About - Brilliant Basics

Who we are

About Us

Full-service brand marketing & sales management for over-the-counter (OTC) medicines, medical devices, food supplements & cosmetics.

Our team

Penny Curtis

Brand and Marketing Management, OTC Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices

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Mission & values

Our mission is to help our clients build consumer-centric brands that thrive online and in retail.

Our values are to keep it simple, love the brand, be creative, be trustworthy, and be a friend to the environment.

“Brilliant Basics add real value to the strategic process and I would highly recommend Penny’s services. Penny is a consummate professional with significant networking skills with both colleagues and clients. Whilst working with Premiere Products Penny has managed some key commercial projects including: Freshu product development and the launch of our E-commerce website. She has a crucial ability to deliver on time and on budget.”

Peter Brown
Commercial, Innovations, International & Marketing Director.
Premier Products

“Penny has worked for Boehringer Ingelheim on a number of strategic and tactical projects across our consumer healthcare portfolio. Her thorough understanding of the healthcare environment always adds value to her work. Penny is at ease working cross-functionally with other colleagues in the BI UK brand, sales and regulatory teams to ensure that her final recommendations are actionable and in line with current guidelines. It has been a pleasure working with her as part of the team.”

Martina Gripp, Head of Marketing
Consumer Healthcare | Boehringer Ingelheim UK

Brilliant Basics and Penny Curtis have played an absolutely vital role for Dr.Dünner and our goal to establish our brand in the UK markets.

Penny has an amazing network, so we could right from the start rely on her for connecting us to the right marketing agencies, legal experts, and also basics like warehouse operators and forwarders.

Her comprehensive knowledge of the retail landscape helped us to have a clear picture of what investments were needed to be successful in the short and the long run and to avoid costly marketing mistakes.

Robert Bastong MD Dr.Dünner AG

Penny Curtis

Brand and Marketing Management, OTC Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices

Penny makes things happen and she has a proven track record of success across the UK and Ireland industry. Her award-winning career in OTC pharmaceutical marketing and selling includes working for Big Pharma giants Bayer Plc, Boehringer Ingelheim, and more recently HRA Pharma (now part of Perrigo) alongside family-owned SMEs and international start-ups.

Women’s Health, Dermatologicals, Food Supplements, Pain Management, Digestive Health, Herbals, and Cosmetics are categories where Penny has significant strategic and tactical experience in a career spanning + 20 years. Her knowledge of OTC retail and e-commerce is deep as is her understanding of how to use digital and traditional communications channels to promote OTC brands.

Penny has developed a successful business model to enable international businesses to easily set up operations in the UK and IE enabling access to regulatory support and all the other business support functions (warehousing, book keeping and VAT, etc) to operate in the UK.

Penny has been proud to receive numerous OTC Marketing and SMaRT awards.

David Mitchel

Commercial Management

Highly regarded in the OTC industry and extensively connected, David’s career has been long, broad and award-winning.

At Johnson & Johnson for over 40 years, he spent the first 24 years at the Janssen Pharmaceutical subsidiary, in their pharmaceutical, animal health, medical devices and OTC sectors working his way up from Territory Manager to National Sales Manager, and finally Group Product Manager and Sales Director. He helped form the Jansen OTC business and became its Sales and Marketing Director, which was then followed by a move to McNeil, the joint venture between J&J and MSD. As Commercial Director and latterly Head of Pharmacy at J&J Consumer, he focused on switching prescription-only medicine (POM to P) business where he ran a £150m business across all sectors of pharmacy.

Well-connected in the industry David was director of The Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB) for many years and is currently Chairman of UK the Health & Beauty Association (H&BA).

Awards for sales & marketing results include Pharmacy Sales Force of the Year across 5 consecutive years and 3 separate Lifetime Achievement Awards by the pharmacy profession and the industry.

Lyndsay Vye

Marketer

Lindsay is a very experienced marketer with a successful career working for big brand OTC Pharma & FMCG companies, as well as SME’s and start-ups. She is a “can-do” strategic commercial leader and collaborator who quickly builds trust across teams. She is skilled in innovation, marketing strategy, brand activation, brand proposition, and category management.

Her early career was at Cadbury Schweppes South Africa in FMCG but a move to the UK saw her join J&J.MSD (now Johnson & Johnson McNeil) Consumer Pharmaceuticals division where she worked on leading white space innovation, all things digital (IOT) and skincare brands.

