Wild Thingz - Fliss Newland

0:03Fliss Newland:Hello there and welcome to episode 125 of People Doing Things. So I'm super excited to have Fliss Newland on the show today. She's the founder of Wild Things, the Venus flytrap bug eating kids sweet brand with no artificials and half the sugar of traditional sweets. And they're vegan too, on a mission to take the mental load off parents wherever they can. stocked in the likes of Ocado, Amazon, Whole Foods and Planet Organic with many more on the horizon. Having been an international sweet pusher for Mondelez for six and a half years before taking the jump to turn around a 40 year old vegan sweet brand, not only do they taste incredible but they are organic, natural and half the sugar reborn as wild things.

0:48Fliss Newland:The brand's origin is rooted in a deeply personal and universal problem, the sweet dilemma. A problem many parents face navigating the convectionary aisle where parents are torn between their children's demand for fun tasty treats and their own concerns about the content of those sweets and the artificials inside them. In this episode we explore how Fliss went from corporate baddie to passionate founder, the power of mums in the workplace and how brand positioning can really make all the difference. Grab your sweets and enjoy. Hello Fliss, how are you doing? Very good, thank you. How are you? Very good, very good.

1:26Welcome to People Doing Things. It's great to have you. It's an honour. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm very excited. And we've got all the sweets in front of us. Of course. If they hear us rustling, then it's the sweets fault. ASMR for the pod. Yeah. I thought we would start with your youth. You grew up in a family of entrepreneurs with both parents kind of working for themselves. how did that environment and even the apprentice themed birthday I guess shape or inspire the kind of future and I think the risk-taking part of it I don't know how you call that from the internet but yes we it's true me and my sister did have an apprentice tv themed 12 year old party but yeah we even as kids we were always trying to like wash dogs and charge for that or like sell squash at the end of our lane even though we'd have about one person come through an hour yeah my dad worked for himself and my mum had a management consultancy that she built so that she could kind of manage looking after us and running her own company so I think it's only something you notice now in yourself that being an entrepreneur was something that was definitely kind of encouraged or it was an example that was set for me and something I've always aspired to so yeah and which of the childhood selling activities was the best one one of my best gigs was selling Nesquik obviously not telling my parents but sneaking our nesquit chocolate powder to school and at break time obviously boring milk gets served so i'd be sneakily selling the the brown powder that doesn't sound quite so good but that was very lucrative until the teachers caught on that was quite a good one yeah i used to sell uh sweets at school and i made a fortune i used to go to woolworths buy all the like strawberry laces cut them up redistribute them into different packages

3:10Fliss Newland:and then sell them they were like 99p you'd sell them for like 20 quid it's genius it's amazing just works how have some of the things from that childhood then influenced like your approach to things today would you say that you're less risk averse because of that or more backed so you're secure to take on kind of new things i feel like it's about self-confidence and as kids like we're so lucky that we've always had parents who really believed in us and yeah but big part of my passion is kind of like women in leadership but I was really lucky that like if you come around to my dinner table you're shouting over each other to try and get word in edgeways so we didn't really need the the Sheryl Sandberg lean in at my house we're all leaning in and really both my sisters are really strong commercial successful women and I think it's more about that piece on having a really kind of strong family that back you and support you for whatever happens but this business as well like and where do you sit in the sisters I'm middle middle the weird middle child did you think i should have made you guess offense taken i'm joking it's brilliant being middle child but even like i'm sort of middle as well yeah yeah even now like the support from my family is immense with this it's like their their baby as well but um i think it's that and yeah just going after risk like what's the worst that can happen don't try don't yeah don't get anything are they sort of sounding board with the business now or cheerleaders or what's their role yeah i drag my mom out of retirement to do some of the recruitment which is hilarious and like everybody every honestly doing something like this you realize like all your friends family come out the woodwork everyone in their own way is supportive but certainly a sounding board and a big support yeah my sister's a kind of like free consultant I mean literally my my sister on maternity leave four months into maternity leave is currently giving me some free consultancy she's an ex-mackenzie girl so obviously I'm not going to say no to that but yeah hugely supportive yeah and Halloween yeah well she's currently dressing her whole house for Halloween wild things inspired Halloween because her street is fantastic for kids it's like can we do something around that so um yeah literally just sent you a photo of our I don't know what 10 foot Venus firetrap on the front of her house cobwebs I mean yeah and it's and it's the end of September so yeah it's epic so epic and it feels like that is like 100 % the spirit of the brand it's like doing crazy stuff to get kids excited right that is literally it like how can we be as fun for kids as any skittle haribo whilst obviously reassuring parents with the recipe and being half the sugar natural so yeah it's it's so cool building a brand like this because basically anything goes and we want to be as like wacky and cheeky and challenger because i think that's the thing that makes wild things like so exciting is there's a playbook written by the kids sweets brands of the past that is like really exciting for adults like it's fun it's playful it's nostalgic but the problem with sweets is that they're not made particularly well and they're not very good for you and I think coming with this better for you proposition is like really where the magic sits but also allows you to go and have such fun as a brand.

