“Building A Business Is The Key To Happiness” - Holly & Co founder

0:00Well, hello, bonjour, je m 'appelle Simon Mayo. And je m 'appelle Mark Kermode. Coming up on this week's take, reviews of Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, Minions and Monsters, a catch-up review of Supergirl from last week, because they screen it too late, and the invite with our special guest, two of its stars, Ed Norton and Olivia Wilde, who also direct the movie. Do not miss this week's take. I've watched people use their businesses to define their position on this planet and who they're going to be to their children and who they're going to turn up as. And they live in their creative self.

0:38And it's why I actually think building a business and why I'm obsessed with business is because I actually think it's a key to happiness. And I don't think we talk about that enough. welcome back to the businessmen i'm ben shepherd and much like celine dion i'm all by myself while joel takes official paternity leave as you know we take these things very seriously here at businessmen hq we're deep in the trenches building our men's skincare brand for skin and every week we're discovering just how much there is still to learn there's a lot we've already had some brilliant guests join us and share their stories their mistakes and the lesson that they've picked up along the way in business and in life, of course.

1:17If you've missed any of our conversations, do make sure you catch up wherever you get your podcasts. Hit the subscribe button so you don't miss anything that's coming next. You can also watch the full episodes over on the YouTube. Now, today's guest is someone I'm really excited to speak to. She's one of my neighbours. She's also one of the most influential voices in British entrepreneurship, the co-founder of Not On The High Street, the founder of Holly & Co, and a woman who has championed independent businesses long before it was fashionable. She's built communities, movements and entire industries around creativity and small business.

1:50And she's inspired thousands of founders to turn their ideas into something real. She's an MBE, a podcaster, a campaigner and a relentless believer in the power of doing things differently. And given that Joel and I are trying to build a brand from scratch with all the chaos, confusion and excitement that comes with it, this is a conversation I think that's going to be very useful indeed.

2:15Holly, thank you so much for joining me in the Businessmen's Studio. We're local neighbours. We are. And we bumped into each other pub the other week. We were trying to get you in and then there was a train strike. Yes, there was. But randomly we were in the same pub the same night. And you were enjoying your fish and chips? It was officially fish and chip day in the UK. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. It was National Fish and Chip Day. That was the only reason I was having fish and chips. I was celebrating. They looked delicious. Yes, they were. As did you. And you do again. I love how beautifully colourful and flamboyant you always are.

2:44Thank you. It makes me happy. I had a spell when I started my businesses, you know, many, many years ago that I felt that you had to be and look a certain way. And it's only now, 21 years later, I realised that this is who I am and I do my best business being fully me. So, yeah, this is the real me. Well, fully you is very impressive. Well, thank you very much. It's interesting. I want to talk about how you started off your businesses, because I think you were doing art classes around the kitchen table. Yes. Talk to me about how the genesis of what you've managed to create from a business perspective.

3:22Well, you know, when I was, I was a creative girl and that creative girl was always dreaming things up. In my teenage years, I would have a book that just had my little ideas for what businesses I was going to start. I was always in a hurry my nickname was Holly Hurricane and and I would start little companies with mum and dad and I would make them pay me to clean the house or to do the babysitting all those sorts of things but funny enough I didn't think I was going to run my own company I just loved the idea I think now I look back at building things and so I was a creative and I went I got some Good results in my A-levels around creative design, technology and art, less so in business studies.

4:11Interesting. I got an E, a nice good old fashioned E in business studies. E for effort. Yeah, E for effort, Mr. Perkins. And from there, I was going to go into a degree doing art. And actually, because I had been in a hurry, I'd been spending my summers for the last three summers at school in advertising in Baker Street. And so on the day of my A-level results, I went for an interview to see if I could be a junior, junior, junior tea maker in the world of advertising after the 80s. And I got the job on that day. So I had that moment, the crossroads, do I go and do a degree or do I get into sort of what now I call the university of life, which is advertising after the 80s think mad men crazy and it was a lesson and then so I celebrated my 19th birthday in the office and I haven't looked back was there as much booze as there was in mad men as well yes there was yeah I mean I learned how to um my boss would always send me because I was this naive 19 year old and I would always go and you know work it out on how to go and get the bar downstairs because Every advertising agency had a bar downstairs.

5:21And I would manage to go and sort out a few bottles of wine every evening. And that's how we would do our creative thinking. And sometimes we wouldn't even get back to the office after lunch. And I look back at those times and I think, how are we drinking a bottle and a half of wine at lunchtime and then going back to work? Amazing. I mean, you know, it just feels like that was a lot of fun. Yeah, happy days. Happy days, yeah. Yeah, drinks and alcohol and a bit of L 'Oreal and perfume. Health and safety got in the way of everything, didn't it? It did, it did. So look, so you're working in the world of advertising and clearly having an absolute ball.

