AKT (pronounced “act”) was born from a very real need, one that exists not only in the intensity of theatre life, but on stages as different as an Olympic stadium, a hospital ward, or an ordinary Monday morning commute. Just as every performer on stage plays a vital, supporting role, so does every ingredient carefully cast into The Haze, an alcohol-free deodorising body mist with a proper ensemble that creates a scene-stealing fragrance built to keep your performance fresh, no matter where it takes place or how long the show goes on. Each mist doesn’t just smell good; it sets a scene, turning something as ordinary as a body mist into something distinctive, immersive and entirely its own.
We sat down with Andy and Ed for an in-depth chat about all things AKT.
How did it all start?
Ed: We met while performing in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical at the Aldwych Theatre in London’s West End. At the time, we were doing eight shows a week, wearing the same costumes, under very hot lights, running up and down five flights of stairs to the dressing rooms, then going to rehearsals, auditions, dance class, the gym – we were always on the go.
Andy: It was hot, sweaty and, let’s be honest, pretty smelly. Nothing we tried was really working. Antiperspirants stained our clothes and costumes, and the natural deodorants available at the time were very much “bottom shelf health store” products, which should ummm… remain on the bottom shelf.
Ed: The real turning point was when I was performing in A Chorus Line at The London Palladium and a co-star told me, mid-show, that I “f***ing stink”. Devastating. Iconic? But, useful feedback. Feedback which has changed my life for the better.
So we started making our own deodorant balm in the kitchen. We didn’t intend to start a business. It was just fun at first, making batches, researching ingredients, testing, tweaking, and writing notes down on paper. This was before AI, so we had to use ACTUAL notebooks like Victorian scientists.
Andy: We began giving it to fellow performers to try, and they loved it. In 2018, after a chance meeting with Sam Farmer, actress Caroline Quentin’s husband and a cosmetic brand owner, we were encouraged to give it a go properly.
Ed: We launched a Kickstarter and handed out a sample to every performer in a West End production with a little leaflet asking them to try it and, if they loved it, to post about it. We set what felt like a very ambitious target of £15,000 and ended up raising around £55,000 with over 3,000 orders.
Andy: At which point the kitchen was no longer a suitable manufacturing facility. And I don’t think our flatmate would have wanted to wear a hairnet every time he wanted to make a coffee.
The West End community helped turn your original kitchen idea into a huge success. As AKT grows internationally, how do you retain that feeling of an ensemble rather than becoming another polished but impersonal beauty company?
Andy: The crowd is the foundation of AKT. We have over 1,400 investors, many of whom come from the creative community, including West End performers. We’ve also just launched a new crowdfunding round on Republic, so that community is still very much part of the story.
Ed: We will never lose those theatre roots. Everything we do has a theatrical nod, whether that’s in our copy, our product names, our values or the way we think about ‘performance’ of using the product. We still bump into performers in the street who tell us they’re investors, which is always amazing.
Andy: We also hear stories of new graduates entering the industry and asking, “Do we get AKT now?” That is wild to us. The idea that AKT has become part of that performer kit is really special.
Ed: But as well as being used in theatres all over the UK and Broadway, we’ve crossed over onto every “stage” from Olympic athletes to doctors and nurses. And that means a lot. If it works for people doing eight shows a week, in Olympic stadiums, doing brain surgery(!), it can probably handle a Monday morning commute.
Andy: Internally, we try to keep that ensemble feeling too. One of our brand values is “always in rehearsal”, which means we collaborate, test, try, listen, and keep improving. We want the office to feel like a creative rehearsal room, not a corporate machine.
Ed: But by the time the curtain goes up, everyone still needs to know their lines and steps. It’s creative, but it’s still disciplined. The show – whatever it is – has to be a hit.
Andy: We also love employing people with performance backgrounds. Our whole customer service team are all actors, and some have moved into bigger roles across the business: PR, partnerships, even HR. Performers are incredible people to work with. They’re resilient, collaborative and usually very good at pretending everything is fine when it absolutely is not!