6:25Yeah, I think you're bang on. And I think the thing that we found is like, obviously we know the big boys that have the most incredible jumping off the shelf packaging. It's colourful. It's a wash of kind of plastic and multicoloured shouting. You know, it's epic and it's fun. But then you look at the no nasties, quote, kind of players or organic players. Suddenly it's white bags. Quite apologetic. Yeah, very. And it's very cutesy and gingham picnic rugs. and obviously there's lots of lovely kind of adult gourmet pink pastel stuff beautiful for me and you but like our whole thing is like why can't you mash those two worlds what was it like hand delivering the manifesto to haribo what was the story that was a bit of a cheeky stunt so this time last year just before we launched i was kind of trying to do a bit of a call to action to all the big confectionery people to drive a positive change like we don't need to have artificial stuff we don't need to have sweeteners the amount of like emulsifiers and additives that just aren't we've proven like don't need to be there so my intention was like like i'm going to go to haribo hq i'm going to deliver a letter saying please join us it can be done obviously i haven't heard a peep and actually i look back now like i love that i was in that mood of just like campaigner you know but actually leave them to it we don't need to look at like what's bad in others and outing you know this has got gelatin and this has got sugar just you do you is my whole mantra but just do us like we can just be cool and be like hey cool cool parents cool kids join us why because we're better because we're good because we're fun because we're tasty so i did send um a letter in the post to all of the big confection manufacturers and we didn't hear anything back but i'm sure it might ruffle a few feathers who knows maybe in a few years time i also read that like part of the journey around wild things was inspired by a dare to go vegan in 2016 so almost 10 years ago during easter lent what was the background to that story this is way before wild things but i was a big meathead fillet steak smoked salmon and i was found the pub with my mates back when vegan i hadn't actually heard what vegan was i'll ruin spoiler I've been vegan for about eight years now but at this time hadn't heard what it was didn't understand why you wouldn't eat egg and dairy anyway and we were a few pints in and my mates were like you could never go vegan so I was like I bet you just being stubborn and I said I could do it and so I did it for Easter Lent that Lent I actually failed annoyingly a day before ending because I got drunk and had KFC I nicked a nugget in KFC or something allegedly as well allegedly but um it fully changed my whole perspective on food and ecosystems and climate and ethics and welfare that stint and it actually changed me over that time I kind of went back to eating meat and then it just didn't sit right with me for like so many reasons so yeah I kind of dabbled with pesky and veggie and then I fully went vegan um I think it was eight years ago now yeah and yeah that's a big part like we are a vegan and organic brand I don't shout about it a lot because sadly the vegan were about one percent of the population as i speak we're noisy but it was small but um personally yeah it's a huge passion of mine and that's how i came across the the brand not as wild things but as what it was before as a kind of really amazing 40 year old vegan sweetie that kind of lost its way but had this amazing formulation and tasted great and i was low sugar for yeah so that's kind of what led me to this really because um i was really sure i I loved working for Mondelez who a huge manufacturer I was working with before I mean Oreos, Maynard's Bassett etc um Cadbury's obviously but I just increasingly didn't feel proud to be selling stuff with high sugar and palm oil and gelatin so it was that growing in me plus this kind of like longer term ambition to kind of do something more entrepreneurial and then coming across this vegan sweetie brand that it just felt too sliding doors special for me not to give it a go but at the time I was like obviously showing myself like oh my god I'm gonna make this jump from kind of this corporate world to fully starting something from scratch but it's just bit mental how I dare or choosing not to you know not to give in to previous way of eating yeah how I dare can then actually inform like