5:57When did you decide that working for somebody else wasn't what you wanted to do and actually setting up your work? Because clearly as a little girl or a young girl, you were thinking all the time about Little E's business. When did you go, actually, I want to do my own thing. I want to be my own boss. I want to make my own. Well, I had a moment in life and I think, now again after thousands and thousands of businesses I've helped um mentor and and and support during their growth you realize that your starts are never sometimes perfect so my start was actually because I had gone so fast in my life I'd found myself I'm getting married very young I had a brain tumor all good but it was at that point in time you know the the train came off the rails and I found my creative self trying to heal.

6:49So I was designing, this is not the cringe bit, this is how my story starts, with vegetable wreaths. Okay, Ben? A vegetable wreath? A vegetable wreath. Now it's not a classic tale of starting a business, but it is mine. So I found myself in quite a low spot in my life and I decided that wreaths needed a complete makeover, right? Because I just thought someone needs to do this. So I took on the wreath business and I thought they don't have to just be for death. They could be for happiness, Christmas. So I designed this vegetable wreath and it had tangerines and chilies. And then I designed another one, all these sorts of things.

7:31And I thought to myself, can I go and sell these at the local, I lived in Chiswick at the time, local Chiswick Fair at Christmas. Yeah, West London. And I thought it must have a Christmas fair and it didn't. So I said, well, what I'll do is I'll set up the first fair because then I can have the best trestle table. Yes, the best spot. So I got Chiswick Town Hall and I then realised actually I couldn't be the only stand. So I designed the first Chiswick Christmas Fair, 90 stools. Everyone loved it. And I had this brilliant trestle table right at the entrance. And I sold all my wreaths. Your vegetable wreaths were a hit.

8:08They were. I did do some Christmas ones, funny enough. The Veggie One one maybe wasn't as big a hit as I thought, but that's fine. And I sold all these wreaths and then I looked around and it was electric. People loved coming to this event, seeing all the small businesses. And I thought, oh, my gosh, there must be something in it. So I got all my wreaths, delivered them all to everybody and decided that was the last day of my wreath empire. And I was going to go into the events empire. So I started a company called Your Local Fair and I put on events all over England and I brought all small businesses under the roof of a town hall.

8:46Did you specifically look for civic centres and towns or maybe big towns that didn't have Christmas fairs? I can't believe, what year was it, Holly? Oh yeah, we're going back in time here, 2002. Because the interesting thing is you think Christmas fairs are everywhere now. Like the idea that you would go somewhere like Chiswick, and I live quite close, it's a big town. It's a very sort of affluent area as well. The fact that there wasn't Christmas fairs everywhere. There wasn't. So I just picked anywhere that didn't have one. Right, yeah. And I picked places that would like small businesses. And so I put on these events.

9:19When they worked, they were fantastic. But when they didn't, it was terrible. because when you have a town hall full of people who have travelled miles to get there and it's pouring with rain, somehow the rain is your fault or you feel that responsibility and you are thinking, I don't know if this business model is, well, firstly, I'm going to survive it and not have a breakdown. But secondly, I don't think this is the right way to show your incredible products because I would handpick every single person. And you can see where this is going because at that point, That was my first business. And that was the essence for the idea around my second business that became a bit bigger.

9:59Yeah, well, a little bit bigger. How long were you doing the Christmas fairs? Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And essentially, that would have been a hell of a lot of work and also a lot of pressure. Because, as you say, if the event doesn't work and people don't make their money, they don't sell their products and they've travelled from all over the country to be with you, that responsibility is heavy. Yeah, it is. And, you know, I was young as well. So I was young. I'd gone through so much already. So I was quite vulnerable. I was just I knew what I wanted, but actually taking on the weather and taking the blame for it wasn't something I was expecting.

10:37And so I just knew that even though now we think about entrepreneurship and we understand that when you fail, actually the whole point of being an entrepreneur is being able to pick yourself back up, reiterate, change, become a chameleon, move forward. At that time, you don't have the playbook. So at that point in time, you're thinking, my goodness, what am I going to do? I look back and I realized that I had what it took because I looked at that fail, so to speak, and then I just moved it forward into another medium. And was that because the advent of the internet was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the opportunity to create a business that could bring all these fabulous crafts and design excellence from all over the country or all over the world into one marketplace that wasn't weather dependent?

