111Skin founder Dr. Yannis Alexandrides is a practicing triple board-certified facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon, with a clinic on London’s Harley Street. Back in 2007, he teamed up with two biochemists to find a solution that would help his patients’ skin heal faster post-surgery. They came up with an anti-oxidant, vitamin C-infused formula called NAC Y2, and Dr. Yannis started prescribing it to his clients thereafter. “A lot of people would come back saying that they wanted more because their skin looked so much better,” he says, which sparked the idea of tweaking the formula for everyday use and selling it out of his clinic. In June 2010, Dr. Yannis’s wife, Eva, took on the creative and marketing of the formula — and so their ultra-high-end skincare label, 111Skin, was born.
In 2012, Annalise Fard, Harrods senior director of beauty, home, and fine jewelry and watches, discovered the brand through one of Dr. Yannis’s patients, and became the brand’s first stockist. “At the time, I was specifically searching for a highly effective post-surgery skincare line that genuinely delivered results and 111Skin fulfilled every requirement,” Fard says. “The fusion of medical expertise, clinical efficiency, and true luxury positioning made it incredibly compelling for the Harrods customer.” She was onto something: today, 111Skin is stocked at 400 retailers and 140 spas, and its Repair Serum NAC Y2 is a bestseller, alongside the Celestial Black Diamond Lifting and Firming Face Mask.
After years of steady growth, 111Skin caught the eye of Kim Kardashian’s private equity firm, Skky Partners, which took a minority stake in the skincare brand in January 2025. And last month, beauty giant Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) announced a minority investment in the brand. “For the stage of growth that the company is in, we want someone who is a strategic investor, not just someone to give us money. What’s next is to create new products, cultivate what we already have, and continue growing our community of people who love using our products,” Dr. Yannis tells Vogue Business exclusively in a joint interview with Eva, their first since the news broke.
In 2025, 111Skin delivered £60 million and 27% year-on-year growth across retail sales, stemming from the mutli-brand, direct-to-consumer (DTC) and spa channels, according to the company. The brand said its gross margins for 2025 remained healthy and exceeded 80%.
But post-investment, the duo are keen to develop new products, invest in key markets such as the UK, the US, China and Thailand, and continue to scale their business, while grappling with a saturated skincare space and the growing pains that come with scale.
The power of investments
In the year following the Skky Partners investment, 111Skin has streamlined its operations. “We were able to look at better warehousing and financially upgrade our internal softwares. We really used their resources to future-proof the operations of the business,” says Eva. The brand now manufactures products in Europe and Asia, but its formulations are still developed in the UK.
111Skin’s association with Kardashian has also been a boon for the business, boosting brand awareness, in particular. The Skims founder has 345 million Instagram followers and a history of carefully endorsing other brands — she first posted about 111Skin in 2019, using the Black Diamond Lifting and Firming Neck Mask. “Personally, it was important that one of the founders, Kim Kardashian, was a big fan of the brand, and she had used it before being associated with us. She’s such a leader in the beauty space and her belief in the brand was a seal of approval to the quality of the products,” says Dr. Yannis.
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