"Why Don't We Just Do It?" The Conversation That Changed Everything

24:17Alex Chisnall:which I can relate to, juggling a family, bringing up kids with bringing up another kid which is a business right yeah i mean i think it's it's hard at times we go through real busy periods like from february for the from february march april we're really really busy but then on the flip side you know we can kind of relax a bit more august september time so i feel like it's it's worth it for the for the quieter periods but yeah I mean it's a constant juggle. I feel also there's so much at the moment it's very like founder face like be your personal brand and that's something that I think both of us have found quite difficult because we genuinely are at max capacity.

25:00I can't vlog like my whole morning because I've got three kids asking me where their uniform is getting stuff out of the tumble dryer like we don't have nannies to support with stuff like that or kind of like relative support so it's just it makes you feel like oh i'm not doing enough as a founder but it's a whole nother dimension when you've got kids because they just take up so much of your time especially at the age

25:26Alex Chisnall:yeah when they're young they're not they can't just get on with their yeah and it's not just that it's not just that it's like managing their schedule when do i need to be in school for an assembly or a sports day or a recital or an award ceremony like what uniform is this one wearing on every day it just is overwhelming yeah claude's helped me with that a lot mine too were dancers and um i remember doing you know putting them in their ballet outfit doing the hair and i used to get lots of compliments about their hair so i used to be like you know very good at very good at that as well because my wife's work have her own business as well so it's like both of us running our own businesses and trying to manage it around who's taking who on what day to you know tap ballet modern every day after school yeah yeah literally is yeah but you want to do everything for your kids right and give them as many opportunities as possible but at the same time you're trying to run a business and like the thing that always goes with me is literally that like doing a social media post yeah that would be the thing that every day i like need to do social media posts but that will be the thing that just goes just just drops off yeah i mean before we hired our social media girl who's been with us full time for a couple of years now social media would stress us out so much because we wouldn't post for a day or two and then we're like oh my god we haven't posted it just like build up and up and up but now that we have one i mean she's been like pivotal to our growth yeah but it's as you as you say it's very much um personal brand sells sells the business and how much time have you got to actually do that do you want to do that yeah but then also i see a lot of like personal brand sales business i've also seen a lot of companies recently with really big personal brand faces or celebrity faces that have gone under.

27:11So I also do kind of think it is amazing and it can be really, really amazing for kind of building out that community and getting more eyes on your brand. But also it's not the be all and end all of running a brand. I think if you can, like, sometimes that comes at the expense of profitability and like focusing on your bottom line, which is something I think that we're have always been so like laser focused on. Yeah. So yeah, I think there's pros and cons.

27:41Alex Chisnall:Who's the optimist in the business? Me. That was an easy one. That was an easy one to answer. Who's the one who challenges decisions the most? Me. Because you're the optimist. Like let's do this. I've got this idea, this idea. I'm like, okay, let's sit down. I'm going to get out of my cash flow and let's talk it through. Bring the evidence. What's the biggest disagreement you've ever had? We were trying to talk about this earlier and it's such a boring answer because I feel like we really just don't disagree on anything. There might be some design decisions where I like something, you don't like it or vice versa but we always just hash it out.

28:23No hissy fits. No hissy fits, no. I think because we're sisters there's just no professional boundaries at all. You don't harbour any feelings or resentment or, you know, if it's a business partner that you're not related to, you might be like, okay, let's handle this professionally. But we would just say it. Can you talk about stuff other than work

28:46Alex Chisnall:when you're together? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. All the time. I mean, we literally spend, I would say 80 % of my time is with Olivia. And we might work together in the day and then go home for like an hour and then meet up for play dates because our daughters are the same age. Are they the same age? and then meet up and then go back and then we might then meet with our mum and our other sister for dinner a little bit later. So, yeah, we can definitely separate it. We do talk about it a lot, but we can separate it. Are the sister not in the business? No, she's not. She's not. I don't know if she would want to be.

29:22She's the cool sister. She is. The cool sister, yeah. She's very edgy. She's very edgy. She's very creative. She's like an art director. she's very successful in her own stream, her own industry. But maybe she'll do some creative direction for us. Every year we're like, please will you come and shoot our campaign? Because we go to amazing exotic locations. This year we were like, do you want to come to the Maldives with us, shoot the campaign? She's like, no, I've got fashion week.

