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How to Build a Premium Brand: Kate Prince on Growing Ancient + Brave

Why Building a Premium Brand Starts Long Before You Scale

At our latest Changemakers event, we welcomed Kate Prince, founder and CEO of Ancient + Brave, to Virgin HQ for an honest conversation about building a premium brand, earning customer trust and staying true to your values as you grow.

Ancient + Brave launched in 2018 and has since become an award-winning wellness brand known for its science-led collagen, functional supplements and nootropic blends.

Last year, the business turned over £20 million.

But Kate's story isn't one of overnight success. It took four years to reach the first £1 million, including long stretches spent building the business from her kitchen table.

What Ancient + Brave did have from the beginning, was a very clear idea of the brand it wanted to become.

Finding Creativity in Unexpected Places

Before becoming a founder, Kate trained as a solicitor before moving into media law and eventually working at Endemol across television formats including reality TV and documentaries.

Working in television changed the way she thought about creativity.

Kate realised that creativity doesn't belong exclusively to designers or marketers. Whether you're working in legal, finance or operations, approaching problems differently can help a business cut through unnecessary processes, make decisions faster and challenge the way things have always been done.

Her first experience of building a brand came later, when she co-founded tea company Prince & Sons with her husband.

Kate described the joy she found in creating its packaging, colours and the world around the product. The experience sparked an interest in formulation, storytelling and brand-building that would eventually lead to Ancient + Brave.

Creating Ancient + Brave

The idea for Ancient + Brave emerged from Kate's growing interest in nutrition and wellness.

After taking a nutrition course, she became frustrated by how complicated wellness could feel. She saw people juggling long lists of supplements and ingredients and thought there had to be a better way to make wellness both effective and enjoyable.

At the time, Kate was importing collagen from America because she couldn't find the product she wanted in the UK.

She spotted an opportunity to create something different. But the product was only part of it.

From the outset, Kate wanted Ancient + Brave to combine ancient rituals and ingredients with modern science and innovation. That thinking even shaped the name.

"Ancient" represented ingredients and practices with long histories behind them. "Brave" represented innovation, science and looking forward.

The team obsessed over the details, from the name to the packaging and visual identity.

Kate openly admits they "really overthought it" - a confession that helped the Virgin StartUp Community founders in the room feel a little more sane.

Looking back, that attention to detail gave the brand a world it could continue building on as it grew.

Building a Premium Brand Without a Huge Marketing Budget

Kate started Ancient + Brave with £70,000 of her own savings.

That had to cover everything from creating the brand and website to producing the first run of four products.

There wasn't a huge advertising budget, a big agency or an established direct-to-consumer team waiting in the wings. So Kate focused on something more fundamental: finding people who genuinely connected with what Ancient + Brave stood for.

The brand honed in on niche communities interested in practices such as wild swimming, sauna rituals and cacao ceremonies. And because they aligned so authentically, those communities naturally began sharing the products and telling the story themselves.

That word of mouth helped Ancient + Brave build credibility and trust without trying to buy attention from day one.

Word of mouth can sometimes feel like an impossible marketing tactic to achieve, because it is supposed to happen without the brand around. And yet, Kate shared the intentionality behind how she found it.

The business now spends significantly more on paid marketing, but Kate believes none of it would work without the storytelling and customer connection underneath it.

Brand Is More Than Beautiful Packaging

Ancient + Brave's distinctive packaging is an important part of its identity, but Kate was clear that building a strong brand goes much deeper than design.

For her, brand is messaging. It's customer connection. It's community. And, crucially, it's trust.

The product still has to deliver. Kate described Ancient + Brave as being obsessed with product quality.

But the brand gives customers something bigger to connect with.

That has become particularly important in wellness, where brands aren't simply asking customers to buy a product. They're often asking people to trust them with decisions about what they put into their bodies.

Educating a Market Takes Time

When Kate began talking about collagen in 2018, it wasn't an easy sell.

She remembers discussing it at a dinner party and being told that it sounded disgusting and nobody was going to buy it.

Rather than abandon the idea, Ancient + Brave kept educating.

The brand focused on ingredients, rituals and the wider lifestyle around its products, gradually helping customers understand a category that was still unfamiliar to many people.

Kate says market research now shows Ancient + Brave has helped grow the collagen market in the UK. That education continues today.

Kate made experienced nutrition experts some of her earliest hires because she wanted the brand to communicate with genuine authority. The company has since built a much larger nutrition team and invested almost £1 million into research, including independent trials and longer-term research projects.

For Kate, building a premium wellness brand isn't about making the biggest claims, it's about earning the right to be trusted.

Your Values Have to Show Up in Your Decisions

Kate encouraged founders to get clear on their mission, vision, and values early.

