Thea Green on her Nails Inc empire Thea Green, the woman who pioneered British nail bars in the 1990s still has the market at her fingertips. At the heart of the Nails Inc head office, situated in a nondescript 1970s building just off Regent Street, there is a stand displaying 60 bottles of nail polish in different colours. There are milky beiges with names such as Jermyn Street and Fouberts Place, a tomato red named Portobello, a midnight teal (Kensington) and an edgy, crackle-effect jet-black topcoat: Camden, of course. Nails Inc nail bars are famed for their walls of nail polish. There are 100 colours in total in the Nails Inc colour 'library', all manufactured in Britain, and all named after London streets and boroughs. 'From day one we had about 60 colours, because we aimed to get the product outside the nail bars,' the company's founder, Thea Green, says. Colour ideas usually come on the back of catwalk trends. We initially spent a long time scouring the market for unusual ingredients and interesting materials, and now paint suppliers come to us with an idea that might translate well to polish. The best-selling polish is Porchester Square, a muted mushroom, and a recent hit is Baker Street, a zingy cobalt blue worn by Beyoncé. Green still gets a kick out of hearing customers ask for colours by name. 'I love naming them - it's like my bubblegum moment at the end of the day,' she says. Nails are big business right now. What used to be known as the lipstick index - a term coined by Estée Lauder's chairman, Leonard Lauder, in 2001 to explain why, in a recession, lipstick sales soar while Ferraris sit unsold in showrooms - should now perhaps be known as the nail bomb. While lipstick and lipgloss sales rose 16 per cent to £204 million in 2010, according to the analysts Mintel, nail polish is hot on its heels, with sales rising 14 per cent to £179 million. Fingertips are also bringing footfall to the high street: in the UK there has been a 16.5 per cent increase in the number of nail salons since 2008, according to Local Data Company, a retail consultancy. For Thea Green, 36, these figures are merely confirmation of a trend that she spotted in the 1990s, and which saw her appointed MBE for services to the beauty industry in 2011. A sleek blonde with a distinctive, matter-of-fact manner, she set up Nails Inc with £250,000 in 1999, at the age of 23. Last year the company turned over £22 million, a rise of more than 40 per cent on the previous year. Crucially, the recession appears to have boosted business. 'Fashion has become outrageous and colourful, which it does in a recession to encourage people to buy, but if you can't afford a new coat in this season's bottle green, you'll buy bottle-green nail polish instead. It's a purchase that gives you a lift but doesn't break the bank.' Innovative special effect polishes are also hauling in the punters. 'Women experiment with nails in a way that they wouldn't necessarily do with other make-up,' Green says. Recent hits include magnetic polish (magnetic particles are manipulated by a magnet in the brush lid to create a marbled effect) and the Swarovski crystal pedicure (500 crystals are hand-applied to toenails, at a cost of £120). You may wrinkle your nose, but every week more than 30,000 Nails Inc polishes are sold worldwide - at an average cost of £10 a bottle - and about 10,000 women visit their salons every week, most often for the 15-minute manicure, which will set them back £28. Business is in Green's blood. 'I wanted to earn my own money and always talked about having my own business,' she says, when I ask about her childhood. Born in Wirral, between Liverpool and Chester, in 1976, she was a 'fairly industrious' but 'definitely creative' child. Her father was a company director for Littlewoods, having worked his way up from the bottom; her mother, contrary to Green's Wikipedia entry, was a housewife. 'For some reason Wikipedia says that she managed a chain of snooker halls, which makes her sound like some kind of Brookside mother,' Green says laughing. My mum stayed at home and baked cakes. At 18 she moved to London to study fashion journalism at the London College of Fashion, working as an intern on the fashion desk at the Daily Mail in her spare time. When the Daily Mail editor she was assisting moved to Tatler , Green went with her, helping with shoots in her summer holidays and at weekends. Upon graduation, she got her first job, as a fashion assistant at Tatler at the age of 21. Tatler in 1997 was a hot-bed of entrepreneurial talent. Green reported to the fashion editor, Natalie Massenet, who later founded the wildly successful luxury e-tailer net-a-porter.com, and Claudia Levy (now Claudia Grant), who was the new company's first employee. Other staffers included Kate Reardon, now the magazine's editor, and Ben Fogle who, though an intern at the time, eventually became the picture editor. 