111Skin founder Dr. Yannis Alexandrides is a practicing triple board-certified facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon, with a clinic on London’s Harley Street. Back in 2007, he teamed up with two biochemists to find a solution that would help his patients’ skin heal faster post-surgery. They came up with an anti-oxidant, vitamin C-infused formula called NAC Y2, and Dr. Yannis started prescribing it to his clients thereafter. “A lot of people would come back saying that they wanted more because their skin looked so much better,” he says, which sparked the idea of tweaking the formula for everyday use and selling it out of his clinic. In June 2010, Dr. Yannis’s wife, Eva, took on the creative and marketing of the formula — and so their ultra-high-end skincare label, 111Skin, was born.

In 2012, Annalise Fard, Harrods senior director of beauty, home, and fine jewelry and watches, discovered the brand through one of Dr. Yannis’s patients, and became the brand’s first stockist. “At the time, I was specifically searching for a highly effective post-surgery skincare line that genuinely delivered results and 111Skin fulfilled every requirement,” Fard says. “The fusion of medical expertise, clinical efficiency, and true luxury positioning made it incredibly compelling for the Harrods customer.” She was onto something: today, 111Skin is stocked at 400 retailers and 140 spas, and its Repair Serum NAC Y2 is a bestseller, alongside the Celestial Black Diamond Lifting and Firming Face Mask.

After years of steady growth, 111Skin caught the eye of Kim Kardashian’s private equity firm, Skky Partners, which took a minority stake in the skincare brand in January 2025. And last month, beauty giant Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) announced a minority investment in the brand. “For the stage of growth that the company is in, we want someone who is a strategic investor, not just someone to give us money. What’s next is to create new products, cultivate what we already have, and continue growing our community of people who love using our products,” Dr. Yannis tells Vogue Business exclusively in a joint interview with Eva, their first since the news broke.

In 2025, 111Skin delivered £60 million and 27% year-on-year growth across retail sales, stemming from the mutli-brand, direct-to-consumer (DTC) and spa channels, according to the company. The brand said its gross margins for 2025 remained healthy and exceeded 80%.

But post-investment, the duo are keen to develop new products, invest in key markets such as the UK, the US, China and Thailand, and continue to scale their business, while grappling with a saturated skincare space and the growing pains that come with scale.

The power of investments

In the year following the Skky Partners investment, 111Skin has streamlined its operations. “We were able to look at better warehousing and financially upgrade our internal softwares. We really used their resources to future-proof the operations of the business,” says Eva. The brand now manufactures products in Switzerland and South Korea, but its formulations are still developed in the UK.

111Skin’s association with Kardashian has also been a boon for the business, boosting brand awareness, in particular. The Skims founder has 345 million Instagram followers and a history of carefully endorsing other brands — she first posted about 111Skin in 2019, using the Black Diamond Lifting and Firming Neck Mask. “Personally, it was important that one of the founders, Kim Kardashian, was a big fan of the brand, and she had used it before being associated with us. She’s such a leader in the beauty space and her belief in the brand was a seal of approval to the quality of the products,” says Dr. Yannis.

After the ELC investment, president and CEO Stéphane de La Faverie said that 111Skin exemplifies the shift in beauty: consumers are demanding high-performance luxury skincare inspired by in-clinic treatments and built on clinical insight, next-generation ingredients, powerful formulas, and proven efficacy. He added that the investment in 111Skin is part of ELC’s transformation plan, otherwise known as Beauty Reimagined, the company’s turnaround strategy to restore sales growth.

Post-investment, the 111Skin founders plan to deepen the brand’s relationship with retailers such as Nordstrom, Bluemercury and Space NK through sensory in-store activations, educational workshops, and exclusive product collaborations, as they have done with early stockist Harrods. The key is to combine experience and innovation, the pair say. “We’ve never believed in fast growth and everything so far has happened organically, but we feel we are at a stage where we continue growing with one main target in mind, which is the quality of products,” says Dr. Yannis, adding that the brand has recently launched a NPD (new product development) team that he oversees in the UK. The brand’s latest launch was its Exosome Face Lift duo in September 2025, which was born out of Dr. Yannis using exosomes for his patients to stimulate cellular repair, and boost collagen and elastin production in the skin.

