
The AKT founder talks about what it takes to succeed as a challenger brand
When you think ‘brilliant branding’, you rarely think ‘deodorant’. But challenger AKT has shaken up the category. It burst onto the scene in 2020 with a product that didn’t just look, sound, and smell amazing, but worked better than what was already out there (just ask London’s sweaty West End performers). We sat down with co-founder Andy Coxon to talk brand-building, genderless products, and how two actors cooked up the UK’s most sought-after deodorant on their kitchen hob.
Can you tell us a bit about AKT?
AKT is the UK’s most awarded deodorant. And in August this year we released bodycare. So we’re a ‘personal performance company’, exploring all products that help you perform for your day. They’re plastic-free, natural, and fully recyclable where possible.
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Can you tell us the story behind AKT?
In around 2016, my co-founder Ed [Currie] and I were West End performers, doing eight shows a week in the same costumes every night. No deodorant was working, so we set out to make our own.
For about three years, we were in our tiny flat in Camden making hundreds of formulations on the hob. We started giving it to friends and family. They loved it, and started asking to buy it. We looked into how to start a business: the legal side of things, the branding side of things. We came up with a name and a brand.
We’re called AKT because we were actors, and our tagline is ‘Born to Perform’, because the product was born to perform, but so were we. The performance element is huge for us, but it isn’t just about theatre. Our mission statement is: ‘To give you the confidence to step onto your stage, whatever that may be, and perform’. Everything we do comes back to that.
No deodorant was working, so we set out to make our own.
So you found your brand and then everyone lived happily ever after?
And then Covid hit. If Covid hadn’t happened, I don’t think we’d have built what we have. Because we were forced to focus on something that was so out of our comfort zone and was just never the plan. It was a terrible, manic, chaotic time; our industry as performers had collapsed around us, but it meant we were at our laptops nine-to-five, meeting people, learning how to build a business.
We launched in 2020. And then out of nowhere Vogue ranked us the number one deodorant. They’d heard about us online because the whole of the West End were posting about it. It was like a firework that put us straight into this premium category, and I haven’t left my laptop since.
How were you able to make your own deodorant? Did either of you have any background in chemistry?
No, which is just nuts.
I think Ed worked with someone who told him you can make a natural deodorant from quite a simple recipe. So he started researching and trying out new ingredients. He basically turned our kitchen into a lab. We had cupboards full of essential oils and powders.
But obviously what we were making on the hob hadn’t been tested for selling. That’s why we did the kickstarter – so we could get it regulated and approved for use. But when we finally took it to the factory, they couldn’t replicate what we’d made. Every time they remade it and sent it to us to test, it just did not perform to the same standard. It took another year to get it to the level of performance we wanted.
We were in our tiny flat in Camden making hundreds of formulations on the hob.
And when did the scents come into play?
At the very beginning. Alongside not wanting to smell was not wanting to smell like a teenager. Because roll-ons and sprays – I don’t care what anyone says – none of them smell nice. They are synthetic. You always get pastels and florals for women, and war and fire for men. And you’re like: who made that up? And why has that stuck around for decades? We wanted to change that.
So we explored the kind of fine fragrances that you’d want from a candle – that you’d want to fill a room – because there’s a connection with mood and personality and character. It tied in perfectly with our brand down the line – all of our scents are named after scenes.
So on our packaging it says ‘SC.01 EXT. ORANGE GROVE’, which means ‘Scene One, Exterior, Orange grove’, written like a scene description that you’d read in a script to help you get into character as a performer. We didn’t want to just put ‘Clean linen and sea breeze’. We wanted to evoke the transportative world that is fragrance. Because when someone smells something it either reminds them of something or it takes them somewhere.
Who’s the audience for AKT?
We coined the phrase ‘earth-conscious metropolitans’: a creative high-earner in the city who cares about the planet but doesn’t wave the flag. That’s who we’ve always aimed at, but it has opened the doors to every type of person you can imagine. Last year, we did a customer survey, and the age range, the wage bracket, the job title: it went from 18-year-olds up to 65-year-olds, working in the middle of nowhere to a central London bank, from £24K a year to £250K+ a year. It’s kind of crazy. But if anything, it re-enforced that we are doing the right thing, because we wanted to create an aspirational brand, and it appears we’ve done that.