'Tamara [Mellon] had left Vogue two years earlier to start Jimmy Choo, so the big buzz was about her when I arrived,' Green recalls. Magazines are a real stamping ground for ambitious women; there was a "can do" attitude, because we had to create something hugely glamorous on a shoestring budget. At a very young age I was given a lot of responsibility, so it was an amazing first job. It was a very inspiring workplace. Within two years Green had had her lightbulb moment. Regularly travelling to New York, by now as the fashion editor, she noticed nail bars on every street corner. 'Everyone I knew from the UK had their nails done as soon as they got to the States,' she says. 'At first I wasn't sure if that was just the fashion bubble, but I started talking to real women, and the trend was clear: if they'd been to Manhattan in the past two years, they'd got their nails done.' She got together with an advertising pal, MT Carney (short for Marie Therese, now the president of movie marketing at Disney), and set about doing extensive consumer research. We did lots of focus groups, got perfect responses - textbook stuff - and then we pitched for funds. The 23-year-old raised £250,000 from private individuals - no mean feat, although she insists, 'We could easily have got a million pounds if we'd been solely a dotcom [start-up]; private equity firms were throwing money at digital enterprises' - and in 1999 opened the first shop, on South Molton Street. The response, even for someone as ambitious as Green, was extraordinary. 'There was a queue all the way down South Molton Street,' she says. People were waiting for two hours to get our 15-minute manicure. It was insane. Six months later Nails Inc opened a shop in Canary Wharf, then hooked up with department stores: House of Fraser, Fenwick and Debenhams came first; then Harvey Nichols, Selfridges and Bentalls. Department store contracts guaranteed Nails Inc's success in a market that had suddenly become flooded with competitors. All sorts of nail bars were opening at a frightening rate - including Scarlet and New York Nail Company - but whoever got the department store deals won the race. You can go from one store to 20, 30, 40 stores so quickly with department store contracts. The name was important, too. 'It was an accident, but I think everyone thought Nails Inc already existed in the States - they thought they'd heard of it.' Green now employs 420 people and has 58 nail bars in the UK and Ireland offering manicures and pedicures (from £17.50) and doing a roaring trade in nail polish and treatment products such as cuticle oil pens and hand cream. Last year Nails Inc joined forces with the cosmetics giant Sephora, which quickly took on the polishes (all made in the UK) in its US, Canadian and European stores. Such rapid expansion has tested Green's people-management skills: 'It was a huge step, going from motivating three people to 50 people. It was my dad's one concern when I launched, and he said I wouldn't know what it was like until I started. I think you get better at it. Now Green employs a full-time recruiter for the nail bars, three people leading training around the country, and a 'massive' mystery-shopper programme to keep on top of quality control. Her success means she can pick who to partner when expanding into new countries. 'It's about fashion, colour, special effects - there probably isn't anyone that does that better than we do. That sounds blasé, but we've been doing it for a decade. People didn't used to care about it - and now they do.' Green is also the mother of three children - Charlie, eight, Harry, six, and Allegra, three - and wife to Nicholas, who runs a print and digital marketing agency with his brother. 'He used to send me flowers every time we opened a store, but then we got to about store nine and he said, "This is the last one,"' she intones in a growly mimic. They live in Fulham, west London, and she happily admits that her children are 'obsessed' with her business. Allegra is her biggest fan. She will only wear neon pink. She can see six shades of pink and still pick Notting Hill Gate at 60 paces. Her eldest, Charlie, seems to have inherited her head for business. He is really focused on how he could run his own business - at eight! Charlie gets very upset that he can't wear magnetic nail polish. He's not at all camp - he likes football and rugby - but the magnetic polish is a gadget he wants to play with. My husband wouldn't hear of it. Instant divorce! Her biggest challenge for 2013, aside from fitting in all the football matches and school plays of parenthood, is to conquer the overseas market. 'There will be seven or eight countries taking on the brand at the beginning of next year,' she says. 'We've just signed a distributor for Australia and the Middle East, we're about to do Mexico and Brazil, and Asia is going to be massive for us. The States has been a deal-changer in terms of volume. Green attributes her success to her no-nonsense work ethic. I think when you run your own business you focus on the logistics. You get past the praise quite quickly. I'm super-hard on myself.' Surely balancing family life with plans for world domination exhausts her? 'It is a bit of a nightmare,' she says laughing, 'but it's a good nightmare.' nailsinc.com