8 How to build personal brand, Eshita Kabra-Davies, By Rotation

0:00We're now on to day eight of 12 Days of Christmas. you've probably lost track of time and probably spent quite a lot of time on social media, kicking yourself thinking you could have spent time elsewhere. It's with this in mind that we wanted to speak to Ashita Davies, founder of By Rotation, who explores the tension between building a personal brand and running a serious business. From the pressure of constantly feeding social media to questioning whether visibility is actually driving commercial value, Ashita speaks honestly about presence, boundaries and ownership. Tune in tomorrow to hear Daisy Bird speak about emotionally intelligent teams and how to build one.

0:38Thanks for inviting me onto the series. I'm very honoured. It's an absolute pleasure. So we've got into more of a habit of doing season themes and we've done sustainability, health and wellness, investment. This one's branding, the next one's productivity. And we'd love to chat to you about personal brand because you seem to do it so well with so much grace. Wondering how you can do it all. How important do you think personal brand is in a startup? I have really mixed feelings about this. I mean, I know the conversation is going to be a little bit about how you think it's great that I've built personal brand around me.

1:12Or not. Like whatever you want to share from your experience would be great. Yeah. For me, I think the reason that I have like a present personal brand is because I'm very much the customer that's using the solution, the business. And I use it every day, like without fail, I'm using it at least once a week, either I'm lending something out or I'm renting from someone else. So I think for me, having that personal brand has actually made me like an ambassador for the business free. It's like the most cost efficient way of doing marketing without having to pay, you know, models or not, not that I'm saying a model or like influencers or like voices or ambassadors to essentially embody the brand in like a scripted way.

1:56Because for me, it's coming very naturally. I'm breathing it every single day. It's my reason for being. And did you start it because you found there was a gap in the market that you wanted to solve? Yeah, bi-rotation is very much like a first-world problem that I was having. And I was like, I wish there was a way to be able to share nice designer, high-quality fashion with each other. And no, I don't want to buy it and own it forever. So I don't want to buy it firsthand. I don't want to buy it secondhand. I just want to borrow it for like a holiday. So like my honeymoon, you know, that's the story.

2:30I came up with the idea of it for my honeymoon. You'd have this amazing borrowed wardrobe. Yes, exactly. I didn't have it then. And that's why I look back at it and I was like, wow, if I were to go back on honeymoon part two, I would have so many incredible options now. it's funny actually we are sending out a newsletter on sunday about honeymoon rentals so it kind of feels like full circle it's so true because when you have these special occasions in your life you want to pack a good suitcase for it and you want to know that you've got outfits that you feel great in and you don't necessarily want to invest in those pieces every time you want to be able to have that treat and that lift of wearing something that makes you feel wonderful and then give it back it's fantastic i mean years and years ago when facebook launched and i was going to lots of weddings but can we have a facebook album of photos of all the wedding hats because in england at the time everyone was wearing hats and fascinations none of us want to wear these more than once or twice can we all just swap around and share this facebook album and you've created that software to help people do that yeah and and also you know like a lot of times within your friend circle i mean with hats sure like one size fits all right and they're adjustable but you know even within your friend's circle there are these situations where people are different sizes so what if you wanted to borrow from a complete stranger whose style you admire and I think that's where I was like yeah I want to create a community where people actually bond over their love for style and fashion and actually are very happy to share with each other as opposed to you know just being consumerist about it all what we've created is very much the sisterhood of traveling pants coming to life.

4:09But now it's a dress because people love renting dresses. And for you with the personal brand element, is it being quite a challenge to overcome to put your face out there and your personality out there? You know, people have an insight into your life. Is that quite hard? I think it does come to me naturally. But I think what I struggle with is the fact that this space, so like the social media space, and when you look at whether it's content creators or influencers or even I guess bosses like CEOs who have kind of a public profile it's sort of expected that you have like a content plan like you know you need to figure out your pillars and what exactly you're speaking about and you need to make sure you're like creating content that's useful shareable debatable and all of that strategic stuff and I'm like I don't really have time for that because I spent all of my brain power in building the business, which is by rotation, right?

