Meet the jet-setting fashion editor who turned a New York manicure at 23 into Nails.Inc—Despite selling for $40 million, she still wakes at 5:45 a.m.

Thea Green was a 23-year-old jet-setting fashion editor for Tatler magazine when she noticed something no one else had: She was grabbing last-minute speedy manicures between meetings on every trip to New York or LA—nowhere back home in the U.K. offered that service for your nails yet. And just like that, Nails.Inc was born in 1999. Twenty-six years later, the company says it sells one nail polish every single minute. 

She had no background in beauty and no business plan when she launched a 70-shade polish range and opened her first nail bar that year. But having watched her dad work his way up from a tea boy to a retail director gave her all the proof she needed that “hard work and a good idea could take you anywhere,” Green tells Fortune. 

Vogue magazine’s HQ was just around the corner, and staff there started combining client meetings with manicures. The lines quickly followed.

Fenwick’s came next, the first department store to give Green’s business a beauty concession—it marked the first time a service, rather than a product, sat in a beauty hall. “People worried women wouldn’t want to get their nails done in public, but I knew convenience would win over privacy,” she says. 

Harvey Nichols and Selfridges came next, before she decided to start selling to the masses and selling her nail varnish in major retailers: Boots in the U.K, Sephora in the U.S.

By the late 2000s, she was expanding in the U.S. and needed to build awareness on a tight budget. Green turned to collaborations before most beauty brands were doing it. “Alexa Chung was one of our first, and it flew off the shelves,” she adds. Then came collaborations with Victoria Beckham, Magnum, even McDonald’s. 

And she did it all while raising a family: two sons and a daughter. She’d go through her emails before they woke up, split the school run with her husband (who also happens to be an entrepreneur), do calls on the way back home from the office, and log back on after bath time.  

Today, the 50-year-old founder lives in leafy West London with her husband, three children, and dog named Sunday. Green sold Nails.Inc at the end of 2024 to the American private equity group Pacific World Corporation in a reported £30 million ($40 million) deal—but she’s stayed on as chair. She says the company achieved its highest........

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