the you know your whole life I know actually that is weird if you're thinking about it if I deep it you know it's quite a big uh a big decision to then impact on your life going forward and starting your own business because of it like there's definitely one of those uh butterfly effect type things definitely definitely yeah hugely you discovered this amazing product but you realized that there was a huge brand problem with it which I guess you knew brand pretty well because you've been at Mondelez have kind of worked in Sweeties you come across this amazing product but it's just niche yeah really like the full positioning was two vegans four vegans by vegans yeah we just felt like it was literally missing 99 % yeah what's so amazingly innovative about these gummies which I can't claim is that they are both way lower sugar but without using artificial so you have some sweets now that like zero sugar with sweeteners and additives and you've got some obviously great brands are doing kind of the no nasties palm oil free and no artificial additives but to do both i was like this is amazing this is actually amazing and they taste great what the hell so they'd done really all the hard work for me but like you said the positioning was so neat it hadn't really you know been found by the masses and i i had a real obvious gut feel i mean i knew the kind of consumer insights from mondelez where everyone was looking everyone i mean health is not i'm not exactly a genius um specialist to to guess that people are trying to cut sugar etc but a real gut feel that parents would really care about this suite so i guess i had this had this hypothesis took on the brand and then did loads of consumer research to kind of back that up and i say loads consumer research there's a startup consumer research it's not big budget but kind of paying well taking my god mum out of retirement who's ex she used to do consumer back in the day um she's amazing auntie Alison and she helped me um with another amazing kind of old mentor of mine called um Jen Spurr she's ex Cadbury's and I was like I've got this sweetie brand it literally was just a suite let's speak to parents and find out what they're you know if they if it resonates with them so we gave a few consumer groups kind of Amazon vouchers and begged for kind of afternoons of their time I mean the insights from those sessions still are so helpful and still guide us now but like it really affirmed what we thought which is that modern parents want to give their kids sweets sash sweets everywhere they're at the parties they can't avoid sweets even if they wanted to and they want their kids not to see sweets as like bad food because we grew up a lot this kind of diet culture good food bad food modern parents want balance and moderation but they feel really awful about the artificials and the sugar so we were like oh i mean that was a bit of a sort of eureka like we're on to something here i think in your kind of mission or somewhere within your brand you talk about wanting to take the mental load of parents yeah when i read that i was like oh that's so insightful because i look at my brother has two young girls and you know you only have to spend a little bit of time with them to realize there's quite a lot of like guilt that comes with what you feed your kids and you want something easy and convenient yeah but you don't want it to be too bad and then if you get some dodgy pouches you know you feel a bit embarrassed feeding them in front of certain people and like it's mad it is a tough gig yeah and I think when I saw some of the Instagram images of like you out in the wild with kids and the you know that sort of vibe to it I was like oh this is so smart and I totally get that positioning of being like this rebellious natural punk sweet business that is actually good for kids and there's like real power in in that it was like shocking for me actually these consumer groups like how much is on parents play and in psyche and guilt is such a good point we try to never mention guilt i don't want to feed into guilt so i also moving away from punching down to kind of let's say the more kind of artificial brands is in them i don't want to actually feed into that because i don't want sweets shouldn't be something that is stressing parents out there's enough to stress about with like raising kids nowadays and people typically managing jobs and school pickups and it's all far like far too much like as