29:48Alex Chisnall:You weren't trying to create more swimwear. You were solving a frustration you'd experienced yourselves. how important has listening to customers been so important I feel like what has kind of set us apart over the year is we've always been very solutions focused swimwear brand so all of our styles we focus a lot on adjustability we focus a lot on women with problems that women encounter you might have a small band and a large cup you might want to buy mix and match because your different sizes on the top and the bottom you might want something that's got grippy silicon lining because it rolls down so every design decision we've ever made has been based on customer feedback and that's been the case ever since day one so that has been pivotal to our growth because I feel like our customers have felt so involved in the actual design of all of the swimwear and we've really answered a lot of their I guess requirements with new designs that we launch each year yeah we definitely couldn't have done it without our customers and you say your repeat order rate is something like 40 percent how do you think you've managed something like because you can especially the background you have the the financial forecasting that that you can have from season to season right must be pretty accurate yeah i think i think honestly just having a really really great product once people are in the kind of toco world they don't really want to leave it again it's just like getting them in for the first time that is the kind of more expensive part but yeah once they're buying from us then they're usually continuing and like telling their friends about us but it really is just down to having a really good product at the end of the day and have you launched product that haven't done as well as you thought they would yeah for sure yeah i mean we launched loungewear which was i mean one of the questions that we got was one of our biggest mistakes and I think that was it it was like almost thinking wow we have this amazing community they'll buy anything from us but realizing that our specialism is not in loungewear the only thing that was kind of a common denominator between loungewear and our swimwear was that it was really soft and it was really well made but it was like a completely different product it felt like we were kind of hosting two completely different brands which was really difficult um so yeah i feel like that we definitely missed the mark with that one but we recognized it quite quickly we i was gonna ask you that yeah how quickly did you kind of pivot from that really quick like really quickly i think we knew within six months that this was not like this was the wrong decision that we'd made yeah yeah so we parked it really early on it was expensive but it was also i think a mistake we needed to make because we were trying to combat our seasonality that's why we launched it in the first place and we realized actually we shouldn't be focusing on releasing a whole new product but focusing on selling more of the product we're really good at and maybe just looking at different geographies I was going to say how did you overcome that challenge then or something that you were talking about earlier trying to overcome is seasonality I suppose so I think different geographies but also I mean back in the early days we would launch a collection sell out and then kind of be like out of stock for the whole of winter but what we've now done we've kind of managed to stretch our period out for maybe like eight to nine months of the year much better at ordering stock making sure that we're not sold out we're still then appealing to people who are going on the winter sun holidays or who are shopping from America in winter and stuff like that so just getting way better with stock planning basically and how hard like was it personally to admit that that was a mistake do you think or was it an easy decision because you've got each other to bounce up i think it was an easy decision to make but it's quite embarrassing like you know you put all of this you have a photo shoot and it's like we're launching this new product and usually we're so used to launching our swim collection and shopify is just like ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.

33:56It's great, you get that dopamine hit, but it was just, we sold a few pieces. And we sold some stuff, and people to this day still say those tracksuit bottoms are the nicest ones they've ever had. I still wear them. I still wear mine all the time. But it was just, yeah, it feels like you're admitting failure. I think you had just had Elodie, and we filmed a video of, I got newborn baby, like a talk to Cam style video, just saying why we'd, ended it and then that was felt really good

34:30Alex Chisnall:what did you learn from that do you think like one lesson each maybe I think I think the challenging thing was the products were just so different and so much of our sales come from social media we were trying to I mean we are a very fun brand like our swimwear is very fun bold colorful and then our loungewear was like super neutral like minimalistic and it just the two just like didn't go hand in hand at all so i think like we still we've launched resort wear which is way more in line with the swimwear that we produce so i suppose the learning is keep it on brand and know and knowing what what customers love us for yeah um which is that fun like approachable kind of lifestyle that they see on our instagram yeah what is the rationale for for going like more minimal with with that I think it's because with swimwear, you can be really fun and loud and like wear really bright colours.

35:27Whereas with day to day wear, I mean, me personally, definitely. There are, of course, people who wear really colourful stuff day to day. But typically you wear your blacks, your browns, white, grey. I mean, look at what we're all wearing. Olivia's got a pop of colour. She has.

