Back of the notebook to front of the shelf
It started in the bath (not one Reece and I were sharing). Not glamorous, but that's genuinely where the idea came from. Bathing's been a form of self-care for thousands of years, so why did the products sitting on the shelf never live up to that? The answer to the question became BAVE. What followed was less romantic: months of R&D, more meetings in Starbucks than any loyalty card should allow, and slowly talking suppliers into believing in a brand that, at that point, only existed in our heads.
Made our mark. Then kept making it
Simply effective self-care, from a simply effective brand. That was the whole brief, and we wrote it ourselves. No 40-page guidelines document, no committee. Just one rule we stuck to: if we wouldn't use it, nobody should. Everything BAVE became, its tone, its values and how it looked, came from the two of us and that line, applied consistently for six years.
Read the label. We wrote it
Keeping things simple took a stupid amount of complexity behind the scenes. Getting the chemistry right, creating a fragrance you'd want to wear and a product that worked for your skin and your headspace at the same time, became a genuine obsession. Then came the hard work and the harder chemistry. Standing in a storage unit for hours on end mixing, filling, labelling and shipping. Building relationships with perfumers, soap makers, packaging suppliers, printers and fulfilment houses who cared about getting it right as much as we did. Cost sheets, price negotiations and a concept we refused to water down. It all paid off: BAVE ended up featured in GQ, The Telegraph, and on ITV.
Site unseen? Never
BAVE's first home was Wix, and BAVE outgrew it fast. Shopify gave me the room to build the experience we wanted, and we kept building it, testing new features like the Bundle Builder, which quietly became one of our best-converting tools. Every update stuck to the same brief as everything else: keep it simple, keep it effective. Social and marketing got people interested in the brand. The website's main job was to close the deal, and it did.
Fed the feed
BAVE was never just about what we sold, it was always about how we showed up. Instagram, Facebook, paid media across both, all run by Reece and me, all built around one attitude: funny, irreverent and different to the wellness brand script everyone else was reading from (no Johnny Depp in the desert for us). The line we kept coming back to: you'll spend around 1,200 hours of your life in the shower, you may as well make them count.
Lights. Camera. DIY
Small budget, big expectations, the usual start-up problem. Content had to look as good as brands spending ten times what we were, and it did, thanks to skills we already had, a few we learned fast, and the goodwill of old collaborators (payment: exposure, and a genuinely excellent bathroom). Filmed, edited, shot, art-directed, all of it in-house, all of it ours.
Ducking out
Six years after that idea in the bath, BAVE was a proper business, formulated, profitable, and loved by people who kept coming back bottle after bottle. But life moves on, and so had we. Which is why, in 2026, my co-founder and I did the hardest thing: we sold it, on our terms. Valuations, due diligence, a buyer we trusted with it, and a handover pack thick enough to double as a doorstop. Dave (our rubber duck mascot) stayed behind for the new owners. After all, someone's got to keep judging the bath products.
