In its first year, Oushk Pharmacy has seen its orders grow from “20 a week” to tens of thousands per month, the online pharmacy’s owner Hira Malik last week (April 29) told C+D.
Since Malik started the business in March 2024, Oushk’s growth has been staggering.
While shareholder funds sat at £124,925 in September 2024, they had rocketed to £850,386 by March 2025, Companies House filings last month revealed.
Read more: Pharmacies to pilot NHS weight loss jab expansion, reports claim
The figure represents a 580% increase in cash over just six months.
What’s behind the company’s booming orders? “I would say 98% are probably for weight loss,” Malik said.
Read more: Revealed: Pharmacy weight loss consultations rocket twenty-fold
“Strangely, we never actually wanted to be just a weight loss company” – “I was actually specialised in dermatology,” she added.
“As we were growing, we were starting to get recognised as a weight loss provider, then we made that decision – ‘Okay, if this is what we need to do, then let’s be the best one at it’,” she said.
“Mentions on Facebook”
“What happened randomly is we started getting mentions on Facebook” and “from there the brand awareness just went through the roof”, Malik told C+D.
She said that one of her business partners joined a Facebook group for Mounjaro users, “just to understand what patients are talking about”.
Read more: Mounjaro: NICE sets out £317m annual NHS weight loss jab rollout
Then a member asked them if an Oushk pharmacist could conduct a ‘Facebook Live’ answering the groups’ questions.
When the first live call was a success, Malik started leading one every month “and then from there a lot of patients transferred over to us from other companies”, she added.
“I suppose it was a marketing thing but it was never intended to be, it was more education from our side”, she added.
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“No one else was offering that kind of service where you could actually speak to your prescriber and the prescriber would answer the questions,” she said.
Now Oushk Pharmacy has its own Facebook “support group”, hosting content from nutritionists, health coaches and educational blog posts written by Malik herself, she told C+D.
What competitors are “not doing”
Being known for customer service and support has led to surprising growth “especially since January”, Malik told C+D.
“We were expecting growth anyway, because obviously it’s ‘new year, new me’…but it was a sudden really big change and since then it hasn’t actually stopped,” she added.
The company’s orders have more than tripled between December and April, she told C+D.
Read more: Newspaper rapped over article promoting Mounjaro
“The growth is happening, and it’s happening quite fast,” she said.
“We don’t charge crazy prices, but we’re definitely not the cheapest either,” Malik reflected.
One thing that competitors “are probably not doing”, she said, is catering to their weight loss patients’ side effects – “they tell them ‘go to your local pharmacy’”.
Read more: Pharmacies must ‘immediately’ remove weight-loss ads, regulators warn
“Whereas I have made a group of [items] and we are saying to them ‘actually we will add this into your product’,” she added.
“If they need a more in-depth fitness plan or a nutritionist plan, they can very much use those sources as well,” Malik said.
Read more: Wegovy: DH to consider pharmacy role in £40m two-year obesity pilot
Another reason Oushk stands out is that its pharmacists are happy to prescribe weight loss injections to patients long-term.
“This medication is fully licensed for long-term use [and] if that’s what’s appropriate for you – if you’ve got genetic or hormonal issues – then you might benefit from a low-dose long-term maintenance plan,” she said.
“So that’s something that we offered, and again, that got picked up and patients just went a bit crazy about it,” she added.
Competition “getting nasty”
But Malik told C+D that the booming industry has led to some challenges.
“There’s so much competition, and people are getting a little bit nasty out there,” she said.
“Sometimes people will say things…just for the sake of drama,” she added.
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“Right now, we are one of the highest reviewed on Trustpilot,” she said.
“Our competitors sometimes will leave a [review] saying, ‘I sent them an email and I didn’t get a response for three days’ – but we know that’s never true, because we respond to everyone within 24 hours,” she claimed.
“It’s simple things like that, they will do it just to annoy us” – “it’s so childish”, she said.
Read more: Novo Nordisk launches ‘lower cost’ Wegovy online pharmacy
But the drama isn’t likely to stop Malik.
“The priority is always looking at the trends and knowing that actually we are growing as a business,” she told C+D.
“Currently we’ve got ads for two new prescribers, we’ve got two new customer service [staff], we’ve got two more dispensers,” she said.
“It’s always being ahead of what may come that allows us to maintain that level of customer…support,” she added.
Trouble brewing?
It comes as newspapers last week reported that a multimillion-pound deal “with a major pharmaceutical firm” is set to fund a national NHS weight loss jab prescription pilot in pharmacies.
Health officials are set to announce plans to make weight loss injections available “on prescription” at pharmacies through “a short over-the-counter consultation” without seeing a doctor, the Mail Online reported.
Read more: New weight loss regs: Almost 50 concerns already raised with GPhC
“Once the deal is signed, it will be possible to walk into a pharmacy and, after a short assessment, leave with a supply of jabs for £9.90” – the current cost of an NHS prescription - it added.
And new National Pharmacy Association (NPA) chair Olivier Picard said that the announcement “has the potential to make sure that people who need these treatments the most could access them for free”.
Meanwhile, pharmacy service provider Pharmadoctor told C+D in March that its weight management service had grown “exponentially” in the last year.