35:43Alex Chisnall:Maybe we all needed to have a colourful necklace. Yeah, but I mean, maybe that would have been it if we were like, oh, well, we're going to bring maximalist colour to loungewear. Maybe that would have been different. But I feel like we went for those muted tones because that's just what we personally buy in those kind of more day-to-day-aware style pieces. Yeah, no, I find it fascinating. Somebody kind of referenced earlier when I was recording here with Roxy Nafisi, and she's launched like a perfume range. And you think, okay, so you're an author. that everybody, you know, sold two million copies of your manifest books.

36:20Alex Chisnall:And I was, you know, how's that going? And she's just like, not as good as I thought it would. And I was like, what do you mean? She's like, I just assumed it would sell out. And I was like, it didn't. She was like, no, not at all. And I said, so, again, similar to what I asked you, what do you need to do to sell that out? And she's like, I don't know. And I was just like, I appreciate that honesty. and they're kind of like talking through that. And again, it just seems, someone I was talking about too early with like Simon Scrib and stuff, but I was like going, that's quite a departure to go, book, perfume range.

36:56Yeah, sometimes like someone said it quite, I can't remember who we were talking to, but they were like, you don't want it, if you're pivoting or diversifying your product range, you don't want to do like a 180 different product. You want to kind of go 10%. So stick in that. So we've always said now, like going forward all our products are going to sit in that holiday wardrobe ecosphere so whether that's resort wear or bags or fun jewelry the necklace that if you're wearing it's a collaboration we've done with a jewelry brand it's all stuff that you're going to pack in your suit smoothie london yeah really beautiful but all stuff that you can pack in your suitcase to go on holiday

37:37Alex Chisnall:when did the business stop feeling like a side hustle for you was it literally the moment you finished your jobs or did it feel more than that before that i actually think when we outsourced our fulfillment to a warehouse that was a big moment for us well for me anyway because because i left earlier so i was doing a lot of the fulfillment myself um from my flat and i think when we outsourced it that felt like wow we've got someone else that's doing something to help us fulfill more orders and that felt like a big moment quite a simple shift but it did feel like a big moment for us and I think maybe when we were quite prudent about hiring people for a really long time because we're both control freaks and wanted to do everything ourselves but enough was enough so I think once we hired our first full-time employee that felt like wow like this is quite serious now you know we we are paying someone once a month they're relying on us and so that was quite a big moment, I would say a big milestone for us.

38:40Yeah, definitely. But very much, I mean, thank God we did. I've spoken to so many people who were like, you need to see it as an investment, not as a cost.

38:50Alex Chisnall:It's a mindset shift, isn't it? No, I agree with you. I think it's the first time you hire somebody and you're like, okay, so this is serious now. Somebody's relying on me. As you said, I need to make X to pay Y to then give me Z. head you know um as you as you've grown and scaled the business like you say nearly 10 years um what what broke first in that process like what challenge did you hit that you really had to find an answer to aside from cash yeah i mean cash has always been the the challenge that we have to overcome but I think a huge one for us was inventory management and it's such a boring one but I speak to so many founders who are like what what tool are you using to forecast your inventory there's so many tools on the market but I feel like none of them really worked for us we've got Olivia, Olivia manages all of the operational side of the business now we've kind of divided our roles in recent years but we've got like thousands of different SKUs and it's impossible to predict what's going to do well what's not going to do well so there would be times where we'd order tons in a color that we think is going to do really well and we can't sell any of it so we end up selling it discounted during we have one sale here during black friday so i think that that inventory management piece is definitely one that has been a difficult it's an ongoing yeah an ongoing thing i mean it's better than it was definitely but i'm still trying to work through it yeah yeah and how did you separate your roles out how does that look and so it was only within the last like couple of years really that we thought we can't keep both trying to do the same thing it just doesn't it doesn't make sense and also we have very different skill sets even though we're very similar our skills are actually very different so yeah i think once we had employees as part of the team it just made sense for us to have our kind of different roles so I'm more operational finance product in your brand marketing yeah um what has surprised you most about scaling would you say I feel like just all of the infrastructure that you need it's it's over the last year we've tried to really kind of lay the groundwork and we've got all of these applications and things to try and help us grow I think yeah just having to implement proper infrastructure to actually scale sustainably.