11:27Yeah. was suddenly really viable. Well, I remember saying, I think, you know, I just think that the, you know, this internet is going to take on. And actually I described it as a fare that never rained, you know, and it was on 24 hours a day. That's literally how we looked at it. And I hooked up with my business partner, Sophie, and we basically designed one of the first marketplaces in the world. And that's, again, the beauty is that we didn't have a playbook. We didn't understand, you know, that failing and then you build it again from your failure because it makes you stronger. But at the same time, naivety is one of the most excellent, excellent magic potions.

12:18Motivated, yeah. No, I think magic potion that you should drink as an entrepreneur. You should have tons of naivety because I think potentially I worry about people today being able to access any piece of information whatsoever. At that point, you went on your gut. You had to feel it. You had that naivety. You knew that you wanted to do this thing, bring everyone together under one roof on this thing called the Internet. The only other people doing it at the time were eBay and Amazon. Now, we didn't know that. We didn't know that this thing is called actually a marketplace. We didn't know that you didn't have technology that was one basket checkout, which, you know, at the time, Amazon sold books.

13:00Yes, absolutely. And eBay, you had to check out from individual sellers. You couldn't put a number of things in your one basket. So we were just designing it because there was a truth. small businesses needed to be found at the time in chiswick there was six five or six starbucks on one chiswick high road it was insane all the small businesses were leaving the high street so we were just thinking okay well then not on the high street becomes the new virtual high street it's quite a simple idea if you think about it it's you know how come everyone used to say how come no one else has done this and i think if you ever hear that and you've got an idea how come no one else has done this that is the idea you should go for so look so not on the high street when did you launch 2005 2005 do you remember um what that first moment it goes live and then the first time you realize things are selling on it as well and how that feels.

14:08I do because it didn't feel so great because that beautiful naivety meant that we'd given the technology checkout, the checkout technology to a group of people who we thought were going to build it. And so then we did this thing because we didn't realize there was a thing called beta because, you know, these were the day where my bank manager didn't know what an entrepreneur was. All of these sorts of things. There was no language. And that's not that long ago, is it, really, for a bank manager to not really understand what an entrepreneur was? It wasn't that long ago, but all of this has happened over the last 20 years.

14:40And so we hadn't realised you had to have a beta and you could – we just said, we're going to launch on this date. And we told all the press and we told absolutely everybody. And then there was this little problem, which was the agency wasn't giving us our checkout. And for a retail site, funny enough, you need a checkout. And so 48 hours before we launched, they gave us the news that the checkout has not been built. And we were like, but we're going to be in the Daily Mail to this, to this, to this. And so we had a disastrous launch day, which was basically, I think 16 ,000 unique people came to the site.

15:18Not one person could purchase. But because we'd been in PRE advertising, we flipped it and we said it was a preview. and then we got my sister's friend's roommate who knew how to do some tech stuff and we just said listen there's no chance um in any way is there that you know how to i mean just think how random this is and again another lesson your sister's friend's roommate yeah and at uni this is another lesson which is keep asking people because you never know your friend's roommate ended up becoming our CTO of our business and built the entire marketplace in two weeks and we relaunched. And it was incredible that that moment again happened.

16:07And I always think of these journeys. You've got to keep putting out into the universe what you need. You've got to keep asking people, random people, what you need and something will click. And here came an angel, rebuilt our website. As I said, two weeks later, we had completely new technology and we went out to the world and the rest was sort of history. So what an extraordinary series of events that forced you down that route that then ultimately created what has become, you know, a sort of defining website for what it achieved, that sort of marketplace, as you say. Talk me through some of the highlights of Not On The High Street, the moments that have really made you pinch yourself and gone, how on earth have we created this?

16:54And isn't this extraordinary and special? One of the things I've carried through to today is every year I would watch small businesses grow. And I'd watch the person who created the company come to me the first year. And maybe they were looking down at the floor and, you know, hair swept back and very shy about what they were creating. Slightly that it was a hobby. Maybe they didn't, because again, this was Not On The High Street, I think, helped us define whether you liked it or not the word mumpreneur, because this was not a thing. You know, women would start businesses and you'd call it a hobby.

17:32Do you have a hobby business? So this hobby business was really the start of Not On The High Street, which was ultimately actually empowering women to work around, because over 90 % of the businesses were run by women, around their family. and so rather than just sort of not addressing that, we leant right into it. So I'd watch these women coming in, head down, you know, opening up their case, showing me a few things and I'd be like, this is the best thing I've ever seen, ever. Get it onto the website, this is incredible and then it would just sell out and then the next year she'd come in, oh and her hair's cut and she's slightly looking up and she's got a scarf on her and actually she's got a whole presentation box and then the next year and then the next year and I bonded with this group this movement of people so much and have watched 20 years I've got to do this Ben 20 years and I was with them all yesterday actually funny enough these are people I've said when did we last meet she's like 22 years ago you told me about this this thing that you're going to do on the internet 22 years ago and I said and look at us here today and I would say that these are my my family now really I know that sounds corny but they really are I've watched people use their businesses to define their position on this planet and who they're going to be to their children and who they're going to turn up as and they live in their creative self and it's why I actually think building a business and why I'm obsessed with Bill's business is because I actually think it's a key to happiness and I don't think we talk about that enough.