it is police can sweets not be something else on people's like radar to be stressing about so i love that we and everything we do and like our activations and i work with like mostly or half mums now as well so i can see it live time how much is on their plates but we try to think of like what can reduce mental load with parents what how can we just like make more moments of joy for families because that's what it's about and that's what sweets are about let's not we're not healthy we're not an apple we're never going to be an apple we're just the kind of probably the best of a bad bunch is probably where i'd do it but in those moments of like fun and joy and at a birthday party or at trick-or-treating sweets are appropriate and if you're going to choose one then why not choose one like slightly less sugar and artificials in them you know there's an interesting nuance obviously it's predominantly kids product in many ways but you're selling to adults yeah and so that like having that element of kind of fun rebellion you know not necessarily nostalgia coming through the brand but that nostalgia of having like fun like the world of sweets as a kid when we were kids yeah pretty fucking cool yeah you know whether it's kind of sherbets or pick and mixes or dolly pops or all the rest of it chubba you know chubba lollies like there was so much kind of fun and joy and excitement there but because of the world that we live in now where we're like being hit over the head with you know sugar tax and macros and micros and what's good for you what's bad like and the whole like upf thing yeah you know it's really like quite taxing on the mind without kids yeah imagine with kids i think that would be really stressful yeah and you're just trying to do right by them I think the interesting thing I kind of alluded to but like these parents that we speak to and now we're always at like family friendly festivals or obviously samplings and stuff but I speak to loads of parents now but it's this really interesting audience who grew up with the special k diet and like fads and you know like kind of really toxic 90s like examples of nothing tastes as good as skinny feels you know and then live through Jamie's school dinners and then deliciously Ella when it was like you know you've got to be perfected it feels to me that parents just want something a little bit more holistic like it's not just about obsessive diet for diet's sake I mean Joe Wicks got a lot of heat for this recently in the Daily Mail and I was trying to let me I was trying to reach out to Joe he liked to speak to us that Joe Wicks was speaking about how he's completely banned sugar and his little three-year-old said daddy am I naughty why because I'm not allowed sweets and the other kids are everyone's coming up for basically there's an emotional there's an emotional factor with these things and actually depriving people yourself and your kids of something which their friends are having is also not ideal and not easy as a parent so basically hats off to parents there's a lot on their plate sweet shouldn't have to be one of it one of those things on their plate so happy to be hopefully part of reducing that mental load and making things a bit easier a bit more fun and a bit more light when you're bringing up kids and And have you sensed that sense of kind of relief from any of the parents that you've spoken to?

18:06Like what are some of the things you've heard from them? I've had a few examples where kids have had their first ever suite in front of me. Because mum or dad's gone, are we not allowed them to suites? Or we'll let them have this. I've got one fully on camera. I said, do you mind? I have to film this. Which is pretty cool. But it is literally, it's like Eureka. Most parents I speak to, particularly like when they're a bit younger, kids are sort of four to sort of seven. and parents slightly despair because sweets are everywhere so it's kind of an unavoidable truth but um it's like a eureka moment like oh my god this is great this is what we need so that is epic and that for me is like what really does fuel me when we're with our demographic and then the kids taste it and that's always the sound and the parents i explain to parents you know the fact we're organic and natural and half sugar and they're like what that is for me all the kind of proof point that i'm like yeah it keeps me going and you get to go and do some fun stuff with the brand as a result.

