Alfred Dunhill’s Great Granddaughter Builds Upon Her Family’s Luxury Heritage With Premium CBD And Wellness Brand Lady A

In a way, Alexandra Dunhill, great granddaughter of Alfred Dunhill, is continuing the family business. 

The Londoner is the founder of Lady A, a luxury CBD beauty and wellness brand offering a stylish selection of vape pens, tinctures, supplements, patches and more that would make her forefather, a legendary entrepreneur in both the luxury goods and tobacco industries, proud. Alexandra Dunhill has taken her business a step further than Alfred probably could’ve imagined. Lady A has built a range of intimate wellness products that harness the power of broad-spectrum CBD and other plant-based ingredients to enhance arousal and pleasure.

Currently, the collection dubbed After Dusk includes an oil-based lubricant that combines CBD with warming ginger, cinnamon and cardamom essential oils for for 48 pounds or about $65, a massage oil for 52 pounds or about $71, and a silk eye mask for 30 pounds or about $41. A water-based lubricant is in the pipeline. “Your sex life is all part of the circle of a well-balanced, well-lived life,” says Dunhill. “So, as a wellness brand, not offering these products felt like a missing link.” 

She was introduced to CBD here in California while visiting her son. Amazed at how much the cannabinoid helped his anxiety, she felt inspired to create a premium wellness brand tapping the power of the hemp plant and began what amounted to two years of research and development. Sexual wellness products were on Lady A’s roadmap from the get-go, but it didn’t release them until it had been on the market for a year mostly in Europe and Asia. 

“There seemed very little stigma attached to the category [in the United States]. I was ready to launch my lubricant along with my first Lady A products at the start of 2020,” says Dunhill. “However, I did not feel that Britons were ready. I felt the need to establish my brand first before unleashing these exciting new products on an unsuspecting market.” 

The staggered product drop strategy was effective for an unforeseen reason. The items debuted as consumers’ needs shifted during the pandemic. Lady A’s vapes launched as people were experimenting with different methods to take the edge off their COVID-related worries, and After Dusk followed as people turned to releasing their tensions in the bedroom.

Today, the brand’s bestsellers are its award-winning CBD- and matcha-infused Daily Fix Gel Capsules priced at 55 pounds or about $75 for a 30-day supply, Evening Tincture with CBD and chamomile priced at 60 pounds or about $82 for the 750-mg. formula or 80 pounds or about $109 for the 1,500-mg formula, and Natural Vape Pens priced at 30 pounds or about $41. “They get to work within five minutes, making them perfect for on-the-go use and great for anyone new to CBD,” says Dunhill of the pens. 

Judging by the retail reaction to Lady A, Dunhill has nailed an elevated wellness aesthetic. In less than two years, the brand has secured distribution at several of United Kingdom’s most well-known retailers such as Selfridges, Fenwick, Flannels, and Feelunique. It’s also available in CBD boutiques Molecule and Origin 40, and independent health store chain Revital. Outside of the U.K., it’s at Grassyard in Hong Kong and Aquerone in France.

Although being stocked at fabled retailers like Selfridges is certainly a wonderful feather in Lady A’s cap, Dunhill views wellness-focused boutiques as the ideal spot for CBD brands. “People are going there for a specific reason,” she says. “If you just put them on a counter in a beauty parlor and you walk past, nobody understands what the stuff is.” Dunhill is in the process of achieving approval to sell Lady A in Japan. She laments it “takes forever,” but notes she’s not alone in enduring it as many American CBD brands are entering the country. 

The British CBD market is the world’s second biggest behind the U.S., according to the U.K.’s Association for the Cannabinoid Industry (ACI), but has been in tumult since Brexit. For 18-plus months, the country’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) has been evaluating the safety of oral CBD products in line with its requirements called “Novel Food” requirements. A novel food is a consumable that doesn’t have a long history of being consumed. Any CBD product formulated for oral use in the U.K. had to apply by March 31 last year to be evaluated. Only oral CBD products on the FSA’s approved list, expected to be published in the coming weeks, will be able to stay on the U.K. market. 

The FSA has received over 800 CBD product applications, and it’s rejected some 600 of them. It’s still evaluating over 200 submissions. This week, cbdMD was announced as the first American CBD brand to pass muster. Brands OK’d by the FSA will be ready for an eager audience. ACI reports that the U.K. CBD consumer products market roughly doubled from 314 million pounds or $427 million in 2019 to 690 million pounds or $939 million in 2021. 

When the full FSA list is issued, Dunhill predicts a large number of ingestible CBD products will be pulled from shelves in the U.K. She says, “A lot of these small companies, they’re buying their oils from places in Europe, and they haven’t got the money to put them through the novel food testing to get it on the dossier, which gives an advantage to the big extracting companies who have the money to do it. The brands can’t really launch in the supplements [category].”