Is Ori Lifestyle Still in Business? (2026 Update)

Bello wanted £60,000 for a quarter of the business, and Emma Grede funded it in full. Grede's own history scaling consumer and beauty brands made her a natural match for a founder pitching haircare built around real education, not just product.

A single-investor deal often means a closer, more hands-on relationship afterward, useful for any young beauty label working out where it fits in retail.

Afro haircare has long been squeezed into a small corner of the beauty aisle rather than treated as equal to the rest of the shelf, so founders here often have to do double duty, selling the product and making the case that the category deserves proper space and marketing budget at all.

Getting picked up by Selfridges' online store and by Harrods is not something a brand earns just by having appeared on television once. It takes a department-store buyer actually examining the packaging, the ingredients and the founder behind it, and deciding it deserves a place next to names already established there.

The brand has kept education as central to its identity as the products themselves, spending as much energy showing customers proper care techniques for their hair type as it does selling them anything, an approach that tends to earn loyal repeat buyers rather than one-off purchases.

Department stores at that level are notoriously quick to drop underperforming lines, so continuing to hold shelf space there years after broadcast points to real, ongoing sell-through rather than a launch placement that quietly disappeared.