19:01Yeah, I mean, we do tattoos at the kids' festival. We've now got a nine-foot inflatable Venus flytrap like the V on the front of our packs. And we had a kid's car. We actually just gave that car. We took a kid's little Jeep covered in Wild Thing stickers and we took it to all the festivals and we said, if you follow us, you can win it. And we gave it to a little boy yesterday who is the most delighted little boy in the world. But it's so far. I mean, sorry, I'm selling sweets and it's for kids. It's the coolest thing ever. and there's more to come and like there's so much you can do with content with kids and parties and yeah it's it's literally the most fun job really when you think about it yeah one side of it is like how do parents and kids react to it how have like the retailers reacted to it because I know that you're in some great digital retailers also in some you know like Ocado and Amazon and then you're also in Whole Foods and Planet Organic like how have they responded to it do they get it do they think it's too radical does it take convincing are they reaching out to you like what's the dynamic there i know if i speak to buy this that's our demo i always think yes it's so much more of a selling like pushing on more of an open door we're an interesting one because our packaging is as such it's so wacky when you see this now on whole foods as of last friday we look like quite crazy on a whole foods shelf and i feel it's interesting because we because of the quite i think bold choice we made of like right we're not going to look like an organic suite that's kind of deliberate in our heartland we're now in 400 and total kind of distribution points and most of those will be farm shops and farm parks and organic stores and health stores that was originally our kind of like early adopters we look quite different and i i do remember some early stage feedback from some of the more independent gorgeous yummy like dalesford for example don't stock us they i think wow wow i'm like but our suites the credentials of our suites are great we just want to appeal to the kids to actually enjoy them so it's an interesting one the ocado launch this june has been really well game-changing for us because then getting in front of more like busy families as part of their weekly shop but um that was through the ocado roots program and really helped because we won an award some of the organic awards there was an there was an organics soil association awards that we entered and there's a panel that judge it and one of those awards was to get onto the Ocado route so we kind of won that through a tasting panel so that was sort of I guess part luck parts the suites doing the talking for themselves and we're listing in co-op in a couple weeks on their brand incubator scheme so getting that was just a typical kind of pitch process I think they had a load of applicants and full Dragon's Den style pitch in front of 10 people up in their HQ in Manchester in March they got it we had a kind of very tight selling story of why they needed to stock us and give us a chance and why there was nothing out there like us i mean i'm hoping they were brought in because we're one of the kind of seven brands on their incubator and that will be really game-changing for us because i mean obviously it's going to take us then nationwide but we will get weekly data and as small brands like that is everything you want that kind of case study and that in those insights good bad or ugly like to know that is just going to be incredible i mean when i found out that news i was in floods of tears hugging my manufacturer who I was I was randomly with our our warehouse and I was sorry and I was hugging her in the car park because we'd heard that but it's genuinely game-changing for us yeah I definitely see like once people know what the brand is yeah and like especially on the online platforms I can imagine there's like really high intent to just stay super stocked up with it yeah but I think the test will be like will people pick it up yeah because you've got the story and the product and all the rest of it to get into those places it's then like if they know it then they'll pick it up because it's great and to be honest i haven't even mentioned amazon like amazon are interesting obviously they kind of we like love to hate them hate to love them but from the beginning we launched with them and really single-minded of getting into party bags and kids parties and i still don't think we're making much profit through them because the fees are exhaustion it however that as a vehicle for trial has actually been amazing because just yeah because because one we've made literally our party box on amazon are like made for purpose so you can order one they've got either sort of 34 packs 24 packs or a smaller 12 pack so they're kind of they're ready and then because of naturally like the search it's the first example of where i've met people who've heard about us first time ever someone's like oh i've heard of your brand we're two months into launch i was like i don't think you have and they were yeah i got you on amazon i had them for my son's birthday last month i was searching for low sugar sweets and i i just straight burst into tears to her face but i was like that is so cool but that as that is actually really exciting because then if a mum or dad brings up to a party and explains why they got that and gives it out to 24 kids i mean that that is one of those for me trust the process moments because now our amazon is really firing we've got trick-or-treat box coming soon in october which will be epic for halloween but i think that's a really important part of our strategy and kind of marketing getting into um more party bags and party occasions i remember there was this story the founder of green egg told they obviously had the data but you could tell when one guy had like bought it had a barbecue yeah and then they could see like five other people would buy it in their local area