Antonia Philp was working as a paediatric nurse when, in 2010, she was forced to take a fortnight off because of her red, cracked and bleeding hands. “It was from the constant hand washing and sanitising required to keep our patients safe,” she explains.
Philp tried “countless hand creams — everything in Boots, all the samples from occupational health — to sort them out, but got nowhere.” The heavy medical ones took time to sink in, and on hospital shifts she had no time to wait. “I needed something super-effective but also lightweight that provided a long-lasting effect — so my husband and I started to research the problem to understand what could be done.”
Said husband is Jonny Philp, who was working for a sports nutrition distribution business focused on cyclists’ electrolyte drinks. His background spanned various entrepreneurial businesses including one making iPad accessories. “I’m not a chemist or scientist, but I love to know how things work,” he says.Fast forward 13 years and their Nursem hand cream, designed to protect skin that is very regularly washed and sanitised, is a must-have for thousands, with sales exceeding £2 million this year. The duo have also given away more than 600,000 free tubes to NHS nurses and midwives.
“We were pretty disciplined and didn’t jump straight to hand cream as the solution at the start,” Jonny says. “We read medical reports and White Papers on contact dermatitis to understand the physiology, then started to work on a formulation.”
We knew we had something special when nurses from other wards and even other hospitals and trusts started to get in touch to ask for a sample
In 2011, Nursem joined a funded accelerator, Science City, who tested their product to ensure it was safe for hospital wards. They opted to use a factory that makes pharmaceuticals “to make sure the facility worked to the highest standards,” says Jonny.
“We put in about £15,000 — money left to me by my gran — to develop the cream. The accelerator helped fund our first pallet [of 10,000 tubes], then we used the money from our first batch of stock to buy more.”
Commercial success may have been slow — revenues were still £145,000 in 2020 — but evidence-wise, it wasn’t: “In the very early days when we were testing samples with nursing colleagues, Antonia became known as the ‘handcream hero’,” Jonny says. “We knew we had something special when nurses from other wards and even other hospitals and trusts started to get in touch to ask for a sample. That was the moment we realised just how many others needed help with this issue.”
Antonia, who is 38, still works three days a week as a specialist paediatric transplant nurse in Newcastle, joining Jonny, 39, every Thursday and Friday at Nursem’s headquarters in Shoreditch. The office is in agency Mother London’s HQ, having given a minority stake in Nursem to Broody London, a marketing agency aimed at entrepreneurs and based within Mother London, in 2017.
The couple both describe their big break as getting onto the shelves of Boots in March 2019. Having survived on a shoestring self-funded budget for the first few years of the business, they secured £300,000 angel investment in 2019 to superpower this national launch: “you only get one chance to launch with someone this big.” The initial order was to stock 400 stores, around £20,000 worth of cream.
Today Nursem is in almost 1000 Boots stores and spans three products — hand cream in a tube and pump, and a skin-fix intensive cream. These cost from £10 for a tube up to £20 for a large pump bottle. The company pledges that for every product purchased, it will give a month’s worth of free hand cream to a nurse or midwife.
Turnover rose to £1.5 million in 2021, and jumped again to £2.5 million last year — when Jonny also had to take six months off from the business to have a brain tumour removed. “It was discovered just after we got married in 2016,” he says. “I did say to Antonia she should have kept the receipt and sent me back. But actually it worked as a kick in the backside to get on with Nursem, and just do the stuff that previously would have scared me.”
He had surgery last September, and took six months off the business with an MD at the helm. “Every cloud has a silver lining though,” he adds. “It just reinforced how lucky we are to have the NHS and it’s truly incredible staff.”
New products include a lip balm and body lotion, and the couple also want to grow Nursem in the US and Europe. “We’ll keep making things as long as customers ask for them.”
Nursem is currently looking for £750,000 backing via Crowdcube.
