#55 - Lois Mills - Yonder [Senior Content Lead]

0:00Lois Mills:Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Unfounders. Today I'm joined by the wonderful Lois Mills, who is the Senior Content Lead at Yonder. Now Yonder is a fintech company looking at their credit cards and debit cards, awarding their customers with all sorts of giveaways and giving back to them. They've done some fantastic promotions and ways of thinking outside the box, and I love that it's not stuffy, it's not corporate, it's super creative. and it was really fun to dig into where this creativity comes from from Lois, where the passion for creating content and everything she does herself, talking about her own Instagram growth, Crohn's disease after being diagnosed at 23, all of her different work history, having her own business, going through a similar experience to me.

0:37Lois Mills:There was so much in this. We did have a few technical difficulties, so if that's come across, I'm sorry, we've done our best. This has been months in the making and I'm glad we finally made it happen because Lois is fab. So without further ado, let's get on with the episode. are you a founder of the next exciting food and drink brand are you looking to scale and grow well let me introduce you to mission kitchen london's home food and drink entrepreneurs and sponsor of the unfounders mission kitchen gives you the equipment support and community to take your business to the next level with flexible access to commercial kitchens expert mentorship on site and a network of hundreds of like-minded founders this could be exactly what your business needs to level up if you want to find out more why not book a tour today at missionkitchen.org forward slash unfounders.

1:30Lois Mills:Hello and welcome back to the Unfounders. Today I'm joined by the wonderful Lois Mills. So Lois, can you please let everyone know where you work and how long you have been there? Absolutely. So I work at Yonder and I've been there just over two years now. Sometimes I say two and a half but it's really just been over two you're one of those things where it feels like a lifetime and two seconds at exactly the same time but yeah I'm at Yonder and we are a rewards debit and credit card if you haven't heard from us before and what is your role within Yonder I am the senior content lead which is a it's a long title I basically look after all the fun stuff there's like a lot of business at the back and I'm very much party at the front yeah I think that's a really good thing to dig into a bit more because people will hear like oh senior content you're Well, I know what content is, but what does that actually entail?

2:14Lois Mills:And especially when you're working with things like credit cards or money. So how does your role play within that? And what does like an average day look like for you? It's an incredibly varied role, as I think anyone who works in any startup would say about their position. I think I've nearly always worked in startups and my role title has technically changed. But I think the hats are always the same in the sense that there's 70 ,000 hats. There's like seven plates to spin. So I think my role is quite hard to pinpoint. It's a little bit of social media. It's a little bit of blog content. It's a lot of like out of home marketing.

2:50It's anything I think that you would think, how can we get yonder in front of as many people as possible being spoken about on the internet, no matter what corner it is, whether it's TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram, Mesa, like whatever it is, it all falls under my remit. And, you know, as is the way with a tiny brand, whether it's new brand naming or web page testing or I don't know what customer interviews, like it all kind of falls under our teeny tiny marketing team.

3:19Lois Mills:So no two days are the same. I feel like that is a classic in startup world. But my average day is kind of thinking, how can we get Yonder in front of as many people as possible and to grow the brand? That's kind of effectively what my role is. And then how I do that will change day in, day out, whether it's sponsoring a new podcast or creating a new piece of content or collaborating with one of our amazing partners that's on that month. Like it really is varied. It keeps you on your toes. If you've got like a slightly neuro-spicy brain, it's a great role for that. I love neuro-spicy. That's a great phrase.

3:52It's much better. It's much better than, I don't know, there's a thousand words that get thrown around,

3:57Lois Mills:but neuro-spicy I feel like really takes the biscuit. Yeah, that's perfect. And for anyone new to Yonder, what makes Yonder different? What is the benefits of someone's like, I need a card, why would I choose Yonder? Give us a spiel. How did it start? How did you get involved? How did you first come across it? Yonder's just the best. I would honestly, unbiasedly put my hands up and say Yonder is the best. And if you don't have it, I will send you my referral code with the T's and C's because I've got to be compliant. So I guess for anyone who hasn't heard of Yonder, which is probably a lot of people, I think when you work in like a small startup bubble, it can be very easy to get inside your own echo chamber and be like, oh, you know, all of the London fintech scene know about Yonder, all of the London LinkedIn crew know about Yonder.

