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THG is an online retailer that sells its own beauty and nutrition brands, plus products from other companies, to customers around the world.
THG is an online retailer built around two big ideas: beauty and nutrition. It runs websites like Lookfantastic, where shoppers buy makeup, skincare, and haircare, and Myprotein, one of the world's best-known sports nutrition brands selling protein powder, vitamins, and supplements. Most of its customers are ordinary people shopping from home, and THG makes money by selling them products — some made by THG itself, some made by other brands — and by charging brands for the marketing, fulfilment, and technology services it provides.
The company grew out of a business called The Hut Group, founded in Manchester in 2004 by Matthew Moulding. It started as an online seller of CDs and DVDs, then pivoted hard into health and beauty, buying up brands and building its own e-commerce technology along the way. For a while it was one of the loudest success stories on the London Stock Exchange, listing in 2020 at a valuation of around £5.4 billion. But the shares soon slumped badly as investors soured on the growth story, and the company has spent years trying to rebuild credibility, cutting costs and selling off parts of the business. THG doesn't just sell its own stuff. A big part of the pitch is that it owns the whole machine — the brands, the websites, the warehouses, and the software — and rents that machine out to other companies. Its THG Ingenuity arm offers brands a way to run their online stores and shipping without building it themselves, a bit like renting a fully staffed kitchen instead of building your own restaurant. That said, this division has been the shakiest part of the story, and management has been reshaping it to focus on beauty and nutrition.
The business faces tough competition. It competes with giants like Amazon on convenience, with specialist retailers like Boots on the high street, and with countless online beauty shops on price. Its own brands give it fatter margins, but customers can be fickle, and the company has a heavy debt load that makes investors nervous. In short, THG is a British e-commerce group trying to prove that owning the brands, the technology, and the logistics all at once is actually a winning hand — and that's still an open question.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026