ENTERPRISING young couple Rose Brown and John Tierney are hoping to bring a little more beauty to Cheltenham town centre after opening their own cosmetics store.
Boyfriend and girlfriend John, 24, and Rose, 21, who is the daughter of UB40 drummer James Brown, have just opened their PHB Ethical Beauty shop on Regent Street.
The shop, which has five staff, sells handmade cosmetics made from locally sourced 100 per cent natural ingredients.
All the products were designed by Rose, as was the packaging and company website, while John is the accounting brains of the operation.
They launched their own range of handmade products in August, and the cosmetics are already available in eight stores around the world.
Rose said: "I've wanted to run my own business since I was a girl, and I love beauty products so it seemed perfect for me.
"Unfortunately, there is a lot of dishonesty about what goes into products in the beauty industry.
"But here we make it clear to people that the products are handmade and have 100 per cent natural ingredients."
The Regent Street store is their second, with the first opening in Birmingham in 2010, and they say they have been able to expand the business by reinvesting all the profits since they launched the venture.
Rose said: "We are very fortunate in that we are a family business, with John's parents helping, so we have been able to pool our money together.
"But we have had to make a lot of sacrifices – there's no social life and no shopping any more."
Rose says she did not tell her famous father about the business until the day before the first shop opened.
She said: "I did not want to be stereotyped as a girl who has only been successful because of her dad. I wanted to do it myself."
Rose and John, who have been together for five years, both live in Birmingham and commute to Cheltenham to run the shop every day.
Rose said: "We decided to open the shop in Cheltenham because we completely fell in love with the area.
"We loved that it still has a strong history with a wealth of independent shops.
"Also, the Cotsworlds is renowned as an area of natural beauty, which fits in with our ethos as a company."
Rose said: "When we started in 2010 we were selling other company's products, and we had such a nightmare trying to find products that met our strict standards that we thought we would make them ourselves.
"We didn't know what we were getting ourselves, as it has taken a lot of work to design and produce everything.
"We launched the range in August this year and we now have one of the biggest collections of natural and vegan certified products in the world.
"We're just hoping to keep building the business and hopefully expand and employ more and more people in Cheltenham."