AKT began because existing deodorants could not survive eight-show weeks in the West End. What did you identify that convinced you The Haze genuinely needed to exist?
Ed: When we developed the Deodorant Balm, fragrance was always a main focus. We didn’t just want to create something that worked. We wanted it to smell beautiful. Not like teenage boys. Proper fine fragrance (said in a very Northern accent).
Andy: And not dupes either, like so many body care brands out there. We wanted original, interesting, transportive fragrances that created a world.
Ed: When we first briefed our perfumer, we had no idea how beauty brands normally write fragrance briefs, so we wrote little scripts and scene descriptions instead. We would describe feelings, characters, places and atmospheres – things like “la dolce vita”, “restlessness”, “joie de vivre” – rather than just listing notes we wanted to explore.
Andy: Our perfumer still says our briefs are their favourite, which we cling to during difficult weeks.
Ed: Because the fragrances became such a big part of AKT, customers kept asking us to make them available as fragrance products. But the question was always: how do we make that feel truly AKT?
Andy: Then we had a very specific train experience.
Ed: A very hot train. No air conditioning. Someone nearby was using a well-known body mist on their underarms, and suddenly the carriage smelled like vanilla, caramel and sautéed onion.
Andy: A complex gourmand. Not one we’ll be launching.
Ed: That gave us the idea. Body mists are often used to refresh, but most just add fragrance. They don’t really address odour. So we thought, what if we combined our fine fragrances with deodorising actives and skin-supporting ingredients?
Andy: That became The Haze: an alcohol-free deodorising body mist that you can spray all over the body, with amazing AKT fragrance, but also real deodorising performance.
Body mist can suggest something light and largely cosmetic, whereas The Haze neutralises odour rather than simply covers it. How do you explain the difference to someone encountering it for the first time?
Andy: We’d say: if you love our fragrances, mist yourself all over with them. But if you also need a little refresh during the day, The Haze has been designed for that too.
Ed: It’s for after the gym, after a stressful work day, before dinner, between shows on a two-show day, after commuting. Anywhere you might want to feel fresh again.
Andy: A traditional body mist is usually just fragrance and alcohol. Lovely, but often quite fleeting. The Haze gives you that beautiful fragrance moment, but it also contains deodorising actives to help tackle odour rather than just spraying over it.
Ed: It doesn’t replace our Deodorant Balm, which is still your main daily deodorant. Think of The Haze as your all-over body refresh. Your top-up. Your little “interval reset”.
Andy: Or your emergency “I have been on the Central line during a heatwave” spray.
What is the deodorising active actually doing on the skin, and what was the most difficult technical challenge in making it effective without alcohol?
Ed: The deodorising active is Deolya™, which is derived from meadowsweet. It works enzymatically on the bacteria on the skin that cause odour, helping to prevent smells from developing rather than simply masking them.
It’s also gentle on the skin, which was important to us. Alcohol can be very effective in fragrance because it evaporates quickly and helps the fragrance disperse, but it can also be drying or irritating for some people.
Andy: The hardest part of making an alcohol-free fragrance spray is the skin feel. Without alcohol, there’s a risk of the product feeling too wet, too oily or too heavy.
Ed: Getting that balance right took a long time. We wanted it to feel like an alcohol-based fine fragrance spray, but without actually using alcohol. I’m really proud of where we got to.
Andy: There were many, many tests. Many arms were sprayed. Many opinions were shared. Some (looking at Ed) more useful than others.
The formula contains niacinamide, holy basil, prebiotics, panthenol, and allantoin. Which ingredient made the greatest difference during development, and which proved the hardest to formulate into such a fine mist?
Andy: They all play a different role, so it’s difficult to choose one favourite child.
Ed: Niacinamide, panthenol, and allantoin help support and condition the skin. Prebiotics support the good bacteria on the skin, while holy basil and Deolya™ help with the deodorising side of the formula.