genius i imagine you get a mum hosting a party yeah hosting a kid's party they all go away with goodie bags you get amazon well one of our amazing partners is sharky and george who are really fab kids they do lots of parties but they're particularly famous for kids party planning in london and they're one of our really early kind of like supporters and got us and they obviously do kids parties so they're getting lots of heat from parents saying stop giving so much sugar out so they immediately switched to using wild things in all their parties and i feel that's another one it's impossible for me to measure but um i hope it's one of those groundswell things that just sort of trickle through you know what you should do you should do a collab with jelly cats to make the character toy yeah i'd love imagine yeah some of the kids businesses are just so brilliant yeah have you seen that um what's it called baking mix brand so they have it's like a baking mix in a bottle yeah yeah yeah um genius i think it's called bottle baking coat or something yeah yeah it's cool it is that one it is exactly that one i saw it and i was like this is mental it's 20 quid and it's the raw ingredients in a bottle i love yeah i love it and it's just like it's all loaded so you see it but there's i was just like that's such a genius business and like quite easy to do it's like why didn't I think of that I guess I just want to rewind to to corporate girly yeah you know some people are at risk of going into business kind of too early without earning their stripes or kind of spending time seeing you know how it's done at a kind of

26:09Fliss Newland:bigger level and I think a lot of the founders that have been really successful when people doing things you know have spent some time at kind of either big brands or sort of challenger brands that have gone on to do well and they tend to spawn out a lot of businesses off the back of it how much have you relied on some of the past to execute the future has it been kind of helpful or hindrance like where have you sat with it i would say i had a world-class training at and i work with some incredible amazing people so like bright amazing culture i i can only really think it's positive there's loads of stuff you have to immediately put in the bin yeah and rethink and go back to basics because you don't have the infrastructure and the teams but i think it served me and still serves me really well i remember being viscerally jealous when i see people launching things and thinking i'd be itching and i knew that in my gut but i had to wait to the right time but i also think it's important not to do these things too late because I think if you climb the pole too much yeah the risk feels too great like I was never at a point when my salary was so crazy I couldn't walk from it if that makes sense yeah I mean like I think I don't my stripes enough I got a really brilliant like breadth of understanding and kind of exposure across functions I wouldn't say I'm an expert in any but I'd be jack of as much as I could and that was actually quite deliberate when I was at the organization I really wanted to see as much as possible my last role with Mondelez was in Southeast Asia leading the e-commerce business for Malaysia and Singapore, that was a deliberate move.

27:39I wanted to see a different market. And I wanted to be, I mean, out in Malaysia, Singapore, Cadbury's is a tiny, a challenger brand. I don't want to say tiny, that's a lie, but it's not what it is here. But I wanted to do something in more of that, you know, feeling more challenger. But yeah, I mean, it's brilliant. And I still obviously lean on it every minute with this role. But there is a lot you have to like immediately, like you suddenly feel really a bit useless. like suddenly like I am cash flow HR like accounting finance I have an amazing team by the way which we need to get on to but I it's hilarious how much you don't know and you think you think it's going to be um sailing and even like contacts like having like contacts you suddenly need are very much freelance scrappy bitty challenger which you just don't have from previous life however coming into the challenger world I was gobsmacked how ridiculously supportive everyone is it's like we're this big family that just sort of back each other and you're very rarely eating each other's dinner anyway so you kind of like my office i work in mission works in hammersmith i'm around like tess who's been on the pod so we're constantly and laura he's got eco eco um cleaning brand and we're all leaning on each other and that goes for every forum by women built founders rise every whatsapp group everyone just wants each other like the best for other so that was something I felt really surprised me I don't know what it's like anywhere else but it's definitely something that I felt through the potty yeah is there's this community of especially food and drinks founders and consumer good founders like more broadly that really like have your back and like people get to know people and they're here's a contact here's an investor yeah and it's um it's got a real nice energy to it and vibe to it that i think is is really special i think it makes it a little bit bloody tough yeah i think it's so tough and so hard that everyone's just like out like we're all in the trenches together we're like mostly trying to support each other but also trying to be like these are great i recommend them yeah don't make the same mistakes i did don't go after that yeah and i think the type of person that can go from a big business to a small one and take that jump which I think is definitely harder for some than others and I think it requires a lot of like initiative a lot of like get up and go a lot of like happy to kind of work things out break down doors and not everyone can do that I think that takes a special type of person because you can get quite used to being like oh they do that and that's their role and they do that and that's their role.

