Lab to market: The scaleup hurdles facing The Apprentice’s Browtasia

BBC/Naked (A Freemantle Label)/Ray Burminston

Reality TV star chasing Lord Sugar’s £250,000 investment for brow-growth business

THE 20th series of The Apprentice has returned to UK screens, with 20 entrepreneurs competing for Lord Alan Sugar’s mentorship and £250,000 (US$342,000) investment.

Among the lineup is pharmacist and former Geordie Shore personality Roxanne Hamedi, who is seeking backing for her brow-growth business Browtasia.

With operations based in a single UK laboratory, Hamedi says her vegan brow pomade and loyal customer base make the business ready for global expansion.

For chemical engineers, her pitch highlights a familiar challenge: scaling a laboratory formulation into a regulated commercial product. Investment is only one of the many hurdles when moving from lab-scale to manufacturing.

“My simple advice would be to get in bed with big business,” says Darren Oatley-Radcliffe, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Swansea University, who has extensive experience in pharmaceutical scaleup. “They will be able to help in developing the product, navigating the regulation, and they have the funds available if the product is right for them.”

According to Oatley-Radcliffe, the path to commercial scale is extremely difficult for small businesses, especially those operating in pharmaceuticals and personal care.

Materials and equipment

Experience is key when scaling up and Oatley-Radcliffe stresses that companies should have in-house expertise and reliable access to equipment and materials.

In practice, funding often eclipses both. Businesses must buy or lease equipment and hire specialist contractors, which can be prohibitively expensive.

“As most small businesses will not have the infrastructure needed to scale up, they will need to rent or lease items of equipment or go to a contracting house that has the available equipment. This is not cheap,” he says.
Even with investment, firms may struggle to access intermediate-scale equipment.

Oatley-Radcliffe explains: “You can buy a lab-scale and industrial-scale spray dryer quite easily. However, buying one at pilot scale, say the size of a domestic refuse bin, is almost impossible. This is true of a number of technologies or unit operations and is most likely to a low number of sales at this scale of operation meaning that there is no financial incentive for companies to build them.”