4:41Therefore, we've got world domination, which just isn't the case at all. But reversing two and a half years ago, I had never heard of Yonder, wasn't in the market for a credit card. It's when Yonder was just a credit card, which is how it launched originally as like a credit card for foodies, kind of a bit of like a hybrid between a Monzo and an Amex. So being that nice little middle ground that it was like four millennials and Gen Z, not like your dad's credit card, like a nice kind of old school Amex gold or whatever, but with that points to pay system. So that was the early premise. And I had gone to a Braze email marketing event after work.

5:19We weren't even using Braze at the time. I think we were using Klaviyo in my old company. And I'd gone to this event, I don't know why just to learn about different systems and we got a free ticket so I went and Tom Davies who is the the VP of marketing he was on the panel with a guy called George who is the founder of the Soul Supply who I knew and I was like oh this this will be really fun and I sat in the front row to support George and I said oh this is really cool and this tall Australian man called Tom was out on the panel and the way he spoke about marketing not specifically so much with Yonder but just about marketing, I found incredibly interesting.

5:52It was very non-corporate, very non-wanky, very like for the people, let's just fuck shit up. Let's like try new things. And I thought, do you know what? You're an interesting marketer. So as everyone in the world who works in marketing does, I followed him on LinkedIn the day after. I was like, this is a cool guy. Didn't know about credit cards. Didn't know about Yonder. Never heard of it before. And so he worked at Yonder. Didn't have much interested in it but his most recent post on his LinkedIn page was for my job and I it was posted like three weeks ago and I thought wow this sounds like my dream role like if you could write your dream job description it was literally the job role at Yonder so I obviously did my digging went on the website downloaded the app and that was like my first taste of what Yonder was I'd never ever worked in finance barely touched the size of working in tech but it sounded like such a cool product and such a cool concept of like making credit accessible making it available to people especially someone like me who I think was so maybe like financially naive I don't think like financial literacy in the UK is particularly good anyway and I think there's a real kind of gray murky area around credit so I just found it fascinating that there was this cool new like young trendy brand trying to do something different so that with like the dream job description is how I first found out about it and entered the world and luckily obviously got the job and just found the whole thing fascinating and then over the last two years we've kind of evolved and we've now got a debit product which is really cool and I think makes finance and that side of like as an entry kind of gateway drug to yonder much more accessible I think there's still a bit of a a learning curve that needs to happen for a lot of people with credit but now where we've got like a free debit product it's so much easier to be able to be like okay I'm gonna I'm gonna try this out I'm going to explore with this brand because it's different right to where I've worked before where you know I like home things or for example where it's like a cleaning product it's like 10 pounds 15 pounds you go online you can literally order it and get it in the same day previously with a credit you would have to download the app you'd have to do a credit check you have to do all these things and you know your credit limit there is so much more of a barriers entry that that kind of mindset shift I think for me working in that area was yeah it's been a massive massive learning curve of the last two years to try and understand how to make that switch when you're thinking about it from a marketing perspective that was the longest elevator pitch ever we probably went up like 74 floors in a very very slow lift never never get me to pitch for anything i'm not i'm

8:21Lois Mills:not succinct no i loved it no it's good so i didn't know any of that kind of background or i always find it fascinating how people discover opportunities and roles especially in areas they're not necessarily looking or they haven't worked in before and i think we first connected when you were at home things. And I remember just seeing some of the content you were doing and everything, the way you communicated, it was always really fun and really like creative. And I'd love to dig into some of the campaigns you've worked on because already at Yonder, you've been doing some fantastic things like a weather-based giveaway and all these fun things.

8:51Lois Mills:So yeah, what have been some of your favorites and how are you making Yonder really stand out? Yeah, I think the Make It Rain campaign was definitely one of the highlights. I think it was such a peak moment of time of like people hating the British summer. It was raining all the time last summer. It was like not a good year at all. Luckily, it's been a bit nicer this year, but of us just like sat down as a marketing team and thinking what can we do that feels fun, that feels engaging, that isn't just like pushing a credit card onto people. Because I've never seen a piece of marketing by like a finance company or a credit card that is purely promoting a credit product and has been remotely entertaining.

9:31I think you've got to take it away from trying to just sell and onboard people at all times and just create a nice cultural moment that creates virality, creates conversations, makes people want to tell their mates. So we had the insight obviously of the summer being so crap and thought, okay, our whole kind of brand USP and like the feeling we want people to associate with Yonder is that sense of things feeling rewarding. How do we reward people for being in the UK when it's raining? And we came up with the whole concept that every time it rained over the course of a month, I think it was, and it was specifically had to be on our office postcode because we're like, it's probably always raining somewhere in the UK, realistically, in Wales or in Northern Scotland.

