TheIndustry.beauty reported on 17 September that skincare brand Faace has been sold, with founder Jasmine Wicks-Stephens confirming the deal has completed after years of uncertainty. Source: https://theindustry.beauty/faace-officially-sold-following-lengthy-search-for-buyer/.
She announced it on her Substack on 15 September, saying the agreements had been signed the previous week by the shareholders, the new owner and herself. "My skincare brand, after years and years of heartbreak, has sold," she wrote. The buyer and the terms have not been disclosed. Wicks-Stephens said it was "not a lucrative deal" for her, but that it let her draw a line under the business. She will keep some involvement, and described "Faace 2.0" as on the horizon.
It is a genuinely good outcome for a founder who has been very open about how hard the last two years were. It is also one of the clearest public case studies a UK founder will get of what a long sale process actually looks like from the inside.
The timeline
Faace was founded in 2019, built around hormonal skincare, with products for concerns including stress, menopause, periods, tiredness and perspiration. It appeared on BBC's Dragons' Den in 2024 and secured investment from Steven Bartlett, Peter Jones and Touker Suleyman.
In July 2024, Wicks-Stephens put the brand up for sale after five years of running it. She said she had worked full-time hours without pay and invested hundreds of thousands of pounds of her own money.
In July 2025 she confirmed Faace would close after a prospective sale fell through, saying she no longer had the capacity to keep running it.
In December, she said a new deal was being considered and that the brand could return in 2026, while stressing nothing had been signed.
In September 2026, it sold. Over the previous two years the business had been significantly scaled back while its future was worked out.
That is roughly twenty-six months from putting the brand up for sale to completion, including one deal that collapsed and a public announcement of closure in the middle.
The part nobody plans for
Most founders who think about exit think about the sale itself. The valuation, the buyer, the terms. Very few plan for the period between deciding to sell and actually selling, which is where a great deal of value can quietly leave a business.
The problem is structural. Once a founder decides to sell, energy tends to move away from growth. Launches pause. Marketing slows. Retailer conversations get harder, because it is difficult to commit to a new range review when you do not know who will own the brand. Stock is run down to protect cash. None of that is a mistake in isolation. Together, it means the thing being sold is shrinking while the sale is being negotiated.
Buyers see this. A brand with declining sales and a thin team is priced as a set of assets rather than a growing business. That changes the conversation from what the brand could become to what the name, the formulas and the customer list are worth on their own.
Wicks-Stephens has not said what drove the terms of her deal and it would be wrong to guess. But the general pattern is well known, and her honesty about the cost of carrying the business while it waited is the part other founders should take seriously.
What a paused brand is actually selling
When a brand is scaled back, what remains for a buyer is usually some combination of five things: the name and trademarks, the formulas and the right to make them, the product compliance documentation, the supplier and manufacturer relationships, and the customer and community data.
Each of those can hold its value or lose it depending on how it is looked after.
Trademarks need to be registered in the right classes and territories, and owned by the company rather than an individual. Formulas need to be clearly owned, with the manufacturer's agreement to that on paper. Product safety reports and responsible person arrangements need to be current, because a buyer cannot simply relaunch a product whose files have lapsed. Supplier relationships go cold if nobody places an order for a year. And a customer list that has not heard from the brand in eighteen months is worth a fraction of one that has.
The practical lesson is that keeping those five things in good order costs relatively little and protects a large share of what a buyer is willing to pay.
Deals fall through. Plan for it.
The collapse of the first prospective sale in 2025 is the other detail worth dwelling on. It is common for a deal to fail after months of work, sometimes very late, for reasons that have nothing to do with the brand: the buyer's own funding, a change in their strategy, something found in due diligence, or simply cold feet.
A founder who has mentally moved on by the time a deal collapses is in a very hard position, and Wicks-Stephens was open that she no longer had the capacity to continue at that point.
Two habits help. The first is to set a personal walk-away date and a minimum acceptable outcome before any process starts, so the decisions are made when you are calm rather than exhausted. The second is to keep a running alternative. That might be a partner, a licensing arrangement, a smaller buyer, or a managed wind-down with the assets preserved. Having a second option makes it easier to negotiate the first, and much easier to survive it falling apart.
The personal cost is part of the business case
The most important part of this story is the least commercial. Wicks-Stephens has written about working without pay, putting in her own money, and carrying the responsibility of the brand every day even while it was scaled back.
That is not unusual in independent beauty. It is very rarely discussed in the way she has discussed it. Founders at £500k to £5m are often the only person holding the whole business together, and their capacity is a real constraint on what the business can do. It deserves to be planned for with the same seriousness as cash.
The plain version
Faace sold after a two-year process that included a failed deal and an announced closure. The founder called it not a lucrative deal, and also a relief, and is keeping a hand in the next chapter.
For every other founder, the lesson is to treat the period before a sale as part of running the company. Keep the assets that a buyer will value in good order, plan for the deal falling through, and be honest with yourself about how long you can carry it. What you do in those months decides what there is left to sell.