30:19Whereas you now got to wear a lot of hats and you don't really have any time to complain about it. So you just got to get on with it. Yeah, that's also part of it. If you'd asked any of my old Mondelez colleagues, they'd say I was a bit chaotic and a bit blue sky thinking and a bit fliss focused. So I know it's no surprise to them that I'm doing this now and they laugh about it a little bit. So yeah, it's horses for courses, isn't it? Yeah. And let's talk about, you know, power of mums. you've got a team that's half mums i think we're all women we're all female at the moment we're all female um team and now as i worked out more than half of the team are mums so we're still small but that is epic i mean literally i i think i hit jackpot with this even i i didn't think it was an idea but the first time i'm a genius this is genius this is first hire is someone called abby who does all our ops and logistics so i was like this is where i really need help day one we didn't even have a name for the brand at this point I just had to say believe me this is going to be massive and she did but the reason Abby came on and what she was looking for at that time she'd had a really successful career in fashion ops and she was looking to she's got three kids just be able to pick kids up from school and drop them off so she was looking for all sorts of home based roles and came across this job description at the time and took a punt on us I mean I have basically got like top top talent for the price of being able to say obviously put your kids up from school drop them off I mean I again I think it's genius she's still with us now she's still an absolute legend and I love and trust her so much which I think also makes such a big difference when you're in a startup you literally obviously see a lot more more of the people you're working with than your own family and your own partners so that's epic but now along the way we've got Lucy and Sophie are both kind of junior sales and marketing that joined ex Huel, ex Dalesford and Harrods.

32:10They're really like young, fresh talent that are just brilliant and so high initiative and go getters. And then Lorna, who does our social media, she's a mum of three and a bit of a mumfluencer as well. She does events, you know, massive extensive career in marketing, but because she is the consumer, doesn't need to be taught, you know, she lives and breathes it. and that is just so invaluable and then kind of more externally from a kind of consultancy perspective Jen who I mentioned earlier has been kind of a fractional CMO for us from the beginning an old kind of coach actually of mine before and then she's been a marketing well she's been all many hats at one point she was basically acting like a junior brand manager until I said this is ridiculous you're an ex-director of marketing you need we I can't afford to do this and you you cannot waste your time doing this but anyway she's been amazing throughout and is now very much advisory for me she's a mum of two and Daisy does our PR she's a mum of two so when we're doing kind of like strategy thinking and like what we're next what we're going to do next we literally have in the room four mums who can directly pull on their experience and tell us what to do what not to do what's cool you know why to do jellycat or toxic waste or what you know what what's the trends are so it's sort of happened how it's happened and it means we're building a really flexible culture because what you know one day I'd love to have my own family and I'd love to have a culture that's built and ready to be able to do that without compromising my ambitions you know so that's the kind of bigger driving force and and goal behind the organization but um it's pretty cool space to work in and just yeah a team of legends that inspire me every day I mean we spoke about it last time but there's some businesses in the states I can't remember their names but I remember listening to these podcasts about how they scaled through essentially kind of mum fluences yeah and I think there's such a you know if you can hit the right cultural note yeah be there with a product and a brand that supports that cultural note it becomes really powerful it took me time to actually make the link because it's sort of like deep in my psyche the drive to one day want a family and to want to work and like the motherhood penalty is very real people talk a lot about gender pay gap but realistically in a in a context of like the uk market we've done a lot of work on getting to pay parity for like you know equal pay for equal equal jobs the issue is now expectations of looking after kids at home typically falling on mum and then how that impacts women's careers in terms of likelihood to get promotions and obviously pay and etc is huge so I think it's a really tough time yeah that you know going from yeah being really epic at your career or job usually to then having kids and your world's kind of turned upside down yeah this is from first-hand not first-hand experience but I guess through what I've seen from others you have to like re-evaluate your whole identity for a little period of time yeah you lose a little bit of yourself and of your soul and then I feel like you kind of people can get it