Charles Denton, former CEO of The Body Shop, is putting his turnaround expertise to work again by resurrecting the British discount beauty chain Bodycare with an ambitious expansion plan and a radically different business model.

Once known for selling everyday health and beauty essentials at rock-bottom prices, Bodycare 2.0 is re-entering the market as an artificial intelligence-powered discovery destination that takes cues from Asian retail, combining constantly refreshed assortments of trending brands with social media creators and in-store entertainment.

Initially launched 55 years ago in Northern England, Bodycare entered administration last year, the British equivalent of bankruptcy, following mounting financial pressures, including rising operating costs, inventory shortages and a funding crunch after an abandoned initial public offering in 2024. All 147 original locations were shuttered.

During his roughly 10-month tenure as CEO of The Body Shop after an investor group led by Auréa acquired it out of administration in September 2024, Denton helped return the struggling retailer to profitability. At Bodycare, he’s rebuilding from scratch. He and Ryan Newey, founder of advertising agency Fold7, purchased the business in October 2025 without assuming its previous leases, liabilities or commercial relationships. Newey was the lead investor, and Fold7 developed the retailer’s new branding and visual identity.

“My vision is Bodycare is a discovery platform where the masses can access trending ingredients, trending brands and trending moments at accessible pricing,” says Denton. “I tell my team we’re in the entertainment business in how we bring product to life. We’re going to be all in on entertainment.”

Five new stores have opened since July in Sheffield, Derby, Leicester, Bradford and Brierley Hill. Each stocks approximately 4,000 stockkeeping units spanning Korean skincare, prestige beauty and everyday essentials, with Medicube and Fenty Beauty currently the retailer’s bestselling brands. Stores feature content production studios for local creators and beauty studios offering services such as piercings, fine-line tattoos and makeovers.

To jumpstart the new concept, Bodycare raised 4 million pounds, or roughly $5.3 million, in pre-seed funding led by Arāya Ventures, with participation from British Business Bank and other investors, at a 15 million pound post-money valuation, or $20 million, according to Denton. It’s now seeking 6 million pounds, or approximately $8 million, in seed funding to support expansion to 15 stores. Another capital raise is planned for 2027. Bodycare is targeting roughly 25 openings annually as it scales toward an eventual footprint of approximately 90 stores in the United Kingdom, with international expansion under consideration, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Poland.

Bodycare’s relaunch comes amid intensifying competition in British beauty retail, with Sephora expanding through a shop-in-shop partnership with Marks & Spencer and Ulta Beauty entering the market through its acquisition of Space NK.

Beauty Independent spoke with Denton about Bodycare’s turnaround strategy, the role of AI in merchandising, the influence of Asian beauty retail, early customer response and the lessons he is bringing from The Body Shop.

What went wrong with the original Bodycare, and what’s the opportunity you see for the business today?

What went wrong is the family sold to a financier who came in and all of a sudden the company was reimagined financially and became a former husk of itself. I’m not saying for one minute that the business wasn’t slowly declining, and I’m not saying it hadn’t advanced in terms of how the market operated in health and beauty. That’s clearly true.

My big thesis is that the smart customer is going to reign supreme. The smart customer knows today that you don’t have to pay a premium to get the results or the efficacy. You don’t even need to shop where you used to have to shop because that same product is now available somewhere else.

There is a big trend towards smart consumption, and smart consumption is value-based, not discount-based. The Ordinary, Beauty Pie and dupe culture with the creators, they’ve blown it up. They’ve opened up the model and said you can get the same efficacy, exactly the same ingredients, and you’re paying $15 rather than $80.

How does that philosophy translate into the shopping experience?

It was just discount, and it was more mass product. It was everyday essentials at the cheapest possible price. Today, it’s trending health and beauty at accessible prices. Trending health and beauty for everybody. There’s a nuance there because you come in and it’s discovery at every turn. Every day there’s a product drop, every day there’s a brand drop, every day there’s community outreach from our studios.

It is definitely a treasure hunt. I want you to come in every day. The store is constantly dynamic. Our objective is to wow customers at every turn: the treasure hunt, the exploration, the discovery. I’ve got nothing behind glass counters. You can touch and spray all my fragrances. My competitors have got theirs behind glass counters with keys.

What lessons from your experience turning around The Body Shop are you applying to Bodycare?

My approach to heritage brands is a case-by-case situation, but it starts with two very simple questions. The first question is, did this brand have a reason to exist, and does that reason to exist still matter today? The next question is, is there a customer out there that would resonate with that reason to exist?

Then the final question I ask is, why is it broken now? Is it the product’s gone the wrong way, the price has gone the wrong way, the channel strategy’s wrong, they’re discovering it somewhere else? If the reason to exist is still relevant and there’s a customer out there, how do I connect that and change it?