5:07It's not my personal brand. So all of my incredible insights and strategy and planning, all of that mental power needs to go into the business. That is my priority. So I kind of struggle with the fact that when you have a personal brand, there's this expectation online that you have to build it in a very strategic way. And that's not my vibe at all. My vibe is very authentic. And you'll see like it'll range from things like going to work out in the morning and then not putting anything else up until maybe even the night and be like, oh, just went for like a dinner with a brand, you know, that I'm friends with the founder or the PR and they've invited me and it'll have nothing to do with what I did as the CEO.

5:53that day. And I personally prefer that because where I come from, which is, well, firstly, it's a cultural thing. You know, Asian culture is a bit more, I'd say we're a bit more reticent. You know, we don't like to overshare too much. And then my background, which is I used to work in finance, you would not be allowed to share photos of the trading floor of your desk because there's private stuff on there, right? And so you can get into trouble. In fact, if there were some screenshots of something about a client that you're not meant to be sharing or a trade. So if anything, I thought that when you're building your own private small business, you know, one of the benefits is privacy.

6:35So me, I'm like, why would I build in public? The whole point of having my own company that's private and small at this point is that I get to build things quietly and quickly and test them out and experiment without the whole world watching because I don't need to share my results with them I'm not a public company I think with the rise of social media so my career at luxury brands I remember there was a really interesting time when Instagram was launching and the brand wanted the handle of the other person that had their handle and Instagram said to them it's like right well it's Chanel it's like right if you're gonna do it if we're gonna give this to you you're gonna have to start posting and we had this entire HR policy come out about no one is bigger than the brand you don't speak on behalf of the brand and we knew this anyway that there were very few people within the business that would speak on behalf of the brand and it kept the brand on brand and I was totally happy with that we were behind the camera we were not influencers we were potentially working with influencers but it wasn't about us and I was fine with that and then now you look at how PR agencies and companies want their teams to be their biggest ambassadors and it's quite a tall order and when I was recruiting a team I was like there is absolutely no pressure to but if you would like to share company content on your platform I would encourage you to but please don't worry if you don't want to it's not up to me to tell you what to do on your own channels but my team looking at our company channel and then looking at mine they sat me down at the beginning of the year it's like yeah you're going to need to do more company content because at the moment all you get is penguins because you've just come back from the Antarctic and your next travel plans I was like I don't care because that's me I love traveling yes I'll post work content but I don't want to have to become a product of the business it's not what I'm doing it for there's got to be other ways and we see a lot of CEOs particularly on LinkedIn putting a voice to their roles now and I used to be an in-house PR person it's really risky because if they say something that goes viral and is not great the firefighting you have to do is awful.

8:37No no it's it's so true it seems like everyone is very vocal now, even when there's nothing that they are actually saying. And to me, I have to say it's a bit cringy. And I am quite, I suppose, discerning. Like I'm not just going to post on LinkedIn for the sake of posting, because I need to build my audience. Because if I don't build it, then someone else will, or they'll forget about me, you know, and I'll have that FOMO. it's just not really how I operate and I think I think there's now this sort of this push right I remember LinkedIn reached out to me in the early days and they're like we would like for you to be a voice on LinkedIn one of their creator programs and I was like okay you know interesting tell me more and there were all these sort of things that you had to do every week you had to make a set amount of posts they had to be educational they had to encourage people to comment debate discuss and I thought, okay, I mean, it's great, but it's just, I'm really, really very, very busy and I cannot put my energy on this because then I'm taking away energy from actually running the business.

9:41And I think that's where we as founders and CEOs really need to decide how is this actually going to help the business? Is it helping the business or is it helping me and my personal profile? And if it's a latter, that's also fine, but I'm currently at a place where for me, everything that I'm doing needs to help the business. I'm still at that pace and I'm still very much in love with the business yeah and we meet a lot of clients so in the day job that we teach people how to do their own communications it's finding the time that they may have spare to do it and if they don't have capacity don't do it and adding another hat to that wheelhouse of 30 different hats you're wearing running a business it's the last thing you want so when my team again we're putting pressures like turn the camera on do more video to content people want to see your face it's like that's only ever going to be me I can't delegate that to someone else that's not sustainable for me there's got to be other means of doing this and I met someone recently who's a beautiful florist cut flowers sells to florists doesn't do bouquets doesn't do arrangements she's like oh I need to do Instagram I need to get real sorted and people tell me I need to do more to camera I'm like but why and I kept saying why oh but I got 3 ,000 views it's like were any of them florists or any of them buying from you no walk around exeter meet 30 florists and you're done like don't worry and people get so distracted i think when they're starting out i've got to build a website got to get a logo got to get it's like what is actually going to make you money to keep you alive for the next month to then do the next project for you how integral is your professional profile to the growth of your business because obviously you're pitching potentially for investors new employees board members clients do you think there is a percentage of you that you have to give out as a founder or can you completely protect it yeah i think this is where like setting the boundaries for me has been really important which is if you're say for example you're an investor right if you've decided to follow me on a non-professional channel such as instagram that's right i'm posting important work related updates about my company on linkedin as my primary platform for where it's all things business.

