Shaking up the traditional mass-market sunscreen market has rocketed Ultra Violette founders Bec Jefferd and Ava Matthews to international success.

Working at a major Australian beauty retailer meant Ava Matthews and Bec Jefferd had the perfect inside view of the sector’s unfolding trends and what local customers wanted.

With Matthews in marketing and Jefferd an operations specialist, their expert knowledge allowed them to spot a gap in the market for a premium sunscreen that wasn’t sold in family-sized pump packs on supermarket shelves.

“We felt like no one was speaking about sunscreen in the way it needed to be spoken about,” Matthews explains. “It was a very seasonal, beach-focused, mass market product that was only talked about loudly from November to March – but most parts of Australia have a high UV index factor outside those months.

“We knew how important it was to wear sunscreen every day as part of a skincare routine and we wanted to create an SPF product that looked and felt like a skincare product – something made from luxury ingredients that would sit nicely under makeup and wouldn’t make your skin break out or become greasy.”

Going big on risk

In 2019, after six months of stress testing the concept and crunching numbers, the pair decided to go all in, giving up their well-paying jobs for the cut and thrust of entrepreneurial life.

Within another six months, the first Ultra Violette lines were on the market and being snapped up by Australian consumers who couldn’t get enough of the upscale products and their attractive packaging.

Distribution deals with Adore Beauty and Sephora, two of the local beauty sector’s biggest guns, came quickly, as did contracts with upmarket retailers in the UK and Hong Kong.

“The positioning and messaging we crafted alongside the product just worked really well,” Jefferd says. “We felt pretty proud of the fact we’d created something no one had thought of previously – that we’d carved out a space in a category that didn’t exist before Ultra Violette.”

Laying the foundations for global growth

Six years on, the brand and business continue to go from strength to strength. Today, Ultra Violette employs a team of over 30 across its Melbourne, North American, London and Paris offices and has 50 products in its range.

After an unbroken stretch of 40 per cent year-on-year growth, its turnover is over the $20 million mark, and Jefferd and Matthews say they’re only just getting started.

Securing a stronghold in the US market is their next goal; it’s an ambitious one given the myriad uncertainties, from tariffs to social media shake-ups, facing foreign firms seeking to sell into the world’s largest economy.

The duo are energised by the challenge, though. Going global has been their plan since the start and they’ve invested in systems and processes, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, that have made scaling up as straightforward as it can be.

The power of partnership

“The lesson I learnt from Bec when we started out was that being as ‘buttoned up’ as possible is really important,” Matthews says.

“You see a lot of businesses that don’t implement tight controls over their stock and their cash flow, or they haven’t taken the trouble to register all their trademarks.

“Their brand may be amazing but behind the curtain they’re losing money. Some of the things we invested in during the early days weren’t sexy from a marketing perspective, but it’s been so valuable having those controls in place.”

That’s the beauty of having a partner and co-founder, Jefferd adds: different skillsets and someone to share the challenges – and the wins – in a way paid employees, however committed and competent, simply can’t.

“We bounce off each other,” she says. “It would be really hard and not as much fun if we were doing it solo.”

Banking on a bright future with NAB

Jefferd and Matthews began partnering with NAB shortly after starting their new venture.

“I remember going into our local branch because I had an invoice for our first lot of packaging – we were buying from Korea in US dollars and I needed help transferring the money,” Jefferd recalls.

Since then, NAB has provided a range of support, including trade finance, foreign exchange and internet banking.

Working with a bank that’s prepared to back startups in fast growth mode has been invaluable.

“They really listened to the bigger story and vision, and have been tremendous at finding ways to support us through the various stages of our growth,” Jefferd says.