The Story behind Rimini Beauty

My name is Daksha Millar. I was born in Uganda in 1960 and came to this country in 1972 when the then President Amin expelled the Asian Community from Uganda. Fortunately, we were all brought up in the English schooling system and spoke excellent English, so on arriving in the UK the biggest shock was the cold weather!

My Father had been a successful entrepreneur and businessman, so I think I must have inherited his flair for ideas and business from him.

In the 1980s I ran a successful restaurant in Ibiza from where the island hippy culture gave me some great ideas about using natural ingredients for cosmetics.  I have always had an interest in make up and cosmetics and created The Natural Care company in the 1990s, but the money ran out before we could get properly established!

I invented a children’s game called Alpha/Beta based on a lenticular, which I patented. With a lenticular you get two images on one surface, so for example hold the card flat you see an apple, turn it slightly and you see a let A. You get the picture! At this time with my partner Richard, we were also running a successful mail order fulfilment business, distributing products and catalogues for our clients. Then along came the world wide web and the internet. We realised this was going to be huge, bigger than the wheel my partner Richard said!  We started selling online for our clients but amazingly we had trouble convincing people that online retail would be the next big thing; every banker we approached for funding told us the same thing; “women won’t buy online they want to meet their friends for a coffee in the high street”. We decided to take the plunge anyway and sold our mail order business to concentrate on online retail. That was about twenty years ago.

My sister suffered from Alopecia and, knowing how I researched for products, asked me to find a good supplier for false eyelashes. We found an excellent supplier and decided to put up a simple but functional website selling eyelashes; www.eyelashesadirect.co.uk .  It took off immediately and soon we had enquiries from all over the world. One was from a make-up artist from New York, who was coming to the UK to do the make up at Shepperton Studios for the James Bond movie Skyfall, so if see that movie the eyelashes are ours! We have since supplied Dreamworks for shows like Shrek, West End theatres, The National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company, Cirque du Soleil, as well as many major retailers and most importantly, our special retail customers.

After selling eyelashes for many years, we decided to move into Cosmetics and created our brand Rimini Beauty, Rimini being not only my niece’s name, but also an Italian town on the coast of the Adriatic famous for romancing!

My partner Richard and I have long experience of creating and sourcing products worldwide but wherever we can we source from the UK. Our policy is to ensure all our products are made cruelty free, in other words, no animal testing and vegan.

Our long years in sourcing and creating products have taught us that most cosmetics sold are very similar in content, but the retail pricing of most brands, extortionate. Make up is part of a woman’s everyday life and the price she pays should be affordable to all, without hesitating to think about it. So, our policy is to provide the absolute top quality cosmetic products at the absolute best prices.