Not because every startup needs an enormous business plan. In fact, Kate admitted she's never written one.

Values matter because they help you make decisions when there isn't an obvious answer.

Ancient + Brave is a B Corp, is Climate Neutral certified and commits 2% of its annual revenue to environmental and social causes.

But Kate's approach to values also shows up in smaller commercial decisions. If a product or piece of packaging can't be created to the standard the team wants at a viable price, Kate would rather not launch it than compromise.

Ancient + Brave has grown rapidly and profitably while maintaining those principles.

As Kate put it, "you can't afford to not be purpose driven."

Protecting Your Premium Positioning in Retail

Kate also shared a valuable lesson for consumer founders hoping to get stocked by major retailers.

Distribution can bring volume and visibility, but that doesn't mean every retail opportunity is good for your brand.

Ancient + Brave spent years resisting opportunities with Holland & Barrett because Kate wasn't comfortable with promotional mechanics such as three-for-two offers that she believed could devalue the brand. So, she waited until they could negotiate a relationship that worked for Ancient + Brave's positioning.

Her advice to founders was to understand exactly what a retailer expects before signing:

How often will they want to discount your product?
What marketing contribution will they expect?
And how could those promotions affect your own direct-to-consumer sales?

Getting onto the shelf is only part of the job. You still have to protect the value customers attach to what's sitting on it.

Kate also cautioned founders against becoming too dependent on one marketing channel.

Ancient + Brave has built a substantial social community, but the brand also uses newsletters, partnerships, collaborations and other digital channels to reach customers.

In its earlier years, product gifting was particularly effective. Kate's approach was simple: put the product into the hands of people who genuinely seemed likely to connect with it, without demanding a post in return.

One of those organic relationships eventually came from Davina McCall, who publicly shared that she used Ancient + Brave collagen - before there was a paid ambassador relationship.

For Kate, complementary brand collaborations have also been an effective way to reach new audiences without relying entirely on paid advertising.

The principle remains the same as it was around the kitchen table: find people and communities whose values genuinely overlap with yours.

Scaling the Business Without Losing the Brand

Growth didn't happen immediately.

Kate described the first four years as relentless. Much of the early journey was spent working alone from her kitchen table, problem-solving through challenges including Brexit and Covid.

At one point, Ancient + Brave experienced 700% growth in a year. That created a different challenge: maintaining the culture, standards and purpose of the business while everything around it accelerated.

One decision Kate made early was to invest in expertise. Experienced nutrition specialists were among her first hires because education and compliance were central to what she wanted Ancient + Brave to represent.

As the company has grown, those principles have grown with it - rather than being added afterwards.

The brand is now one of the UK's fastest-growing businesses, but Kate's focus remains on the same foundations: product, trust, storytelling, community and values.

You Don't Have to Be the Face of Your Brand

Kate also challenged another increasingly common assumption about brand-building: that the founder has to become the brand.

She hasn't.

Kate describes herself as an outgoing introvert and has deliberately chosen not to build Ancient + Brave around her personal profile.

In a wellness business, there was also an important credibility consideration. Ancient + Brave decided that people speaking authoritatively about its products should have the appropriate medical, clinical, dietetic or nutritional expertise.

So, rather than being the face of the brand, Kate has created space for experts, customers and members of the community to tell the story.

Her experience is an important reminder for founders who feel uncomfortable with the pressure to constantly appear on camera.

There isn't one formula for building a strong brand.

Final Thoughts: What Founders Can Learn

Ancient + Brave shows that premium positioning isn't simply about charging more or making something look expensive. It's built through thousands of decisions that reinforce what your brand represents.

A few lessons from Kate's journey stood out:

Be clear about what you want your brand to stand for from the beginning.
Invest in the details that make your brand distinctive.
Build trust before spending heavily on acquiring attention.
Find communities that naturally connect with what you're creating.
If your category is unfamiliar, commit to educating rather than simply selling.
Protect your pricing and positioning when entering retail.
Don't compromise your values simply because an opportunity promises faster growth.
Avoid becoming dependent on one marketing channel.
And don't assume you have to become the face of your business to build a powerful brand.

Ancient + Brave started with £70,000, four products and Kate working from her kitchen table.

The business looks very different today. But the principles behind the brand haven't had to.

Come to Our Next Changemakers Event

Changemakers takes place every month at Virgin HQ and is free to attend.

It's a chance to hear the stories behind growing businesses, ask founders the questions you actually want answered and meet other people navigating the highs, lows and messy middle of building something.

Join the Virgin StartUp Community to stay updated on upcoming Changemaker events and secure your place.

See you there!

- Written by Nina Evangeli, Virgin StartUp