10:11So we're like, okay, specifically, it's got to be on our office postcode. But if it's raining over the course of this month, I think we did it for a wildly long time, then every time it rained, there would be a new prize. So on one day, it might be like 10 opportunities to get a pair of theatre tickets. The other day, it might be a hundred free pints or a weekend break so-and-so or a massage like it was constantly changing all the things that we listed were actual rewards on yonder so it had like that nice kind of subtle brand tie of us being able to be like here's some experiences and this makes you feel really rewarded but yeah the the fun and the like the moment of togetherness and kind of the excitement that it created was incredible we got so much like fantastic feedback we got like lo-fi press and I mean that from like it was on socials a lot of people on LinkedIn were talking about it we didn't make like you know the front page of the times but it was like anecdotally very well received and well spoken about and we saw a lot of people like telling their friends and people wanting to like discover more about yonder and our socials went up so we saw a really nice uplift from something that just felt like a bit of fun and just like got people excited and a moment that people wanted to talk about the back end of that was just actually quite jank and very lo-fi it was like me and my two colleagues with our phones and our laptops and I'd be in the hairdresser and it would start pouring it down with rain I was like oh for fuck's sake getting out my laptop being like okay here we go here's the form and having to like buy people's prizes like based off an excel spreadsheet which was fine when it was like five people win a massage slightly more challenging when we'd done the hundred free pints I don't think I've ever spent so much time on like the Young's Pub website in my life I think they must have thought what is this girl how many friends does she have because I was like another 10 pound pint please but yeah it created that like lovely moment of like positive brand association even though it wasn't a super strong like yonder play and I think I don't know if it was in the same month or the following month or even maybe the following year my timelines at yonder have just like all blurred into one but then Heineken very soon after released a very similar campaign I think it was like when it rains we pour so like if it rains you get a free pint of heineken like also genius but we were like we're gonna we're

12:23Lois Mills:gonna send you that straight away as soon as i saw it i was like this feels familiar it was you who said it to me i remember seeing it and being like oh my god and there was a part of us as a team which we were like oh my god i can't believe i can't believe they copied us and then i thought you know what number one we're not that much of a big deal as much i would love to pretend that we were this huge viral success it was probably just a nice shared idea but internally i remember being like yeah you know guys everyone's everyone's copying us but we've done so well at this that even heineken have jumped off the back of this and i think we wrote like an open letter to them that tom my boss like posted on linkedin and that got a nice bit of traction i think the lesson is there's a content moment in everything always and i mean they didn't reply they don't give a shit but yeah for us we were like oh my god this is really cool so that was yeah that was very fun i'd love us to do more stuff like that I think we've got some fun things coming up like in the pipeline I want to say but yeah I think I think it's moments like that that can separate your brand from another brand in terms of being like who's doing just the same old shit who's doing something that maybe feels a little bit bizarre and maybe even slightly off-brand but actually just like creates that really nice like brand love brand awareness like all the things that often can feel quite hard to quantify and hard to measure when you're like reporting back to shareholders and stakeholders but actually creating moments like that you see like quite an obvious like association between like you know impressions on social and the website visits and people anecdotally you know talking about the brand so yeah that was that was very fun i like that it's great i love that kind of outside the box thinking i like what you guys are doing with yonder and changing the rewards and continue adding partners and i've seen like obviously like batch have come up and i know you very recently got married and your partner was in a batch suit so uh that was a very nice to see hopefully you paid with his yonder card i bought it on my yonder card honestly the the whole thing my the whole wedding was basically sponsored by yonder in some way or another the beauty of working with like so many amazing brands and having those experiences rotate every month is just having like constant relationship introductions with some epic people like i only heard about batch through yonder i'd never heard of it before i bought a batch suit ages ago and then for the wedding i think i think my fiance at the time was like oh yeah i i don't know i don't know if that will be like my kind of star bus like honestly like the guys are great like you're gonna love them it's a great experience in their new covent garden so let's just go and try one on and we had such an amazing experience like the guys really looked after us and obviously it helps when you know them a little bit you've worked with them before he bloody loved the suit he look fantastic in it and I was like babe I've got this don't you worry like let me get the points that I paid for it on our wedding day the lunch because our wedding was split into like three parts it was very chaotic and the lunch you had to pay for like pay the bill as normal wasn't prepaid at all and I like very iconically I was like guys I've got this it's on me and like paid everything on my yonder card and my my colleague yesterday literally just messaged me on Slack and she was like is this you because it got flagged as like a potential fraud alert and I was like That was just me dropping a casual 5k on a Saturday lunchtime.

