By Charlie Terry, Founder of CEEK Marketing
When Grace Beverley’s activewear brand TALA reported revenue growth of 19% to £19.8m alongside an operating loss of £2.6m, the headlines were predictable. Losses widened. Profitability delayed. Expansion questioned.
Yet this framing reveals something deeper about how we discuss modern brand-building in Britain and it risks undermining the very businesses capable of defining our next generation of consumer brands.
The problem with headline “losses”
The conversation around TALA exemplifies a growing issue in UK business coverage. Venture-backed brands, particularly those that are founder or creator led are increasingly judged through a narrow profit and loss lens that misunderstands how modern consumer businesses scale.
What is often presented as financial distress is calculated capital deployment. Investing in market share, infrastructure and long-term brand equity rather than extracting short-term profit. This distinction matters. When losses are reported without context, they distort how scale-ups are evaluated and how ambition is perceived.
What the numbers actually say
Look beyond the headline and the picture changes. TALA maintained a 58% gross margin while completing a £5m Series B funding round. The business opened flagship stores in Carnaby Street and Westfield London, expanded wholesale partnerships with retailers such as Anthropologie and END., and navigated the growing complexity of US tariffs.
These are not the decisions of a failing business. They are the decisions of a business making deliberate choices about where and when to invest.
Yet media narratives too often default to treating “losses” as problems in isolation, rather than asking the more meaningful question: what is this business building, and why now?
A digital marketing lens on growth-stage finance
From a digital marketing perspective, the signals are clear. TALA is converting brand awareness into infrastructure.
Physical retail creates high-impact offline touchpoints that deepen customer relationships, improve conversion and reduce long-term customer acquisition costs. Wholesale partnerships extend distribution and credibility beyond owned channels; Drapers reports that TALA’s wholesale revenues grew eightfold year-on-year.
Even the much-scrutinised US expansion, despite tariff headwinds, placed the brand within the world’s largest activewear market. At TALA’s current scale, even modest percentage growth represents meaningful revenue. This is textbook market-share capture strategy, not financial mismanagement.
Why founder-led brands face a harsher test
A striking double standard emerges when founder-led brands are compared with traditional corporates.
Gymshark, now valued at over £1bn, experienced several consecutive years of declining profits while revenues climbed past £600m. Founder Ben Francis was explicit that this was strategic reinvestment into omnichannel retail, digital infrastructure and US expansion. The press largely framed this as sensible long-term thinking.
Founder-led brands like TALA, by contrast, are often treated as anomalies. When a creator becomes a founder, there is an implicit expectation that the business should bootstrap indefinitely and deliver immediate profitability. Traditional growth playbooks, raise capital, expand aggressively, build infrastructure, then optimise margins, are somehow deemed inappropriate for brands born on Instagram.
This distinction is commercially illogical and strategically short-sighted.
Why this matters now
The timing of this is critical. UK venture capital deal volumes reportedly fell by around 13% in 2025, with overall funding declining by approximately 17%. Against this backdrop, British brands face a narrowing window to establish defensible market positions before international competitors with deeper pockets and longer time horizons pull further ahead.
Grace Beverley’s transparent response to the coverage around TALA’s financials has opened a necessary conversation about how modern brand-building is judged. The business is growing revenue, maintaining healthy margins, securing institutional backing, expanding distribution and investing in long-term infrastructure. That these decisions generate operating losses during a growth phase is neither surprising nor concerning – it is strategic.
Rethinking how we judge modern brands
Perhaps it is time for British business media to adopt more sophisticated frameworks for evaluating consumer scale-ups. Not every business needs to be immediately profitable. Not every loss signal failure. Sometimes strategic investment requires patience, long-term thinking and the courage to build something substantial rather than extracting what is immediately available.
As we head into 2026, founder-led British brands face enough genuine challenges, from tariffs to macroeconomic pressure, without legitimate growth strategies being mischaracterised as financial distress. If we want Britain to produce globally competitive consumer brands, we must recognise that building them takes capital, time and strategic boldness.
The alternative is a generation of under-capitalised, under-ambitious businesses that play it safe and ultimately lose to those that didn’t.