19:10It's interesting. And it's not necessarily defined by commercial success. Not at all. I mean, that's lovely. Absolutely. And I'm, you know, a stickler. I never mince my words with this family. It is about building successful companies, right? And what are your goals and how are you going to do that? And define what your success is as well. Because I think we all have a notion of what success is. And yes, financials, you know, you don't have a business if it's not financially sound that's number one but there are riches in business that are not riches that we think in coins you know there are riches in business that basically allow you to come out of who you thought you were into who you should be and that is one of the greatest gifts I've ever been given because I get to watch that can you imagine 20 years I've got to watch that and so this is sort of a a yes I run businesses and I run companies and I'm obsessed with the I'm very very very ambitious but actually now I've realized that my ambition is actually also about the souls that the businesses carry and why my companies have always carried souls it's not been necessarily just about the products that they're they're making and creating it was about the founder who made them so you so just just talk me through some of the scale of what happened because you there's the two of you initially yeah that that sort of had this idea the creative idea your sister's friend's housemate then becomes we employed everybody we knew so how many people did you end up well in the beginning it was like my sister her flat her roommate from uni her mate who was our cto my cousin my father was the cfo my mum's best friends two daughters they think I'm telling you anyone that came sniffing near our office I would be like what are you doing do you have a laptop because we were growing fast and there was a huge amount to do um and then it basically started doubling and doubling and tripling and doubling over and over and over again and so it sort of got to a point where we had 200 people we had um big offices on Richmond High Street, Richmond Roundabout.

21:22And it grew into what we all perceive success to be, right? It grew into that business. It grew into that thing when I would go to dinners, people would ask me how many people I employed. I would, you know, run to the loo with my PA who would, you know, still be talking to me as I'm in the loo about what meeting I had coming up. I'd be in triple Spanx, do you know what I mean? high heels I had a board table I was the chairwoman full of 14 men who had all gone to Harvard and to universities remember I'd had got an E in A levels yes you did business yeah and that was what we perceive as to be very very successful right that's what we see on TV potentially that's what we at certainly at that time and you know I was 28 when I started the company my son was three months sold when I started Not On The High Street.

22:19And so I didn't know any different. And so it grew. And at the point that it sold, it was doing 220 million through the checkout every single year. And when we started, I remember having a piece of paper. We didn't have a back end that could count what we were doing. So we had someone come in and we had a piece of paper. And you know, like tally yes we do a tally how many orders we got and sometimes it was only eight and we would work out what the amount that was taken through the tills and we'd have a little bell you know like a little bell and so it would just and then during the day we would bing oh that was an order and it was at 30 pounds and I think we were taking 10 percent right so three pounds just there three And so it was just an insane moment that that was the beginning.

23:12And then in the end, when it sold, it was doing that. And it was creating million pound businesses. These women were now walking in with a suit on and maybe their husbands had quit their jobs to join the wife who was doing a hobby job. And it was this incredible, incredible journey. It was. It sounds such an amazing melting pot of opportunity and purpose and ambition and all of those things. Absolutely. It was. So what was it that made you decide that now is the right time to leave that and create something new? Yeah, I think it was a moment where, you know, things grow and you've got to be careful what you wish for.

23:59And I say that in the right way, which is if you wish for a huge business and you want to be sort of getting it to a point where you sell it and then you buy your version of Necker Island or you're wanting the fast car and you're wanting those things, that's great. you have to be careful where you take your money from and I always now say to people who I mentor or I advise you know when you do a deal with money um it's like a marriage and it will last longer than a marriage so you're talking about taking private equity taking private equity so understand that the path you choose financially is the path your business will choose so if you would like to run your company because you're in love with the industry that you're within and actually you could see yourself doing this for a really really long time understand that if you take on venture capital money they've got a timeline that they'll need that money back so I always say if you turn right you're going to be right forever if you turn left you're going to be left forever there's a very it's a very hard thing you cannot switch out just because you decide um you know actually I really love this job you know I think I want to do this for the next 10 years, you've already set yourself in motion one direction.