The Body Shop is very different from Bodycare on many levels. The first obvious one is it’s a single-brand proposition, whereas Bodycare is a multibrand proposition. The Body Shop is also the pioneer of ethical beauty.

Unfortunately, I never got an opportunity to really lean into the growth where I wanted to take it. I did more of the re-platforming exercise, moving it from a loss-making business to a profitable business. That was part of the three-step program. I executed step one. Steps two and three have elements of what you’re seeing play out in Bodycare.

One of the things I was an advocate for at The Body Shop, which would definitely play out at Bodycare, is every market has a hyper-localized proposition. The Body Shop of old pushed out a standard proposition to all markets. The Body Shop that I would’ve taken forward would’ve been hyper-localized, relevant, more of a pull strategy than a push strategy. And Bodycare is 100% a pull strategy.

How is AI shaping the way Bodycare operates?

We run the whole business on an AI platform called AIMEE. The entire business starts with signals externally: trending ingredients, trending products, who’s saying what, what my competitors are selling, what price they’re selling at. These external signals build a buying profile for my store. Each store gets a buying profile based on this data, with local validation based on customer profile as well.

We then lay out the store based on that recommended merchandising mix. It also tells us where to merchandise, how much to sell. It then tells us what content to create in the studios to push out to the audience, and AIMEE tracks the engagement to know which content is good and bad and how we change it.

We have 60 cameras in every store minimum, and we track every interaction with every product, with every customer. I can tell you dwell time. Where did they dwell? Where did they pause? What did they touch?

There’s a sign in the window that says we are an AI-native store. We have live TikTok shows. We film the customers. You are warned when you come in.

Does relying so heavily on AI change how many people you need to operate the business?

What it does is enable us to put our money and investment in the people where they matter most. It starts with the data then moves through analysis. What do we think about that? All fully automated. That leads to a decision, again automated. Now, that decision flows into an action. That action typically goes to a person.

If I need to re-merchandise, a person re-merchandises. If I need to buy something else or change something, a person will interact with that. Then the action leads to an outcome, and the outcome again creates more data, so it loops back again.

You’ve studied retailers such as Olive Young in South Korea. What are your takeaways from Asian beauty retail?

Korea has driven the entertainment factor. They’ve made the packaging entertaining, they’ve made the storytelling entertaining, even the mechanisms that you use, the ingredients, the formulations, it’s all entertaining textures.

They’ve driven Korean drama and Korean pop, no different from what America did with Hollywood. Korean drama, K-pop and cosmetics all hand in hand, reinforcing each other.

The other big understanding is the connection with fashion because fast fashion, H&M, Zara. When I was growing up, two seasons a year, and now it’s weekly.

That Zara way of operating is modern retail. When you have these buyers who do six-monthly reviews and then a new planogram, I have a trading floor that’s daily, a dynamic trading floor that changes daily.

What are you learning from the first stores about who’s shopping and what they’re buying?

We assumed 85% of our customers in the first three months would be old customers coming back. A good 70% of the range was really considering the old customer, 30% was considering the new. We overcompensated for the old customer.

The old customer who is shopping for the lowest possible price has found low-priced retailers out there. The old customer who loves Bodycare loves the warmth, loves that we engage. We have more staff on the shop floor now because of the AI, so I can actually have conversations with every customer. I took the top 100 products from 2024 and have matched those prices. So those top-selling products are still available at 2024 prices.

This whole group in the middle never shopped Bodycare. It wasn’t for them. They’re falling over themselves. They’re in their early 20’s to 40’s and 50s, all on TikTok, on Insta, know about health and beauty, buying into all the latest trends.

We’ve had 300,000 people through our five doors so far, and bear in mind, we’ve only been going 80 days. On average, we get 2,000 people a day per door through.

In the historical store, the average transaction would have been in dollar terms about $8.50, and now we’re running at $15. We still have volume at the lower end, but we have so much more at the higher price. Now we’re selling products at 20, 30, 40 pounds. The other thing is the frequency of purchase. We’re seeing customers come back at least twice, if not three times a month, certainly in the first store.

What’s the strategy behind the creator studios, and how do they eventually connect to commerce?

We see the studios as being a vehicle to professionalize the creators in each community. That’s why we’ve retained an executive producer with capabilities. They know how to film, edit, publish and post. We reach out to the nano creators in the communities and say, “It doesn’t matter where you are on your journey, you’re welcome to come to us and develop and hone your skills.” We’ve got some at 100,000 followers, 500,000 and so on.

Our ambition is to indirectly create work for revenue for 10,000 creators in the U.K. Right now, we haven’t got any other online selling capability, so we haven’t switched on our TikTok Shop. In the future, each studio will behave like an affiliate broadcasting to our central TikTok Shop. The creator will get an affiliate fee. They’ll be using our facilities to sell on our central shop. At the moment, I would call it more like a celebration of community.