Tell us about the AKT tone of voice.
All our copy needs to have a bit of luxury, a pinch of performance, and to show that we properly care. If it doesn’t have those three elements, it’s wrong, because if you take one away, it either becomes a fart in the wind, or too theatrical. It needs a perfect balance.
We’ve used the persona of a confident compere: someone that would MC a cabaret, who can really hold things together, react quickly, and make clever jokes off the cuff.
What inspired the tone?
We’ve always lent on our inspirations within the creative world. For example, Matthew Bourne as a choreographer of modern versions of well-known ballets (Swan Lake: absolutely stunning). Heston Blumenthal for his way of twisting food and how you think about it. Robyn – the first pop princess; not everyone knows who she is, but you’d recognise her songs; she’s got that underground fame. And Oscar Wilde, with his beautiful eloquence. We’ve expanded elements of all those people into this confident compere character.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about these influences, who are populist but also have a bit of character and playfulness. We feel like AKT’s copy has that same quality.
I think that comes from me and Ed, and our personality. We are fun and witty, but serious when we need to be. We’ve woven in confidence without being cocky, and fun without being silly. It’s always a balance. But I think we have genuinely created something that is authentically ‘us’. We tried not to overthink it.
Deodorant is for everybody, so we made fragrances that are for everybody.
We’re interested in the genderless aspect of the product. Could you tell us more about that?
One of our very early pieces of copy was ‘Natural. Plastic-free. Gender-free’. That idea came from the fragrances. Deodorant is for everybody, so we made fragrances that are for everybody. We’ve got a more ‘masculine’ scent that is most popular in women. We’ve got a ‘feminine’ scent but it’s most popular with men. Fragrance is subjective. Simple as that.
And so I just said, ‘Well, let’s just say “all genders” on the packaging’. That, to me, encapsulates everyone, whatever you identify as. You get the odd comment like, ‘There’s only two genders, why are you saying “all”?’ I’m like, ‘Well, “all” includes two, so calm down’. It doesn’t make sense that people are so offended by that. You’re never going to please everybody. I just wanted to include everybody.
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We’ve noticed you seem to lean into different aspects of your brand story at different times in comms. How do you decide what to focus on?
I’m basically a Creative Director of the brand. So I tell the teams what I want our audience to be seeing. I feel like, as someone who lives and breathes this brand, I see what’s out there and ask: Have we touched on this point enough? Have we forgotten about this point? And that’s basically how I decide on what the campaign is for that quarter.
It sounds like, rather than having something like a ‘brand pyramid’, you’ve got a ‘brand space’, and you’re constantly topping up different parts of the space to keep it full.
That’s a lovely way of saying it, yes. We know our brand architecture: the tone of voice and messaging; that’s what we always bounce off. But I love the idea that we are topping up those elements: the sustainability, the founder story, as well as performance in the fashion world, the sports world, the theatre world, the wellness world.
That’s our sphere. We are just moving around that space, as well as reacting to what’s happening. You’ve got to change. I think we moved away from focusing on sustainability at the beginning because we got bored of it. And if we’re bored, everyone else must be bored. So let’s move on and do something more exciting.
Tell us more about your new products.
Second album syndrome is a real thing. It’s hard to follow an accidental success like the deodorant. But just like with the branding, we did what makes sense to us, asking, ‘How do we make it work next?’
So the deodorant is ‘Born to Perform. And our new products sit in our ‘Prepare to Perform’ category. So it’s all the products that help you prepare for your day. So it’s a shower routine. It’s the moisturiser you put on that sinks into your skin. Then you put on your deodorant and perform for your day.
How have you found launching in the US? Did you have to adjust the brand for the new audience?
It’s getting huge over there. Oprah just awarded us the best deodorant award.
The story stayed the same. We replicated what we did with the West End with Broadway. It translated really clearly. If I’m honest, it’s mainly just changing the spelling of ‘theater’.
We were even going to change ‘aluminium’ to ‘aluminum’, but they absolutely love how we say it. And when we launched, we had this big press event where we met all the journalists, and we told them how we made it on the hob, and they were like, ‘… what’s a hob?’ But they love it. So we’ve kept it. We thought that we’d have to change some tag lines and things, but we haven’t. It’s gone down really well over there. They get it.
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