back afterwards and I think it's I think that whole mental transition that I've observed in others like looks tough from the outside so I can only imagine what it feels like on the inside yeah I think it's huge and again I'm close to it with a lot of my friends recently having babies and my two sisters really recently having babies but for me it's the binary of it like going on those chunky maternity leave so that you're suddenly out of work for like i don't know nine months and then it's the expectation when you come back to work this 40 hour working week monday to friday just isn't fit for purpose for a modern world and actually there's amazing stuff happening with you know more paternity leave which is really the answer this kind of idea of shared parental responsibility and then we just need to totally re-look at what the working week looks like and and rip it up and start again because it doesn't make sense and looking at or talking to anyone about the cost of child care and nursery and a lot of women are having to make decisions of whether they go back to work just for their mental health knowing full well that after tax their salary doesn't really quite cover or only just covers the child care so I'm paying someone else to raise my kids but it's just it ain't right and I'm no I don't know the answers I just know that with wild things and what we could do with this org we're designing this for people to be full humans and mums or dads and maybe in the future you know parents to be able to be present with their kids and not forego their ambitions and be bringing their full self to work because there's so many like capable women capable capable people i should say but really what i see capable women who have to make decisions to really take a step back and let typically then their partner take the lead with the salary which works for some people can obviously and it has to be whatever people get their energy from but i think we lose a lot of really talented people from the workplace or from being able to contribute just because the working week doesn't quite fit it's not quite possible for parents and honestly what they go through nowadays with schools whatsapp groups it's like you get to the end there's a nativity and a maypole and a sports day and a back to front and you've got book day and you haven't talked about mental loads schools are absolutely crazy yeah how are we going to solve all this yeah i think being able to offer people opportunities that are in some way kind of flexible that understand the situation yeah i think is a progressive answer and a step in the right direction yeah i know i hope so definitely i think it's really important that more businesses can can try and offer some of more of that like part-time stuff and embrace it and enjoy it where it fits yeah like real part-time work because even like I've seen women who've come and done you know four day weeks it's never you end up doing a five-day role but in four days and paid for four days you know it doesn't it from what I've seen I've rarely seen it work we need to get better at that and looking at how you know like even you can co-share roles it's like one of these ideas but even revisiting the kind of core hours or schools really looking at what we do in the educational system i mean i don't know enough about that to comment but even the nursery pick up times and school pick up times don't not they don't fit yeah two working parents we're doing our little bit with it but yeah it's my dream to be working with such capable talented brilliant women it really is yeah and obviously we welcome men as well i shouldn't say that but it's nice i think it's great to have a point of view and to stand by it and bring it to life with what you do yeah definitely you know i think it's really positive what does the future hold in store what are you like most excited about i haven't mentioned it but we've had a few really big kind of out of home food service distributors back us we call bib foods and breaks and those will take us into more of those out and about locations so what i'm excited and focused on doing is building the brand love you know we've just had a chain of ice rinks list us we're talking to everyone active i would want to get into national trust butlin center parks where are families out about building the brand that way where most likely we're going to find shoppers that get us and love us and the consumers that love us and the kids so that and i'm manifesting now when we get the call from the big grocers and we're hopefully in all the big grocery multiples in a few years time we're ready for that because families will have seen us out about so build it that's really smart well that's the plan but this co-op news around the corner is so exciting amazing well thank you so much for coming on people doing things i wish you the best of success thank you thank you so much that was fliss newland from wild things on people

40:02Fliss Newland:doing things as always i've been your host ed little and if you are feeling particularly generous of spirit reviews go a long way to helping this podcast grow so please head over to spotify or apple and leave one people doing things on a mission to celebrate and inspire the entrepreneurs of tomorrow