Meet the millennial who turned a $400 side hustle into TikTok Shop’s biggest teeth whitening brand in the UK—now he splashes $335 a month on haircuts

Being in the C-suite is a high-pressure job with long hours, board responsibilities, and intense scrutiny. But what is it like to be a top executive when you’re off the clock?

Fortune’s series, The Good Life, shows how up-and-coming leaders spend their time and money outside of work.

Today, we meet Toby Brittan, the 32-year-old CEO and co-founder of Whites Beaconsfield, the TikTok-famous teeth whitening brand he started in his early 20s from the floor of a small one-bed flat.

Raised in Britain’s rural Buckinghamshire, he started working at 16 years old—first on a fruit and veg stall, then at the retailer Argos and camera chain Jessops—before he went on to get a business management and economics degree, followed by a master’s in real estate.

That path led him into an East London estate agency and new-build homes, but the pull of entrepreneurship never quite went away. In 2019, Brittan and his brother Ollie launched Whites Beaconsfield as a side hustle after getting fed up with the cost and hassle of in-chair whitening and the lack of high-quality, at-home alternatives.

Brittan built a website with a £19 ($25.40) monthly Shopify subscription, while working from his flat, and scraped together a £300 ($400) budget to get the brand off the ground.

And what began as boxes of strips sold to friends and family quickly snowballed.

Soon they were running £10-a-day Facebook ads ($13.40), and by 2020, the side hustle was pulling in thousands of pounds a day. That’s when Brittan, then just 28, made the leap and quit his 9-to-5—swapping a healthy salary for £1,800 ($2,400) of monthly overheads and a lot of 24/7 graft. 

A boom in at-home beauty during the pandemic helped turn Whites Beaconsfield into one of TikTok Shop’s biggest whitening brands, now serving more than 2 million customers in the U.K., with over 890,000 units sold on the app since 2023 and annual revenues hitting £10 million ($13.4 million) in 2024. 

There were some hiccups along the way: post-pandemic demand cooled, competition intensified, and Brittan spent years effectively running the company solo after his brother stepped back from the business.

But now, Whites Beaconsfield has........

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