41:15Yeah. And it just all racks up so much because you have kind of like, there's all these tools that they say, this is going to save you so much money. But when you have 50 of those tools, suddenly you're like, oh my God, I'm actually spending loads of money because it's the customer service software. It's the Shopify or the Shopify plus it's the, it's obviously the team, but there's other things like your meta ads, who's looking after that how much does that cost how do you create all of those assets we need to have more shoots because people fatigue of the content so quickly UGC creators we've started working with and it's all these different things just pile up and up and up and it's great because we do see a lot of return on that investment but equally it is

41:59Alex Chisnall:you've got to keep it keep it I remember literally I had a podcast production agency before up until last year with like I think we got up to 9-10 people and I just remember, and I don't know why I hadn't done it before, but then I did it every year, was literally look at all the, like you say, the apps, the different things, the softwares. And there were so many duplications. We were spending like thousands of pounds, like somebody's a decent salary just on all of these things. And if you don't keep a handle on those things, because there's always something new coming out that you think you need, that someone's telling you that you need, and they're all just another X amount a month.

42:3912-month lock-in period.

42:40Alex Chisnall:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Talk to me about building a community. Was that ever part of the plan? Was that intentional or has that just been like a byproduct of starting a business? I don't think it was intentional at the very beginning. Although we were always very responsive with customer service, we were obviously doing all of it at the beginning and we still are very responsive now. So I think naturally that built over time because we were always talking to people through DMs, but it was never the intention at the very beginning. I mean, it is very intentional now. Yeah, I think it's like community for us.

43:18We talked about this just before we came. Is community such a buzzword now? because I feel like community is what's valuable about a company. And if people want to invest, they want to see community. But for us, we've always found it so important that community has always been a two-way thing for us. Like we put content out to hopefully educate and entertain our community. But equally, me and Olivia still respond to a lot of DMs that we get from customers about sizing and style advice. And I've just had a baby and I've got a C-section scar. What's the best bikini bottom for me? And we've always been very, very personable with that.

43:55We always respond ourself pretty much, which probably is what takes up so much of our time. But it also means that I could list the names of 20 customers that bought from us in 2017 that are still buying with us now because you have that kind of personal relationship, even though it might be digital. I know who that person is. They know that they're talking to me or to you or to someone in the team. and we also involve them in our shoots each year. We have a big customer campaign. They're the people that tell everyone about Toko. Everyone that came into the pop-up said, oh, my friend said I should come down.

44:30So it's just something that's happened naturally, but now we want to be more intentional about it. Like we're looking at launching a brand ambassador scheme and things like that.

44:40Alex Chisnall:I was going to say, funnily enough, just popped into my head then, if you're answering a lot of the DMs, you know who your super fans are then, do you? Yeah, and who refer other people and then always buy whatever's come out. Yeah, and there's people that will tag us every holiday that they go on holiday. They'll tag us in lots of photos. And lots of their friends in Toko as well. Yeah, it's incredible. So it's like, why not reward those people for sharing the Toko love by kind of formalising it a bit more. Are you in By Women Built as well? Yeah. I thought you were. Yeah. Literally everyone I speak to at the moment is really i just had a great it's so good it's such a good community i was good i literally just had a conversation with sahar last week um just about coming to the event i'm doing at the nec um the event business that we have a festival of entrepreneurs um and she's she's london-based and this is obviously in birmingham but i was just saying literally i said every female entrepreneur that I seem to interview at the moment is part of Biowomen Build.

45:47It's so good. It's really good. Like I feel like, and they've recently just kind of separated the groups a bit. So now they have like the Biowomen Build Rockstars group, which is 1 million plus turnover or something like that. So they've kind of, they seem to be having micro groups within it. But it's so useful because you can just pop something on there. Like, is anyone having this issue with Shopify? Has anyone got a good app for this? And because it's all other founders, it's just really useful.

46:17Alex Chisnall:What advice would you give other females listening or watching now when it comes to building a consumer brand who's thinking about it, always wanted to do it, waiting for the perfect moment, sat on the fence, procrastinating? I don't think there's ever a perfect moment, honestly, but I would probably say don't quit the day job because I feel like as soon as it's the option yeah I feel like you'll probably say a different thing um but I feel like as soon as there's like the financial stress of running the business like we need to make this amount of revenue I feel like especially in the early days that just takes all of the joy and excitement out of it so for me I would say just keep hustling like putting the hours in after work on the weekend And until you know it's a kind of viable business, yeah.