Andy: It’s a proper ensemble cast. No one is just waving in the background giving “rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb”.
Ed: The fine mist itself really came down to the atomiser. That was one of the hardest things to get right. Atomisers are incredibly temperamental. Some spray too aggressively, some create large droplets, some break too easily, and many are made mostly from plastic, which we wanted to avoid where possible.
Andy: Natural fragrances can also be tricky with atomisers, especially citrus compounds. We learned more about spray mechanisms than two musical theatre performers are ever expected to know.
Ed: The final atomiser gives a really beautiful, ultra-fine mist, which was essential. With a body mist, the sensory experience matters so much. It has to feel effortless.
Your independent trial found that 82% of participants experienced up to six hours of fragrance. What did the testing reveal about how scent and deodorising performance vary between different bodies and what did you learn from the remaining 18%?
Ed: We didn’t want to create just another body mist that smells great for a few seconds and then disappears. So we were thrilled that 82% of participants experienced up to six hours of fragrance.
Andy: That was a big moment for us. We wanted The Haze to feel light, but still have proper staying power.
Ed: What testing always reminds you is that every body is different. Fragrance behaves differently depending on skin chemistry, temperature, clothing, how much someone applies, and even the particular scent itself.
Andy: Some fragrance structures naturally last longer than others. Citrus-heavy fragrances tend to be more sparkling and bright, but they don’t always last as long as fragrances with deeper base notes like woods, amber, leather or tonka.
Ed: People often think longevity is simply about the quality of ingredients, but it’s also about the percentage of fragrance used, the chemical make-up of the fragrance, the formula it sits in and the legal limits around where that product is applied. There are a LOT of regulations around fragrance. Rightly so.
Andy: The remaining 18% were important too, because they remind you that no product behaves exactly the same on every person. Bodies are individual. Slightly annoying for product development, but wonderful for humanity.
You have launched The Haze in all five AKT fragrance scenes. Did those fragrances behave differently when translated from a balm into an all-over mist, and was there one that surprised you?
Andy: Yes, completely. And it’s such a good question because people often assume fragrance is just a straight one-to-one transfer between products.
Ed: But the base formula changes everything. The same fragrance can smell different in a balm, a wash, a mist or a cream. We usually start with a direct version just to see what happens, but then the fragrance often needs to be adjusted.
Andy: Halcyon Summers was the big surprise. In the first version, it went strangely smoky. Almost cigar-like. Which was not quite the fresh mint, pomelo and tomato vine world we were going for. Less “summer garden”, more “man in a linen suit making poor choices”.
Ed: So we had to modify it to work properly in The Haze base. That’s the balance of fragrance development – it’s creative, but it’s also chemistry and regulation. You’re trying to stay true to the original scene, but each format needs its own version.
Andy: I love where Halcyon Summers ended up in The Haze. The mint really sings, and the tomato leaf note feels so fresh and unique.
Ed: It’s one of those fragrances that reminds us why we love doing this. It doesn’t smell generic. It creates a scene.
You have built the company as a double act. What are each of you naturally better at and what have you learned about each other since starting AKT?
Ed: When we first started, I was more focused on the brand side – visuals, tone of voice, creative direction – and Andy was more focused on operations, finance and supply. Then we very quickly realised we should swap.
Andy: A classic casting reshuffle.
Ed: The team is much bigger now, so our roles have evolved again. I spent a lot of the early years deep in finance, operations, legal and supply, but now I’m Chief Product Officer and lead the product team. Andy is Chief Brand Officer and leads the brand team.
Andy: And then on top of that, we’re also co-creative directors and co-founders, which is its own full-time job. We’re the faces of the brand, we speak to investors, partners, press, customers, the team – it’s basically three roles in one.
Ed: AND OUR EYE BAGS ARE FURIOUS.
Andy: What I’ve learned about Ed is that he is very methodical, logical and great at detail. He can hold so many moving parts in his head, and somehow remember a packaging decision from four years ago that no one else remembers. He’s very academic.