Her OTC healthcare expertise has since seen her contracted to Boehringer Ingelheim, Weight Watchers, Unilever, Salcura and Maxwellia, while her FMCG marketing credentials include Premier Foods, New York Bakery Co, Britvic, in a career that comprises 8 consumer healthcare switches, 18 different categories and numerous well-known OTC brands including Buscopan, Daktacort, Daktarin, Dulcolax Nizoral, Salcura Skincare, Simple Skincare, Soft and Gentle & Weight Watchers.

Stephen Boyd

Investments

Guiding SME start-ups and turning around ailing public companies is Stephen’s expertise.  

Following a successful early career in management and operations at Courtaulds in the 1980’s & 90’s, Stephen’s next role was with BOC Murex, a business in difficulties. Stephen restructured the business strategy, turning the company around and putting it back into profit. His steady hand and strong working relationships with banks and investors soon gained him a reputation amongst financers needing help for business’ in their investment portfolios in challenging circumstances. As either a board member or executive director, often brought in by the banks to manage their risk, Stephen’s direction and strategy development revitalise the fortunes of many troubled plc’s including Swallowfield (Cosmetic Manufacturing), Mission Group (Marketing Agency Group), Pittards (Leather Manufacture) & Pure Wafer.  

Today, in addition to running his own business in high security counting machines, Stephen is currently advising SME start-ups, including SeeData Ltd, who provide “Software As A Solution” (SAAS) products to healthcare organisation including the Britain’s NHS. His strategy and guidance have enabled this owner run business to achieve international expansion into hospitals around the world including USA, Australia, Scandinavia & Qatar and Singapore reaching £1m turnover in under 5 years. 

Mary Thomas

Digital Activation

During the past 14 years, Mary has worked with many businesses to move into the digital space. As both a trainer and director of a marketing agency, Mary keeps at the leading edge of the changes in digital and ensures all her clients benefit from her knowledge and expertise.

Mary can advise on and implement websites (e-commerce and brochure) focused on customer journey, social media campaigns (organic and paid), as well as content marketing campaigns (e-newsletters, videos, blog posts).

Viv Bryan

Creative & Graphic Design

Viv is a highly experienced graphic designer with the knowledge and understanding to bring a client’s vision to life across print and digital. She is an expert website designer and has a full understanding of how to effectively make use of social media platforms, email campaigns and multi-media promotional material.

She was an integral part of the team in helping Drapolene® Cream revitalise and establish their brand amongst leading competitors as well as winning 3 awards.

Matt Jolly & Laurel Jolly

Packaging & Creative Design 

Matt and Laurel are also highly regarded for their high-end photo and product retouching, manipulation, and composition skills. Performed to print standards this expertise is useful for any advertising material as well as for product packaging. They combine this proficiency with their print material design capabilities, enabling us to bring high quality branded training manuals for healthcare professionals and in store Point of Sale (POS) materials to life. 

Asim Tariq & Amin Atkinson

Warehousing, Packing and Logistics

Amin & Asim manage warehousing and logistics for our food supplements and cosmetic clients. Their central England storage facility is based in Leicester and where their services include contact packing, storage, distribution, packaging procurement, labelling, and of course logistics management.

Ash Shah

Amazon and Ecom pureplay expert

Ash is an Amazon and Ecom pureplay expert, who, with his team at World Products (WP), specialises in unlocking the digital sales and growth potential of health and personal care brands.

He has partnered with some of the UK’s leading healthcare and pharmaceutical brands in some 14 Amazon markets globally, including the UK, USA, EU (FR/DE/IT/ES/NL/PL/SE), Australia, Canada and Japan, and this number continues to grow.

Ash’s unique full-service Amazon Activation model offers brands access to the world’s biggest online retailer through both Amazon Vendor and Amazon Seller Hybrids platforms. With contact points cross-functionally within Amazon, including Operations, Warehousing, Fulfilment centres, and Brand Registry, Ash and the WP team ensure your products receive the best service in depot and online, avoiding ASIN suppressions and out of stocks.

Meanwhile, their relationships with the Amazon marketing and brand departments help ensure brands have in-feed visibility, messaging control, as well as listing optimisation and sales improvement pilot programmes. All of this, along with unique capabilities to help brands capture buy-box to maximise sales and control.

To ensure compliance with cosmetic regulations WP also offers a Responsible Person (RP) capability enabling them to over-label international products to comply with UK/EU market regulations.

Whether your brand is new to Amazon or is already distributed on the platform and you’re looking to gain more control over your marketing and sales. Ash and the WP team will leave no stone unturned until your brand has reached its full Amazon potential.

Get in touch

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Click to call +44 (0)1235 210 007