James

Co-founder, Smelly Men

I spent 30 years in advertising before co-founding Smelly Men with my partner Chara in 2024. The trigger was simple frustration: men's personal care had been formulaic and neglected for years, and I couldn't find products I actually wanted to buy or hand to my sons. So we built them ourselves, sourced from UK suppliers we could actually visit and question.

Smelly Men is my line. Chara runs Smelly Women, which followed as a natural progression, born from her own frustration with a cosmetics industry more interested in 'fixing' women than serving them. Our sons have their own range too, Smelly Boys, aimed at teenagers navigating the very specific horror of PE kit left in a bag since Tuesday.

Voiceover work is a sideline alongside all this, which probably explains why I'm fussy about how the copy on this site sounds read out loud. If a line makes me wince, it doesn't go up.

I write here about ingredients, what 'natural' actually means on a label (not much, most of the time), and the unglamorous logistics of running a small UK personal care brand honestly. When I'm not doing that, I'm usually on a paddleboard in the Lake District, training jiu jitsu, or fixing something on a car that didn't need fixing until I got involved.

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