In episode 159 of the Glow Journal podcast, host Gemma Dimond talks to the founders of AKT, Ed Currie and Andy Coxon.

Ed and Andy are West End performers. They’ve spent years under the brightest of lights, dancing, sweating, wearing costumes shared across casts for, in the case of a show like Les Mis, years upon years, that are so delicate they can’t be deep cleaned. We know how inextricably linked scent is to our confidence- they needed something that worked, that was formulated with performance at the fore, and that made people smell (and, probably more importantly, FEEL), amazing.

AKT has done what I had, as someone who’s worked in beauty for over 12 years, thought impossible, and that is create an effective, sexy deodorant. There are sexy deodorants on the market and I hate them, there are clinical protection formulas out there that I don’t feel in any way inspired by, but there’s nothing like this. Every element in a little wink to their shared history, which really tickles me from a branding perspective. They brief their fragrances in like a script, the typography is inspired by the letters on theatre marquees, and each fragrance is named as if it were a scene.

In this conversation, recorded at Soho’s Laughing Around Studios, Ed and Andy share what happens when you set out to create one product and somehow end up building an entire brand, how they physically raised the money to develop AKT, and how they learned the importance of using their own voice instead of trying to play the role of professional,