Jonny and Antonia Philp have already endured enough personal and business challenges to last a career since co-founding Nursem, their range of hand and bodycare products, in 2012.

The husband and wife team have claimed universal credit and turned down a Dragons' Den offer, while Jonny has overcome a brain tumour. It has since left him to live by the mantra of “look after yourself, your health and have fun”.

From turning over around £50,000 in their early years, Nursem hit public awareness in 2019 and now anticipate sales of £2.7m this year, with aims of growing their word-of-mouth business tenfold.

The company launched in response to a problem encountered by Jonny’s wife Antonia as an NHS paediatric nurse, working on intensive care wards and washing her hands between 50 and 100 times daily.

After six months, her hands started to crack and bleed with the demands of work. The Philps realised she wasn’t the only one, with nearly 90% of the nursing community suffering similar issues, despite trying a raft of hand creams.

“Hand cream sounds like an incredibly simple solution, probably overly simple, but sometimes the best solutions are the simplest because people know how to adopt and use them properly,” says Jonny.

Originally called Yes Nurse – “It was like a Carry On film,” admits Jonny – he paid himself £500 for the first five years alongside Antonia’s salary. “Until children,” he adds. “That's when things become a lot more real.”

He describes the feeling of juggling jobcentre meetings as the co-founders “tried to survive for six months until we could launch into Boots in time".

“I think the lady looked at me and thought, ‘this guy's on another planet’," he adds. "This is not the usual person she would expect to be interviewing. But I'm enormously grateful because, without it, there's no way we could have paid for nursery in those first months.”

Back at the day job, he says that emails from nurses a decade ago were like “rocket fuel” for a fledgling business.

“Nurses would say that it's the first time in 25 years that their hands weren't painful at work. Messages like that were like a shot in the arm and kept us going," says Jonny.

Newcastle-based Nursem recorded sales of £142,000 (a net loss of £18,000) in their first year before a rebrand and relaunch in 2019 and COVID saw the company grow from a run rate of £150,000 per annum to £2.5m in 18 months.