Lucy Goff: ‘In seven years, I went from one-person start-up to my wellness company being valued at £170m’
When Lucy Goff gave birth to her daughter in 2012, she caught life-threatening septicemia and her body began to shut down. After six weeks in intensive care battling the condition, medicine saved her life – but her body was left exhausted and fragile. In a bid to restore her health to what it was, the Selfridges public relations executive flew to a clinic in Geneva, where she met a longevity expert and Oxford academic, Professor Paul Clayton, who prescribed her peer-reviewed, pharmaceutical-grade supplements composed of carefully dosed ingredients. Goff’s body had been shaking for months. Yet, within a matter of weeks, she began to feel herself again, went back to work, and never looked back.
The experience inspired Goff to leave behind her career in communications to found the supplement, laser and skincare business Lyma, which now facilitates millions of people around the world to access the patented and carefully formulated products that Goff discovered in Geneva, which helped her to achieve a better quality of life following her terrifying health crisis. Within just seven years, the one-person start-up has grown into a global business that’s worth roughly £171m, with Goff – who left school without any qualifications – assuring that the wellness brand is just getting started.
I remortgaged my house to get the money to make the 10,000 products needed to launch Lyma. I must have written to nearly 100 venture capital trusts in the UK and the US with what I thought was a really good business plan – but they all said no. All of these men told me I didn’t know what I was talking about because I’d never been in business before. Everybody said that no one would pay £150 a month for a supplement. It was only when we sold out of all the stock in the first week after the launch that I realised we were onto something. Then they all wanted to chat with us, but I took a £2m investment from Pembroke instead. I wanted to choose a partner that believed in me from the start.
My brother-in-law gave me the book Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson when I started reaching out to investors for funding. It’s about knowing when to stop pushing forward along a certain path. I think I wasted a lot of time in the beginning pitching to investors who just didn’t see the vision, who couldn’t picture what was inside the business plan. I wish I hadn’t wasted time on that. I should have moved on faster and self-funded. It would have saved me a good two years.
Jo Malone is a businesswoman whom I really admire. She took a candle that you’d have previously bought in a supermarket and put it in a different package, added a scent, and turned it into a lifestyle statement and status symbol for the home. It was genius. Similarly, I wanted Lyma to take supplements out of the kitchen cupboard by putting them into a beautiful hammered copper vessel. It’s not enough just to have the best formula.
I made a mistake with a copper supplier when Lyma first launched. We bought loads of vessels that came back and the quality wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t fit for purpose. They had to be discarded and returned to the supplier. I’ve still got one of the first copper vessels that wasn’t right on my desk as a reminder that quality is not a negotiation and that you can actually overcome anything – even things that seem like the end of the world at the time. Every mistake teaches you an invaluable lesson. Every single rejection has made success more meaningful.
You wouldn’t cross the road when there was a huge truck hurtling towards you. Similarly, I don’t take risks with my money. If you’ve worked all your life to get somewhere, why would you do that? So, I don’t invest in stocks and shares. I’m the type of person who will be very happy to have a five per cent yield and not risk anything. I didn’t see remortgaging my house as a risk because I knew that if worst came to worst, I could sell all the stock I had.
I knew my life had changed when the company was first valued at £100m. I’ll always remember that moment, and the realisation that I’d created something that was of incredible value. I grew up in a modest family. My father was a solicitor and my mum was a magistrate and a housewife. I had five siblings and we didn’t have a flash life. We were entertained by board games and the TV, rather than anything flamboyant.
It’s safe to say that I’m not a scientist. I left school with no qualifications and went through clearing to get into a polytechnic university. School wasn’t something that lent itself to the way my brain works. I couldn’t ingest anything in a biology lesson, but I can easily understand a story that a scientist tells me. Lyma works with an incredible group of laser scientists, geneticists, surgeons, dermatologists and longevity professors, who all have their part to play in the engineering of our lasers. They’re experts in their fields. I add to how the products and the brand look, which is within my skill set.
Letting go of people who were with me when we launched the business has been tough. I treat Lyma almost like a family-run business, so that’s been the hardest part for me. You can’t be wedded to everyone; you’re not going to work together forever. People who were right at the start-up stage of the business might not be right for the next stage. Still, personally, I find that quite upsetting – but that’s the sad reality of growth as a company.
The best purchase I ever made was my first Chanel 2.55 handbag. It’s pretty trivial, but it makes me so happy. I got it for my 40th birthday. I have these possessions that look nice but make me feel something, too. Like a Cartier love bangle makes me think about when I had my child. It makes me feel grounded. You can’t take enjoyment away from purchases or the emotions out of life, or it becomes meaningless. Then you just become a computer.
Lucy Goff is a champion of FFinc Forward Faster Accelerator 100 – a UK-based business accelerator programme designed to help female-founded companies scale their growth faster, which was launched in September 2025. For more information, go to ffinc.co