11:51If you're going to start following me on Instagram, I'm sorry, but you're going to see me doing my yoga headstands or whatever. And that's that, you know, that's me being honest and truthful about what are the things that I need to do to be me, right? So as long as I'm kind of showing up on the different platforms where people can communicate with me, they just need to kind of understand what my tone is going to be on each one of them. So on LinkedIn, for example, you know, last week I posted twice. This week I posted once. Each time that I posted, that was something very specific that I was saying about my company.

12:26Be that an update in performance, be that something that happened in the industry or when it comes to sustainable fashion. This week it was about us, you know, acquiring another rental platform. So it's a very, very specific and targeted. It's not, here's a photo of me at my desk. Oh, you know, I started taking melatonin gummies. They helped me sleep. Like that's not relevant. And maybe this is just my training working in a very corporate background and my culture, which is very Asian, but I do care a lot about boundaries for every single platform. So with LinkedIn, it needs to be professional.

13:01It needs to be specifically work oriented. And yeah, the great thing about LinkedIn is that the reach is incredible, right? If someone likes your post, it goes to the entire network. But the bad thing about it as well is that if you're doing like a weird cringy post, people will remember you as that person who is wasting their time during work hours writing those posts. So for me, I'm quite conscious of the fact that a lot of my ex-bosses do read my posts. There's so many impressions that you get on LinkedIn versus Instagram, I personally find. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. And not all of them convert to likes or comments.

13:37So it must be people just reading and absorbing and thinking about it. So I'm so careful. And I think this is maybe where the personal brand side of thing comes, right? For me, it all shouldn't need to be a hard sell. You know, me being a founder or CEO, me being good at personal branding or whatever, it doesn't need to be something that I need to say. If I am good at it, you should be able to decide it yourself and see it from the work that I do. And I think a lot of what's happening these days is people telling you exactly what their brand is. And I don't think it should be this way. I think the people who are viewing your content should be able to tell you themselves that I think this is your brand I mean I'd love to know Julian what do you think is my brand well I think it's a sustainable fashion solution and the brand is accessible for a product that typically isn't that accessible to a lot of people and it makes that wonderful luxury purchase a completely different product offering because I can tap into it for a day I don't need to tap into it for my entire life savings forever and be stuck with it and then regret it so your brand to me speaks it's fun it's joyful it's accessible I remember when I was at Chanel they were launching stores in Westfield and they had to take the big heavy door off the store because normally you have a guard that would you come up to the door and they'd look at you and then they'd open it go yeah you're allowed in here they realized that was a huge barrier for people to come in and buy nail polish They didn't want to feel that intimidated.

15:08And what's so fun now with fashion is that with the rise of digital, with the rise of e-commerce, with the rise of these amazing platforms, you can go in and tap into it for a day or weekend or a week. I love what you're saying about the different platforms because so many people get quite confused about what platform is for what. And I saw someone posting something on Hinge that belonged on LinkedIn and someone posting something on LinkedIn that belonged on Instagram and Zap. And I was like, how do you not get the audience? For me, audience segmentation is so important because you don't want to throw a lot against a lot of walls.

15:39You want to throw a little bit against a targeted wall and it will stick. Your LinkedIn is your professional persona, I guess. Whereas Instagram for me on my channel, I'm very, I mean, no one cares. It's just me and my travels. But my work Instagram, I am like straight laced. This is purely professional. I mean, we've done a little bit of this month the team are reading or this month the team have learned because we are learning and growing and doing all sorts of fun stuff but that is just on the line of how much I'm prepared to sort of sell out my team I don't want them to feel like there's that pressure on social media because as we know it can bring on a lot of anxiety as well it's the last thing you need yeah and I was feeling that a little bit I never want to feel like I don't want to feel like if I'm not feeding the monster, which is social media, that I will be forgotten because social media is not real life.

