From ambition to strategy: How the founders of Love Tea and Bread Beauty Supply are building legacy brands

The vast majority of business owners don’t start out chasing scale. And yet, for a growing demographic of founders, scale is playing a crucial role in their definition of long-term success.

According to Xero’s It’s Your Business report, the top reason Australians become business owners is to be their own boss (43%), followed by prioritising lifestyle (31%) and earning more money (29%).

But there’s a cohort wired very differently. The report uncovered three distinct archetypes – lifestyle entrepreneurs (47%), situational founders (23%) and ambitious achievers, the 30% for whom success means accelerated growth, building both wealth and a beloved brand.

Love Tea co-founder Damien Amos and Bread Beauty Supply founder Maeva Heim both fit squarely into that last category – though what legacy means to each of them looks quite different.

The path from students to a 20-year-old brand

Amos (pictured above) co-founded Love Tea in 2006 with Emma Watson while the pair were studying naturopathy in Melbourne. Watson’s housemates couldn’t get enough of her chai and Amos came on board to transform that early feedback into a business.

“[Our success metric] was launching a product as uni students with zero experience, and actually getting it into people’s hands,” Amos says. “Now celebrating 20 years, success is defined with how we innovate, progress and evolve as a brand.”

For Love Tea, legacy comes down to what Amos calls “People, Planet, Profit” – ethical partnerships with growers, environmental responsibility and a sustainable business that’s built to last. That philosophy is backed by the company’s 1% for the Planet commitment and fair-trade supply chain.

Having such a conscious approach to business has carried Love Tea into New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong and the UK – although Amos is candid about the realities of going global.

“It’s harder than you think,” he says. “There are so many subtleties in each market, and [in some places] like Japan, the differences are monumental. But if done well it can be such a great way to expand your business and brand awareness.”

Building a global beauty brand from Australia

Maeva Heim launched Bread Beauty Supply in 2020 out of frustration with the overcomplicated routines marketed to women with textured hair. The brand’s premise was radical simplicity – hair care should be a staple, never a chore.

More than five years on, Bread is stocked in Sephora across the US and Australia – with Heim the first Australian founder accepted into the Sephora Accelerate program.

“In the beginning, success was very scrappy,” Heim says. “It was as simple as, ‘Can we launch something people genuinely love, and can we sell enough to keep going without running out of money?’”

Today, her eyes are instead trained on “durability and systems” – think solid margins, cultural relevance, staying power.

Heim’s growth strategy for the next few years is “focused expansion rather than fast expansion”, growing deliberately across product, retail and geography only in ways that will strengthen the core brand.

The 17% question

Xero’s report found that only 17% of Australian entrepreneurs aspire to scale internationally – a number that surprises Heim.

“Australia can feel far away from everything, and that distance can make global expansion feel bigger and riskier than it actually is,” she says. “But for certain categories, especially beauty, the local market often isn’t big enough to build a venture-scale business.”

Her advice? Think globally from day one, even if you have to execute in phases.

Amos echoes her sentiment, urging founders to spend lots of time researching their target markets and forging strong local partnerships before dipping a toe.

Both founders also stressed the value of advisors. With 86% of entrepreneurs relying on advisors, and more than half of that group reporting a revenue increase in the past year – compared to 38% of those without one – it’s a no-brainer.

Getting the backend right

Both businesses say that all-encompassing financial visibility has been essential to scaling with confidence. Heim points to real-time cash flow tracking, automated reconciliations and integrations with inventory and e-commerce systems as the most valuable tools.

“Syncing sales and inventory data directly into our accounting stack means we can see profitability by channel and SKU much faster,” she says. “Real-time data without bottlenecks is a game changer for a brand our size.”

Amos says that Xero helped the Love Tea team learn the financial fundamentals of the business and create processes that gave the whole team more confidence in their roles.

It’s a reminder that ambition alone isn’t a strategy. With just 51% of business owners setting long-term goals and only 31% having an endgame in mind, the founders who will be able to build lasting brands are the ones who are consolidating their vision with the systems to back it up.

With the right teams and digital tools in place, the ‘ambitious achiever’ can execute a strategy that changes over time – but never loses what made people fall in love with the brand in the first place.

Find out what Xero can do for your small business here.