I implemented in my first salon.” The business took off and soon moved to larger premises, with 10 nail stations as well as beauty rooms, and it was there that Kalnina began to develop her first products.

“I was using a different brand, a very popular one, but didn’t feel the quality was right. And I’m an entrepreneur, I always feel the drive to develop, open or create something, so, I thought why not try and make my own polish?”, she says.

Initially, the products were created solely for use in the salon, and after 18 months of development, Kalnina began using them on her clients. “I wanted to offer long-lasting, quality nails that I could work with easily, with a great shine and no shrinking, lifting or chipping,” she says. “Those issues that every nail tech had, I wanted to troubleshoot them.”

It was Kalnina’s clients who told her she should start selling the products and she admits that making the move into retail and distribution was a huge learning curve. “I don’t even know how I came up with the pricing at first,” she says. “I guess, at the beginning, I didn’t quite believe people would buy from the website I’d created myself, but I hustled and people did buy. At the beginning I charged £10.50, then down the line I realised, ‘oh, I have expenses and I need to grow the business’, and £10.50 couldn’t possibly cover all that so I had to put up my prices but the customers stuck with me.”

“Eventually, I want to go into make-up to open us up to more retail spaces”

Social skills

With almost a quarter of a million Instagram followers, it’s clear that social media has played a huge role in The Gel Bottle (TGB)’s growth, but Kalnina says there’s no big secret to cracking the marketing tool; rather it’s about retaining control of the message and showing personality. “You need to consistent, but more importantly, you need to interact,” she says. “I think brands that don’t achieve much on Instagram don’t have enough time, or don’t have that passion for it, and put someone else in charge, but people see through that.” While TGB’s team has expanded and more people now work on the social accounts, Kalnina still posts regularly herself.

Getting the product onto the talons of some major celebrities has undoubtedly contributed to TGB’s social following but Kalnina says these endorsements have come primarily from session techs choosing to use the product rather than through paid promotions. “We pay three ambassadors around the world to get the product on as many celebrities as they can, but mostly it’s by accident,” she adds. “Techs come to us because they want to offer trendy colours and good quality to their end user, and that might be Kendall Jenner.”

Clockwise from top: Kalnina in the lab; a panel Q&A during the launch of Peac´ci; The Gel Bottle team; products in The Gel Bottle brand; the newer Peac´ci products

Challenge accepted

Like any business that expands quickly, The Gel Bottle has faced its share of challenges. Last year, a disagreement with Premier Gel, the brand set up by Kalnina’s former partner, went public on social media, and on the day we met at the company’s Brighton offices, news had just broken of a court case regarding a shortfall of product in some of TGB’s stock. Commenting on the latter, Kalnina says, “Our suppliers let us down but ultimately it’s our fault, and we admitted that. It’s easy once you know – you send it to a national laboratory, they’ll pick out random samples and do your in-house testing – but we missed that [step] because we were growing so fast.”

Kalnina remains stoic about the impact of such publicity and in fact says it has actually helped to grow her social media following. “People found out about us and when they got to know us, they started to love us,” she says. “But I’d still rather grow steadily without any dramas than going through this craziness.” While in some ways it has been a tough year for Kalnina, she says it’s her team that have made the subsequent successes possible. “I have great people around me because I offer my team very personal treatment. They are not just staff, we are friends,” she adds.

Consumer demand

Any challenges have certainly not dampened Kalnina’s entrepreneurial spirit either. Earlier this year she launched an entirely new brand, Peac´ci, which comprises clothing as well as nail polish. It’s available to trade but is primarily positioned as a consumer lifestyle brand, which, she says, is “a totally different ballgame”, adding, “With professional products, you get loyal customers, and they keep on ordering from you, whereas consumers make one purchase, then you need to hustle for the next one.” For that reason, she’s working to get Peac´ci into major retailers and is already plotting some brand extensions. “Eventually, I want to go into make-up to open us up to more retail spaces, so ideally, I would love to get into Boots or somewhere similar,” says Kalnina, who has already secured wider trade distribution for the brand via Salons Direct. For The Gel Bottle brand, Kalnina also has international distributors in 15 countries including the US, Australia and Spain, and is now looking to grow that, seeking new partnerships specifically in Canada and the GCC region of the Middle East.

Despite such a strong export business, she remains unfazed about the potential impact of Brexit. “Benelux is one of our biggest distributors here in Europe. They would suffer if there are extra duties put on top but I think it’s going to be fine. We will deal with whatever comes,” she says.

Last year, TGB launched The Gel Bottle Academy, and the training school also features heavily in the company’s international expansion plans. With 11 UK locations, Kalnina is now looking to take it worldwide but admits that navigating different regulations is proving tricky. “Every country is so different. In the US we couldn’t launch accredited courses, for example, because you need to offer two-year courses to your students to become manicurists,” she says. “So, we’ll run simple courses there to learn about the product without accreditation. Here, on the other hand, everything’s accredited.” While international growth might be at the front of Kalnina’s mind, she is also looking to dramatically grow the UK operation. “Our marketing department is going to double in size and we will be moving all our production to the UK too,” she says. Currently, product is all manufactured in China, using ingredients sourced from around the world.

“Soon, we’ll have our own lab with an in-house chemist so we’ll mix our own products, because it takes a long time to develop a product when the lab is so far away,” says Kalnina. “That’s underway and we hope it will happen next year.”

KEY DATES

2001

Daisy Kalnina gets her first taste of the nail industry at age 14, working in her mother’s salon

2012

After a few years working for her familly’s construction business, she leaves to launch her first nail tech business from home

2013

Opens her first salon on Preston Street in Brighton

2014

Relocates to a larger premises with 10 nail stations and beauty rooms, begins to develop own products

2015

Launches The Gel Bottle Inc collection of gel polishes

2018

Launches The Gel Bottle Academy to train nail techs in the system

2019

Following fast growth for The Gel Bottle, Kalnina launches consumer lifestyle brand Peac´ci