In Dr. Yannis’s surgical work, he’s particularly active in attending international conferences, such as the NYC Facelift & Rhinoplasty Master Course and AdBodyFace Contour Congresso in Brazil, to keep up to date with advancements that can inspire 111Skin product innovation. The goal is to continue to innovate without chasing ephemeral trends. The brand’s next launch is slated for September, with an evolution in the acids category that’s been in trial across various spas.

The saturation challenge

In 2015, 111Skin introduced its innovative Celestial Black Diamond Eye Masks to the market, a pair of under-eye masks in the shape of a boomerang with a jelly texture and the sheen of a starry night. The eye masks quickly became a social media phenomenon, worn by A-listers including Anne Hathaway, Dua Lipa, Margot Robbie, and Bella Hadid. Over a decade later, the market is saturated with similar products. Sephora’s website features more than 30 brands with their own variation of eye masks, while Ulta Beauty has a dedicated guide for those shopping the category.

“The challenge that we are facing is probably the same that the consumer is facing: the industry is becoming overly saturated and the consumer is getting confused,” says Eva, noting that businesses have a duty to the industry to slow down and produce quality products for the right reasons, rather than following trends.

The competition has forced 111Skin to keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve. The brand currently sells four types of eye masks: the Celestial Black Diamond Eye Mask, the Cryo De-Puffing Eye Mask, a Rose Gold Illuminating Eye Mask, and an Age Defying Eye Mask. “Consumers have been trained to use multiple products without giving them the time they need to work. We expect immediate results,” says Eva, adding that in the clinical studies, research shows that it takes products up to eight weeks of regular use to see visible results.

Investment and support from a seasoned company such as ELC comes in handy when battling a saturated field. “We want to increase our brand awareness and we want more people to know about the brand, because it’s such a crowded space,” says Eva, adding that a chunk of the ELC investment will be spent on marketing to boost awareness worldwide.

Growing the markets

Last year, North America represented 42% of 111Skin’s sales, while Europe accounted for 19%. Having successfully cracked its home market (the UK), by expanding into Selfridges and Space NK, it’s now time to eye the States.

In September 2025, the brand set up a standalone spa in New York’s Plaza Hotel, offering advanced facials and massages. 111Skin’s shift into a permanent clinic at the Plaza Hotel felt like the perfect way to target the discerning US luxury shopper: a physical space, where consumers spend long periods of time with the brand. “[US consumers] are inquisitive as customers and want to know who is behind the brand, ingredients, clinical stock, and trials,” says Dr. Yannis. “They want to know everything and you can’t just sell them a product, it has to have real provenance.”

The remaining 61% represents business across other markets including the Middle East, China, and Thailand — three regions that have organically grown through word of mouth via Dr. Yannis’s Harley Street practice (which welcomes many international patients). “We already have a good presence in Thailand, and we feel that from the Asian markets, it’s the one where customers resonate with us because they love doctor-founded brands and spa experiences,” he says. In China and Thailand, the brand is currently carried at 13 and four spas, respectively. In the Middle East, 111Skin is used at over 21 spas across the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman.

111Skin’s Chinese consumers have remained loyal to the brand despite softer consumer and travel retail spending. “China is a place where we’ve had a headstart, because my clinic has always been popular with Chinese clients. The brand, for the size it is, is actually quite well known in China, and Chinese people put a lot of credit and faith into science-based beauty,” Dr. Yannis says, adding that the Chinese consumer often begins investing in skincare in their 20s, much earlier than those in other markets (typically 30s).

Eva and Dr. Yannis might have their work cut out for them, but their plate is full of possibilities: new categories, breaking into more regions, and a refined worldview thanks to Skky Partners and ELC. But, overall, Yannis admits that decisions will be made based on his practice as a doctor. “I have always found my advantage to be my patients, who I’ve built trust with and in return have helped me build [a business] based on that,” he says.