16:30So, you know, and I think that's where I kind of struggle with the whole, how present do I need to be on social media for my personal brand as the founder and CEO? So that's why my identity is not just about being the founder and CEO by rotation when it comes to my personal brand. Like there's many different aspects to me and I will always put my business first in my content, but there will be other things that are completely unrelated to the business when it comes to Instagram in particular. It's just so interesting where everything seems to be so strategic now. You want to be known for, I don't know, vegan cooking, because then you'll be the expert and then people will find you when they search for that hashtag, vegan meals or whatever.

17:17I get it, but I think it's almost so strategic that you can't really trust these people anymore. And I think that's where probably I stand out. I like to think anyway, I don't have a large following, but my following is it's pretty high caliber. It's quite established people within the industry. It's quite a lot of working professional women with high disposable incomes who, you know, are basically my customers. And I'm actually very happy with the level of influence I have in a small group. I don't feel the pressure that I need to continue growing my audience. I feel like I'm at the right place and I've got the right eyeballs.

17:56And I think that level of security is something that a lot of people online lack. And I wish that more for them because we're all just, you know, feeding the algorithm and this monster. Completely. And I think where that pressure, it will never go away. No one's going to come up to and pat you on the back and go, you've made it, you've got X many followers, you've succeeded. It's a constant drain and no one publishes the bad stuff either. I think if we're probably a little bit more honest about the trials and tribulations of running businesses, and that's what's wonderful about podcasting is people are quite humble about it and they share a lot more of the heartache and the angst that goes in it.

18:33And podcasting seems to be that sort of therapy platform if we're differentiating between them. And where people have that pressure, they think they have to do all things or actually just take that one thing off the to-do list and do what you're comfortable with especially if you're trying to scale a company to sell eventually because it's not always going to be about you if you then exit and if it is it's harder to convince someone that you can exit a lot of people don't think long term that's really interesting and are there any things that you would go back and do differently now you've had this experience under your belt when it comes to putting content out there I feel like again And, you know, with this whole sort of not being very strategic about content, I think it would have been better if we had been a little, you know, on the bi-rotation channel in particular.

19:19We had been a little more strategic and planned when it came to content creation. Because we do have a huge community, right? And a lot of like well-known personalities and a lot of community members who other women look at and be like, that could be me. and sometimes I think we could have maybe like made a series which was much more consistent as you've done with the podcast series you know you've got over 106 episodes as you said and I think one of the things you know we are very consistent we do a lot of user generated content we were doing a lot of lives during COVID we had like two a week but that seems to have fallen off the radar and we've gotten so busy with like doing transactions and getting people to rent but I wish we did a better job at doing something very consistent but it's never too late you can stop start trial a b test or go you know what when we're ready and got capacity we can do it in the future I think a lot of new founders particularly come in rabbit in the headlights like we have to be perfect from the beginning we have to know everything from the beginning that is impossible and every single person I've spoken to their five is in 50 years in fifth business first business they're like every day know that you don't know everything I was like oh my god because when you're chanel trained you damn sure that you're 150 perfect on everything i came into it with that expectation and my team are like we like working to a really high standard but i've had to bring it down to the 100 is more than good enough it's that's what we want to deliver we won't let anything out the door unless we've had three eyes on it but we have our service level but i mean i'm going off topic here but i think that feeds into the business's brand of our quality of output but that founder piece where you're looking at your persona I think maybe I've mistitled this episode because we talked about personal brand but it's your professional persona as a founder that we're talking about really and that boundary level of how far do you sell your soul for the business and people need to know that confidence of your social media output or you're pitching to investors you've got these different dialogues that you've got to manage and own and know what to say and how to say it both published online in a room with other people it all feeds into your personal brand so something that we love to do with our guests is have a question from the previous guests for you in terms of their startup journey and it was the founding team of collagery so Serena and Lucinda and they're like oh god this is a really important question we really want to think about it's like would it help if I told you who it's going to and they're like oh yeah and I haven't done that before but serena straight off the bat she's like how the hell does she do it all i mean that woman she does so much and it was really interesting because we're talking about how much people are putting content out there well everyone has an impression of you externally and her impression of you is that you do so much how do you do it or does she not sleep was her question no okay so as i said in the outset of our conversation i am sleeping and i'm actually sleeping way better and way more because touchwood business is going well and we're finally at a place where I feel like I don't need to be involved day to day in the business you know like I can actually be in a different city and run the business which is which is really cool and we've finally got into that place because that is huge thank you yeah and I love it you know I'm still very much in love with it sometimes you can see founders and CEOs being like a bit more distanced over time, you know, they're bored of it or whatever, or they're burnt out.