47:11Alex Chisnall:Yeah, we're going to go for the opposite answer now. Well, no, because I would actually agree with that. Hey. Yeah, but I think I would say don't be kind of fooled by what you see on social media about all of these founder faces who are doing all of these big numbers and stuff because the number of followers on Instagram doesn't equate to the amount of turnover a company is doing. and also don't be ashamed of not wanting to be chasing VC money or raising investment because sometimes I feel like people use that as a bit of a vanity metric and it's like, well, we've raised£2 million. Great, but are you making a profit or is your burn rate really, really high and you're just constantly having to chase that money?

47:58Because sometimes you see it and it's like, wow, they've raised so much money, but what does that actually mean?

48:04Alex Chisnall:Quickfire rounds finish. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll alternate, shall I? Okay. Who wants the, what is an entrepreneur and who wants, what is a scale up? I'll do who wants the entrepreneur one. What is an entrepreneur? I feel like an entrepreneur is someone that sees problems in the world through a different lens. And it's just always thinking of solutions to problems. Even if they don't launch a business to solve that problem, they're still thinking, oh, how could I do that better? And like owning the risk, owning the risks. Yeah. What is a scale up? I guess it's just a business that's going places, that's growing.

48:38I mean, we're scaling up. We're expanding the team. We're growing our revenue. It's just we've got, yeah, an end goal at the end of it to hopefully be the biggest swimwear brand in the world. Yeah, I think scale up, like, you can define it in so many different ways. Like, is your team growing? Is your turnover growing? Are you introducing new products? But you're just growing in some way. it might not be financially but it might be in other ways you might just be growing loads on social media and you're scaling up via that

49:09Alex Chisnall:and a question that I think you've come to the same answer what's one song that sums up your journey and why it's also a song that no one will have ever ever heard of try us so the song is called Good Spirits and it's by Full Blown but the reason that it means listen to it after The reason it means so much is two years ago, we went back to Tobago. Our mum is Trinidadian. We went back to Tobago to shoot our campaign. And that was like a huge full circle moment because shooting with a team of like 10, I think, 12 in Tobago obviously is a huge cost. But we were finally at the point where we were able to do that.

49:49And that song was basically played on repeat for that whole holiday. So it just brings back like really, really good positive memories. But it's also about having a positive mindset in maybe not so positive circumstances. So I think we're both very good at just keeping a level head and always looking for the best in everything and always looking for a solution to everything and staying in good spirits.

50:17Alex Chisnall:That must have been a moment, though. Let's say team of 10. Yeah. Yeah, that must have been a moment. Yeah, it was incredible. It was incredible. We spent every single school holiday there, not in Tobago, but in Trinidad growing up. So it was really special. It was Jo who recommended you, wasn't it? Yeah. From Vizzy. Yeah. Having been on Screw It, Just Do It, who do you think would make a good guest that you would know that's got a good Screw It, Just Do It story? I think Amy Smale, founder of Odd Muse, is amazing. She's, I don't know whether you know Odd Muse, but it's a fashion brand. And she started maybe in 2020 or something like that.

50:57But she, yeah, she's just an amazing founder who's scaled the brand massively. And she's very like open and kind of like has. She's actually one of the few podcasts that I've listened to where I've actually repeat listened to a podcast because it's got really interesting, useful takeaways from it. But I also think Amira, Amira Mansour, she's a friend of ours. but she is a business and life coach and she's just really good at like helping you shift your mindset about stuff. This year we did a session with her and the whole thing came to the conclusion was we need to stop calling ourselves a small brand because we're actually not a small brand anymore but she was just really good at kind of helping shift that mindset and she's got a very soothing voice to listen to.

51:45Which helps.

51:48Alex Chisnall:people want to find out more about the brand people are going on summer holiday very soon easiest place to go to website Instagram page tokoswim.com tokoswim is our Instagram literally everything and anything you need to know is on both of those places any last words any last advice for anyone listening buy your swimwear from tokoswim shameless always be selling Absolutely selling. Absolutely. Well, look, it's been great. Really enjoyed the conversation. So thank you both for having us. Thank you for having us. If this conversation resonated with you, don't just sit there, act on it. Make sure you follow or subscribe for more game changing conversations.

52:31Alex Chisnall:And remember, the only thing standing between you and your business breakthrough is the decision to screw it and just do it.