Susie Ma, the founder and chief executive of Tropic Skincare, has replaced Touker Suleyman on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den and has already filmed the next series, which is likely to air early in 2027.

Ma, 37, appeared as a guest dragon in four episodes earlier this year and was approached by the BBC about the role at the end of 2025. She sits to the left of Deborah Meaden in the line-up.

Suleyman, the textiles and retail entrepreneur who owns clothing brands including Hawes & Curtis and Ghost, announced in June that he was leaving the programme after 10 years.

“I absolutely loved filming for the season that has just concluded, as a guest Dragon. They were looking for someone to sit in Touker’s seat and they asked me and I couldn’t say no,” Ma said.

Guest dragons will still take it in turns to sit in the position vacated by Suleyman.

Ma was a finalist on the BBC’s The Apprentice in 2011 and has since built Tropic into a skincare business with turnover of £76.7m.

She set up the company when she was 15, starting with 50 jars of homemade body scrub sold at Greenwich Market. After The Apprentice she secured a £200,000 investment from Lord Sugar in return for a 50 per cent stake.

In 2023 she struck a multimillion-pound deal to reclaim full ownership. Companies House filings for Tropic Skincare show Lord Sugar’s appointment as a director ended in April 2023.

Ma said that when she filmed as a guest dragon in 2025 she thought she might have blown her chance of being offered a permanent seat.

“I was so tired because I was up all night breastfeeding and most nights I was getting four hours of broken sleep and you have to get up really early in the morning,” she said. “Hair and makeup takes two hours and then it’s long filming days, sometimes up to 12 hours a day and then I’m up all night.”

She said she had expected to return for the new series with more sleep, but was pregnant throughout filming. “I was nauseous. I wasn’t sleeping well. I’m obviously very, very grateful to have my baby, but it was just not what I had planned in my head,” she said.

Ma said she connected with the existing dragons: Meaden, Peter Jones, who sold the camera chain Jessops to AO World last month, and Steven Bartlett, who launched the creator venture OBSN in September. She said she dined out with Meaden and Jones on most days during filming.

“They’re so knowledgeable and down to earth, lovely human beings,” she said.

Ma confirmed she had made “quite a few investments” in businesses that pitched on the new series. She said she did not enter the Den planning to play a particular type of investor.

“I liked to invest in businesses where the founder cared beyond just spotting a gap in the market and wanting to make money. If they had considered a little bit more about their packaging sustainability and the general ethics of their business, that was what I wanted to support,” she said.

“There are a lot of fast fads, whether that’s fast fashion, fast beauty products. They come and go within a year and I just think what a waste.”

She said some founders pitched “something that’s just a load of plastic that already exists”, while others presented products that were unique and more sustainable.

Ma said she was impressed by the range of businesses in the series. “There are some really brilliant minds in the UK. Often I would sit there in my chair and I would feel extraordinarily proud of the person in front of me,” she said.

“Beauty is my world; it is how I make money. But there’s a whole world out there of a thousand different ways of making money, of making a business. It is fascinating. What I didn’t expect in Dragons’ Den is how much I’ve personally learnt about business.”

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