Ava Matthews believes she was handed a toolkit of how to run a brand. After beginning her career in beauty PR, with a stint in New York, Matthews had already worked on brands like SK-II, Aesop, Olay, Jurlique, and Napolean Perdis before starting her own company. But when she began working in product development at Mecca, the startup training really began.

“You’re a general manager of a brand,” Matthews said, who worked on the Mecca house range. “We were basically given a P&L for the brand and you ran the whole brand, so not only was I doing product development, I was doing the marketing, I was doing the sales… I was handed, basically, a toolkit of how to run a brand.”

“We thought there’s no one doing anything that is kind of interesting here [in the sunscreen category] and it’s such an important product, such an important category, and no one is making anything fun. It’s all very labby or sciency or scary. So we came together and decided we should do this because we’re not going to be able to do what we want for another company.”

“We did have a lot of flexibility at Mecca, but at the end of the day, it’s someone else’s dollar, you can’t do all the things you want to do. I’m kind of out there, and a bit naughty, in real life and in the way I work. And so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get away with a lot of the things I wanted to do. I thought we know what we need to do, how formulas need to be, and what we can improve on, and there’s no brand really that’s doing award winning sunscreens…. We thought let’s just do a brand of sunscreens that suit lots of different skin types. [Customers] might get their skincare from wherever they shop – Sephora, Mecca, David Jones – and then they can come to us for sunscreen.”