I paid £50 to start my teen side hustle – now it’s a multi-million-pound empire

TODAY Grace Beverley has a net worth of over £8million, but her business didn’t even exist a decade ago.

Now 27, the Tala and Shreddy founder started her side hustle as a teenager, by selling recipes online to her Instagram followers.

Grace, who’s from London, worked as an intern at IBM during her gap year between school and university.

She would wake up at 5am, go to the gym, work at IBM until the sunset, and post her recipes.

Then just 18, she spent her weekends batch-making meals for eight hours a day – to upload the following week.

The recipes were shared on Instagram for free but, after working full-time on an intern’s salary and having no time on the weekend to earn extra cash, Grace remembers thinking “I can’t continue to do this”.

On Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast, Grace recalled she was “completely burning myself out” and decided to start monetising her hard work.

Grace typed up all the recipes she’d ever made into two books – one for savoury meals and one for sweet foods.

She paid a friend of hers, a graphic design student, £50 to make the recipes into a PDF.

Then she created a Shopify account and flogged the PDFs for a fiver.

Grace, who had around 10,000 followers then, said she “didn’t think of it as a business at all” – just a way to make a few quid.

Fitness empire

Grace launched Shreddy, a fitness app while studying at the University of Oxford.

Speaking to CEO Today Magazine, the businesswoman said: “I wanted to help simplify people’s fitness journeys and create products that helped make what can be a daunting, confusing process a lot easier.

“I was in my first year at university, so I didn’t start in the same way I’d start a business now.

“I released a digital product at first, then went into physical products after we spotted a gap in the market for accessible, cute gym accessories that made your gym experience that much better, whilst allowing you to create an affordable portable gym.”

Grace added “she’d be lying” if she said starting a business at a young age hadn’t come with “challenges”, but she claimed the key was to hire “a powerhouse of young women from all different backgrounds.”

She admitted: “I’m sure I’ve also benefited hugely from being a privileged, Oxford-educated white woman. The importance for me is in highlighting these prejudices, and even going as far as to address my own unconscious biases I don’t even know I’ve had, and then talk about them online.”

Activewear launch

But Grace didn’t stop there.

In 2019 when she was 22, the entrepreneur decided to launch another business – an activewear brand called Tala.

The Instagram star was already making a name for herself as a fitness influencer with her @GracefitUK account.

In its first year, Grace made a whopping £6million in sales.

However, she counts the real launch of the business in April 2021, after she severed ties with her initial manufacturing partner and licenser.

She revealed to Vogue: “I haven’t talked about this much because at the time it was sensitive but having to rip it all down and start from scratch in order to build a brand with [longevity] was incredibly hard, it was incredibly expensive and incredibly tough emotionally. 

“It required a huge amount of conviction.”

The previous business partners had wanted Tala to be an influencer brand, with sales driven by Grace’s account and “viral drops”.

However, she hoped to build a long-lasting business model and invest in product innovation.

She added: “Being an influencer merch brand is fine and it has its value. But capping the brand’s growth at myself and my own reach, where being an influencer actually isn’t even what I want to do, wasn’t what I wanted for my future or for the brand.”

The relaunch paid off, as she received a £4.5million investment in 2022.

The key to Grace’s success

Grace told Fearne she has “categorically never been good [at]” any of the things that she has made money from – like building recipes and making clothes – but she knows she can “out-work” other people.

“I will put in the sheer effort and hours 10 times over, whatever direction that may be,” she added.

In addition to her businesses, she has also launched a book and podcast – both called Working Hard, Hardly Working.

Grace was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 Europe list in 2020.

She previously attended a £9,000-a-year nursery and St Paul’s Girls School in west London, getting A*, A, and B in her A-levels.

Her main tip for anyone wanting to start a side hustle is to ask themselves “How can [I] get more out of what [I’m] already doing?”

Despite growing her business on social media, Grace didn’t want her businesses to “become synonymous with myself” so deleted all her YouTube videos after graduating from uni.

“I don’t believe that social media is a good place for people pleasers,” she added.

She still receives some negative comments online and was slammed after launching The Productivity Method, which sells planners.

In October of last year, Grace was criticised for the expensive price of her digital planner: £42.

Her followers wondered how she could justify the price, thinking they were funding her extravagant lifestyle – she recently visited a luxury five-star hotel in the South of France which costs up to £1,224 per night, Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc.

Family legacy

Grace comes from a wealthy family too and is following in their very successful footsteps.

Her grandfather was the multimillionaire Sir Nigel Broackes, who founded Trafalgar House, one of the UK’s largest contracting businesses.

Her dad Peter runs a business consultancy and her mum Victoria works as a senior curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.