10 Amazing milestones in 10 years of School of Natural Skincare

In the 10 years since School of Natural Skincare was started, we’ve managed to achieve some amazing things—not just for ourselves as a business, but for our students and everyone we’ve impacted in that time. We’re so proud to share 10 amazing milestones we’ve experienced!

Where it all began

In March of 2010, Gail received her Cosmetic Product Safety Report for the products she intended to sell, and launched the brand Goodness & Wonder, which was initially a brand of products to sell. Read more about Gail’s leap of faith and how she started her business here.

In April of 2010, Gareth qualified as an IEB Certified Aromatherapist.

In-person workshops

Gail ran her first in-person workshop in May of 2010, in Bristol, and in November of the same year, Gail and Gareth met—the start of a beautiful partnership!

We started running workshops together, including ones at Hawkwood College in Gloucestershire. Our first workshop had 9 participants, and this increased rapidly. 2013 brought us an exciting milestone when a woman told us she’d traveled all the way from the Philippines to attend. We knew then that we had something truly special, and began to build our business with a global mindset.

Gail created our new website, and the School of Natural Skincare was born.

Quitting our jobs and first online courses

2013 met us with some major new creative energies—some we had planned and hoped for, and others which were happy surprises! In May of 2013, we launched our first online course, then called Natural Facial Skincare. In October, we launched a second online course, Beautiful Bodycare. Later down the road, we would eventually merge these two courses together and totally update them, creating our Certificate in Making Natural Skincare Products, which is one of our bestselling courses to date.

A video from 2013 from our very first online course!

We were so committed to our business that we both quit our jobs in the summer of 2013.

More than a few people thought we were a little crazy, especially since we had just found out that we would be expecting our first child!

Going global

In 2010, we began with in-person workshops in the UK only, with a typical class size of 10-20 people per class.

By 2016, after just six years of operation, School of Natural Skincare had been able to reach over 3,500 students in 50 countries via our online education portal.

The following year, we had bumped those numbers up to over 5,000 students across double the number of countries, and by 2018, we had over 7,000 students in 120 countries!

2019 brought us over the 10,000 student mark, and this year we are so pleased to reach over 12,000 students in 130 countries worldwide.

New tutors, advanced courses and a growing family

In March of 2014, our daughter was born. Two months later, after being asked by our students, we launched the first edition of our Diploma in Natural Skincare Formulation.

Our students were asking for a more advanced course which would teach them formulating, and we were excited to offer it at last! By August of that same year, we had welcomed the first 80 students to the Diploma course.

We decided to take our show on the road, and our baby, too, and traveled around to New Zealand, Australia, and through the United States, connecting with students. This milestone was the first time we’d taken on international travel for our growing business.

We were encouraged and excited to see what the future had in store!

In the years that followed, our business continued to grow, as did our family!

In January of 2015, Build Your Beauty Brand: Marketing & Business Intensive for Beauty Brands was launched. In November of 2015, our twins were born!

In order to continue to provide the same high-quality education that our students had come to expect of us, we began working with Chandni Patel, a Cosmetic Scientist.

We launched our Advanced Certificate in High-Performance Serum Formulation (first edition) in January of 2016, and in May of the same year we launched our Diploma in Formulating with Natural Surfactants.

Accreditations and certifications

In July of 2016, we became a certified fairtrade business, a member of the European Association for Distance Learning, and we became an accredited ethical business with the ethical company organisation.

We also became supporters and donors to the Soil Association.

In October of 2017, School of Natural Skincare became accredited by the CPD certification service. All of these allowed us to really continue to build a business that was in alignment with our ethics and values.

Throughout both 2016 and 2017, we also continued to update existing courses, like our second edition of our Diploma in Natural Skincare Formulation, and launch new courses as well. 

Our Certificate in Making Natural Skincare Products combined facial skincare and beautiful bodycare courses into one single course. We also launched our Price Your Beauty Products for Profit course, as well as our Certificate in Natural, Preservative-Free Face Mask and Cleanser Formulation in 2017. 

Additionally, Tina Svetek, Scientist and Cosmetic Formulator joined us that same year. 

Diploma in Natural Haircare Formulation

In July of 2018, we launched our first course focusing exclusively on haircare, which was something we’d been wanting to do for some time, and something our students had been asking about as well.

The Diploma in Natural Haircare Formulation launched to great reviews and 175 students enrolled during the first year. Some have even launched their own haircare brands like Cortney Wilder founder of Wilder.

International bestselling book

In may of 2019, we were so excited to finally launch our first book, The A-Z of Natural Cosmetic Formulation, which was co-written with Tina Svetek. It was an international Amazon bestseller in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia simultaneously. 

We wrote the book to dispel a lot of common natural formulation myths, and to give people the correct foundation of knowledge so they could know where to start with making their own products.

Also, in June of 2019, we got married! 

Entrepreneur of the Year and Best Online Organic Skincare Formulation School

In October of 2019, the School of Natural Skincare won the Health and Beauty Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the Great British Entrepreneur Regional Finals. This was awarded in recognition of being “entrepreneurs who make a real difference when it comes to bettering our health, beauty and wellbeing.” 

The Health & Beauty Entrepreneur of the Year Award seeks out those not only attaining excellence in their field, but also those who put an emphasis on creating better lifestyles.

We are absolutely thrilled to receive this award! It was a great way to kick off our 10 year birthday celebrations which commenced in January 2020 – marking 10 years since Gail and Gareth founded the School! 

After many weeks of deliberation, the results are finally in for the 2020 Health, Beauty & Wellness Awards! 

School Of Natural Skincare has recently been awarded Best Online Organic Skincare Formulations School 2020. We are so thrilled to learn this and feel so grateful to be singled out for all of our hard work.

Office and cosmetic lab

The past ten years have brought us so many wonderful changes, unexpected opportunities, and powerful avenues for growth that we never could’ve predicted. 

Now, we’re planning for the next ten years and looking to the future by renting our first physical office, setting up a permanent cosmetic lab and expanding our team to help us grow and deliver more value. 

Tina Svetek brought more specialist area expertise into the science of skincare formulation – as a chemist and cosmetic formulator – this enabled us to take our knowledge base to another level and provide more value to our students. 

Ria Gane was already working for us in a small capacity but as a professional editor, we engaged her fully into helping us to create course content. 

Kelly Harcus was focused on designing beautifully designed course materials and Adam Loxton helped us to produce, record and edit video content. 

In addition, we hired:

• Lisa Kaufenstein, Marketing & Communications Coordinator to help us communicate our message
• Jon Heavens, Graphic Designer to create the visual representation of our brand and deliver better quality of course materials
• Emilia Macari, Cosmetic Formulator and Lab Manager to support students, do ingredient research, product trials, experiments and create learning materials
• Liz Shepperd, Operations Coordinator, to improve the delivery of our online courses and evolve the student learning experience
• Loisa Despres, Customer Service, to answer the hundreds of enquiries we receive each week!

If you want to get to know our team a little bit better you can read about them here.

Because we truly believe in wellness for all, we have engaged a yoga teacher, Natalie from LoveYogaTree to hold weekly classes in our office for everyone there! 

We are so grateful to everyone who has been with us on our journey these past 10 years, and we look forward to what the future holds, and plan to continue to deliver the best and most accessible courses for all of your skincare education needs.

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