Ed: And Andy is a true creative. He has an incredible instinct for the brand – how things should look, sound and feel. He knows when something is AKT and when it isn’t. I love watching him get inspired.
Andy: We’re different, but that’s the point. We challenge each other, and we’ve had to learn when to push, when to listen and when to say, “Let’s not talk about deodorant at dinner.”
Ed: We are still working on that last one.
Performing teaches discipline, rejection, collaboration and how to read an audience. Which of those skills has been most valuable in business and what habits from your acting careers did you have to unlearn?
Andy: We always talk about how magical performers are. The skill set you develop in training and throughout your career is extraordinary, and performers don’t always realise how valuable it is outside of the industry.
Ed: Discipline, resilience, collaboration, problem-solving, being able to lead and follow, thinking on your feet because “the show must go on”. All of that translates into business.
Andy: Performing also teaches you that everyone in a production matters. The show doesn’t happen without the cast, crew, stage management, wardrobe, wigs, lighting, sound, front of house. Everyone. We think about AKT in the same way. Every person in the team contributes to the “show”.
Ed: Being able to speak confidently has also been invaluable, whether that’s in front of investors, on panels, with retail partners or with the team. Acting teaches you how to read a room and communicate clearly.
Andy: In terms of what we had to unlearn, probably the idea that you always have to push through no matter what. In theatre, sometimes “the show must go on” is to the detriment of your health. In business, sometimes the healthier thing is to stop, reassess and not run yourself into the ground.
Ed: We also learned a lot from people in the performing industry about what not to do. We’ve experienced some incredibly difficult working environments: power trips, hierarchy, feeling the bottom of the ladder. We never want to build AKT like that. We’re not dictatorial founders. We want people to enjoy what they do. We want to enjoy what we do!
What are your top three musicals and why?
Ed: For both of us, West Side Story has to be up there. It’s just extraordinary – the music, the choreography, the storytelling. Andy played Tony in 2019 and was meant to reprise the role in 2020, but annoyingly Covid cancelled the production on day two of rehearsals.
Andy: But I guess without that we wouldn’t have launched a body care brand. When life gives you lemons and all that.
Ed: For me, Dear Evan Hansen is another favourite. I love listening to it. The songs are so moving. And A Chorus Line will always have a special place in my heart. The steps never leave you.
Andy: Nor do the knee injuries!
Ed: Very true.
Andy: I love Miss Saigon. I always wanted to play Chris. And Little Shop of Horrors is just so much fun. I did it as a kid in amateur dramatics and I’m still obsessed with it today.
Ed: So between us, that’s more than three.
Andy: Rules are made to be broken.
What is next for AKT?
Ed: We’re currently in the middle of our “Final Encore” fundraising round, which goes live to the public on Republic on 28 August. From the beginning, AKT has been built by our supporters, so we wanted to create an opportunity for our community, customers and existing investors to participate.
Andy: It’s called “Final Encore” because we don’t expect to do another raise like this. It feels like one last opportunity for the people who have supported AKT from the beginning to be part of the next stage.
Ed: We’re also incredibly grateful that Felix Capital, our capital partner, has already committed a further £2 million to this raise.
Andy: Beyond that, the focus is growth – in the UK, US, EU and Australia. We have amazing retail partners, including Sephora in the US and Space NK in the UK, and we want to keep supporting that growth properly.
Ed: Product development is also a huge focus. We want to keep creating innovative products and fragrances that feel distinctly AKT. I feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface of what the brand can become.
Andy: AKT started with deodorant, but we’re not just a deodorant brand anymore. We’re ‘The Personal Performance Company’.
Ed: The aim is to build a great British heritage brand known for quality, performance-first products and incredible, unique fragrances.
Andy: With a theatrical wink, obviously. Otherwise, what were the three years of training for?
To discover more, visit: aktlondon.com
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All imagery courtesy of AKT.