How Maxine Laceby Built a £42M Beauty Empire in Her 50s

Maxine Laceby didn’t grow up around business. She grew up on a council estate, left school at 16, and built her career in a completely different world before ever thinking about starting something of her own. She didn’t start Absolute Collagen until her 50s. No background in beauty. No experience building a company. Today, it’s a £42M brand. In this episode of Femme & Fortune, she sits down with Ayesha Ofori, a former investment banker, to talk about how it actually happened. Not just the outcome. But everything that led up to it. Her upbringing. The early parts of her career. What pushed her to start later in life. And then what came next. The mistakes. The moments she nearly didn’t do it. The decisions she had to make when there wasn’t a clear path. Because building something like this isn’t a straight line. And it’s not just about what you achieve. It’s about how you think, how you handle uncertainty, and how you keep going when it would be easier not to. ---------- Femme & Fortune is a podcast about how women build wealth. Not just what they achieve. But how they get there. 🔔 Subscribe for more conversations like this.