22:50But I've always been a very highly energetic person. And it kind of feels like I finally found my match. I just feel I used to work in very high pressure environments, you know, either with very long hours or very strange hours. Like my previous job on the trading floor, I had to be at my desk by 6.45am all the way until 6. And you couldn't, you could head out to pick up lunch, but you can't eat lunch somewhere else. You have to eat it at your desk because the market is open and you're trading. So for me, I feel like I've done all these intense jobs and I still felt like something was missing.

23:28But whereas with biotation, I feel like despite the crazy hours and breathing it every single day, even on the weekends and basically using every opportunity to pitch and talk about the business and get people to use the app or download it or invest in it, I still love it. So I just feel like I finally found my calling. And I think that doesn't feel like work to me. It doesn't feel too much. Yeah. Some days are too much. And Serena and I are actually good friends. And she's actually on my close friend's story on Instagram, which is also amazing because I feel like I finally have a safe space where I can confide in a few people who are my friends from before by rotation or my family or people in the industry that I trust.

24:13And it's kind of nice to just have that sounding board or people to empathize with me. So I'm actually really grumpy outside work, but for work, I just love it so much that you can't see it. Yeah. And you're right when it's a, sometimes it doesn't feel like work and you get the ups and the downs and my God, it's a roller coaster. A lot of the conversations actually I've had on branding have landed on purpose people like i need to do this i'm solving a problem that i had but i'm now solving it for a community of people i really care about irrespective of revenue this has to happen and that passion and that purpose it keeps you going it is your lifeblood and it fuels you but yeah when you come across you look like this graceful swan doing so much with dignity and you're like tick tick tick tick tick and the company's going from strength to strength it's lovely to see the success but yeah she's like oh god if it's her just ask her how she gets it all done she's very kind but you know I don't have kids either I think that's another part of it and maybe I haven't been through that yet because I think that's very very difficult so that's another thing I always tell myself for the phase of life that I am in I need to do as much as possible so I don't have regrets yeah so Serena does a lot though yeah I mean she can talk right and would you have a question for our next guest anything about starting a business or scaling a business anything that you've come up and gone oh i'd quite like to ask someone that when you first founded the business was your why the same as what it is today and if it's different how has it changed and why do you think that is perfect i love this because in 106 of these no one's ever come up with the same thing it's brilliant that's great yeah it's like there's a lot going on in your head the whole time about your business and it's you're in the weeds you're on top of the weeds and you're looking at the weeds and you're valuating the weeds and then you're like i've got lots of questions hence do a podcast about them all yeah yeah no but i think that's like i'd love to know that and i think it's probably applicable to any founder to be honest because along the journey you realize so many things about this business idea you had and about yourself and your priorities change and your phase in life change it changes as well like for me i founded it because sorry i'm answering the question myself no no no no i'd love to know but i you know i founded the company you know i came up with the idea of my own i just wanted to wear nice clothes and not pay crazy prices right that was the reason and then along the way i realized that actually this is solving a huge problem in the world which is waste yeah and And then now, for me, it's like, it's all about connection.

26:53Because people forgot that fashion is about self-expression. And the fact that you can actually make new friends because of your love for style. So it sort of changes over time. You know, I've got women paying for their IVF journeys from how much money they're making on the app. It's so much more than dresses and clothes and designer brands. It's grown and grown. I feel like it's brought a lot of emotional maturity to me as well. as the founder of this. I've seen it become so much more than just these materialistic things and so much more than just a solution for me and my friends. Yeah, well, huge congratulations.

27:32And thank you because you've democratized this whole industry where it's much more fun now that we get to do this. And it's so exciting because you're leading the way. Now you see all the massive retailers trying to catch you up and do it too. So thank you very much. And thank you for all the advice you shared. It's been wonderful chatting to you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to our 12 days of Christmas from How to Start Up. If you have enjoyed this episode, please rate and review the show because it honestly makes a massive difference to the podcast being found by other people.

27:59And to me as your host, it's nice to know you're there. Our normal scheduling will resume in January 2026 and we wish you a very, very merry festive season and hope you get some rest.