25:17And so I'd set myself in motion because there was nothing else. Do you remember we were women trying to raise money in 2005? And actually the statistics then were 2p in every pound goes to female entrepreneurs. And would you believe, Ben, in 2026, it's 1.6 pence in every pound goes to women. So it's gone down. It's gone down. So for 20 years, as I've been raising money for my companies, the money to me or the money available has gone down. So you can imagine how difficult it is when you're a female entrepreneur in Britain to start a business. It's like you have no research and development money.

25:56You've basically got these precious pounds that you've got to spend. And so there's a lot of pressure. And so I decided that actually this business was not going to be my, It wasn't going to be the business that I had envisaged. Maybe now I'd fallen in love with it. It had already set itself down a path. And so I decided that it was time to come away from it. It was one of the most difficult things I've ever, ever done. To any entrepreneur who's ever admitted it or talked about it, because again, Ben, not many people talk about these things, because certainly women, by the way, because, you know if if you've started a business and you come away from it and that those pounds were very precious the last thing you want to almost publicly say is you came away from something or that something failed and so I came away it was incredibly difficult um you know I had one son my Harry um and um and then I had not in the high street it was my second child for sure and what happens now and I had to look at it like I'd sent it off to university and I had to let it go and make its own mistakes.

27:09Mum wasn't going to be around, but you know what? I'd given it a great upbringing and so it was going to be okay. And I came away and I had to start from scratch and say, right, what am I going to do? And that's when I decided that probably what I had to do was what I think might be on my gravestone, which is I wanted to help empower people to live their best lives. And for me, that was through business. And so I decided that I was going to start Holly & Co, which is all about myself and co. Community, collaboration, cooperation, cooperatives, you know, all the co-words that you can think of and think about if I could start another way of doing business.

28:01And so with regards to that, because it's sort of the, it seems like that community is so fundamental, creating a community that not only connects with a brand, connects with a business, but actually will last. In a digital age where there's tons and tons, we're being bombarded all the time. How do you go about that then, Holly? How have you distilled down the elements that are crucial in terms of making that community tangible so the business becomes a success? Well, I'd done it already. So now I was like, okay, so I'm doing it again. And please, you know, please say that those years have taught me something.

28:39And it has, you know, Holly & Co is all about the fact that we're going to be around for a really long time. What my interests are is how do you in this world that we're living in now, when everything is getting faster and everything is going to be, you know, in some ways touched by AI, when we as humans wake up in, you know, 10 years time, who has preserved the specialness of being human? And what I mean by that is Holly & Co, we're only a couple of years old. We have 28 ,000 products, all of which have been touched by hand in the UK. So this is about the craft of the creation. I would say that they're the best small businesses that I've curated.

29:28It's all about my eye and curating them. It's not about an algorithm just picking them out. We're a B Corp. So we're actually all about if you took something from our site compared to a much, much larger marketplace and you said, what are the impact on the environment compared to these two products? Our product would win every single time. Ninety seven percent of everyone who's on that site is female and actually over 60 percent are over 40. They've already done the the years and years and years of maybe their first business or second. They're at the same pace as I am. which is, okay, I'm going to build a business for decades now.

30:09Now maybe my children have empty nested and now I'm going to go for it. And so what I'm very, very passionate and curious about is how can you use a business like Holly & Co to maybe be more than just a phenomenal retailer? What about if we represented what we're going to all want to see in the future? Maybe one of the greatest riches we're going to have in the future is something touched by hand. Maybe actually, if we just look at other industries, maybe when we look at what's happening in hospitality, three restaurants and pubs shutting every week, maybe one of the greatest things in the next few years it's going to be is going to be eating out and eating incredible food.

30:51Because I think that when you have something that's going running as fast as it is right now, or the largest businesses that are going to sort of rule the world, the opposite also happens. a little bit like how the kindle was going to ruin the book yeah so i believe that holly and co is going to represent some of the richest um or most um treasured items in the future and and that's what i'm very very passionate about now the things that make us humans right yeah so if we've got and undoubtedly we have some amazing listeners to this podcast that are starting small business or maybe have a side hustle there's what we call it now really and are thinking, how do I turn this into something more significant?

31:35What are the steps, Holly? What advice do you give to individuals who are looking to try and do something but just aren't really sure, don't necessarily have the confidence to go jump in with both feet? So the number one thing is just start. Absolutely just start. Tomorrow is your first day. Congratulations. Get the URL. Get a number of URLs. They're cheap. And just start. Start talking to your friends. As I said, start broadcasting what you're going to do, however silly you feel, have a couple of glasses of wine at the pub, tell them about it. And what do you need? Start asking people about what you need.