15:28But the points, chef's kiss, absolutely iconic.

15:31Lois Mills:Yeah, we did that at my sister-in-law's wedding. We paid on a different card provider, I'm afraid. And yeah, it was a very expensive wedding lunch for many people. And we're like, that's straight on the points. Lovely, thank you. Yeah, it makes so much sense. The gamification of points is really bizarre. Really, really bizarre. I don't think I've ever wanted to pay a bill more in my entire life. I was like, honestly, guys, it's on me. Don't you worry about it. It's fantastic. No, great. Yeah, photos look fab. So yeah, I love all that side. And I think you've probably secretly tailored all the wedding suppliers as, oh guys, these are great perks just so I can get another discount there.

16:10Lois Mills:I'd love to dig back now to your career and how you kind of fell into this content world because aside from what you do now, you obviously have some great Instagram accounts where you talk about other topics. but where did this passion for creating content come from like what was your journey from education did you study marketing did you study anything around business like what what was your journey from early days of education to where you are today that's really really good question actually I've never I've never really thought about it like on the journey from from going so far back I think I've got I didn't make the term up I think someone coined like squiggly CV or squiggly career and I absolutely love that so much.

16:48I think my whole journey into the job that I do now is the most unlinear thing I've ever seen. At school, I went to like an all girls grammar school. It was very academic and I did like all the stuff that you have to do. I did English, I did business studies and just never really felt like it was my vibe. I was like good academically, but I didn't want to do, I didn't want to go to like a traditional red brick uni and study like English literature. Like that's wonderful for a lot of people, but I was like, there's gotta be something more creative in what I can do. And so I went off to study fashion specifically, it was called fashion communication and promotion, which I'd never really reflected on before is having that like marketing content promotion side.

17:29So, but that's what the whole course was basically about. It was taking like brands, like we work with Universal Works, work with Speedo and taking those brands and like basically like promoting them. What would now be like content marketing basically, but at the time wasn't really such a big thing. I remember Instagram came out when I was at uni and I'm me just thinking it was like a photo editing app and taking some not incredibly suitable photos thinking was an editing app and just leaving them on my grid until suddenly I started to get followers and I was like okay I guess this is a following platform which I had not realized at the time like very iconically deleted a lot of photos very quickly but from from there worked worked in like a couple of stores I think I didn't know what I wanted to do afterwards I worked at a model agency for a little bit I worked at a fashion brand for a little bit called Bitching and Junk Food, which I think has just had a resurgence, but a very edgy little East London brand that had literally no idea what I wanted to do apart from wanting to do something for myself.

18:23So I started my own business. I opened like a physical clothes shop in Essex, which was very bizarre. I'm not even from Essex, but my boyfriend at the time lived there. And I was like, okay, I'll move in with you and I will open this like bricks and mortar store right in the height of like Primark being massive, online shopping, like having a massive like resurgence so in hindsight not the smartest idea but I just thought I just wanted to I love brands and I love curating and I love creating so the opportunity to have like a physical tangible concept was like so appealing to me to be able to curate all the brands that came in to be able to do all the email marketing create the content for the socials like it was like a dream it was a dream gig but with a very heavy like rent for the unit and business tax and all these things that in hindsight were just an absolute killer so dropped dropped that then went to go work at a plumbing company one of my peak jobs I've ever had was at this plumbing company so bizarre but taught me so much just about like working environments and ethics and just how you can apply a certain way of thinking to any job in any environment which I think maybe has been what has allowed me to get excited by working for like a cleaning product startup or like a credit hard stuff like things that maybe feel slightly unsexy but having maybe had the experience at plumbing company knowing that actually the job can be fantastic and just because the product doesn't feel like you know a clothing brand doesn't mean that you can't do some really fun shit there so I think that in a weird may be like shaped then my London career because that was still back in Essex and then I moved to London worked at a design agency for a while which I think like really got my love of brands and at that time I think I really started to get into into social and I remember I used to say to people at my old job like I just wish that my job was like posting on Instagram all day like that would be my dream job I was doing it at the time I started a separate page called gut instinct which is all about Crohn's disease I'd recently been diagnosed when I just moved to London I think I'd been diagnosed like a couple of months beforehand and the internet was still a bit of a weird place that when the internet wasn't new but anything kind of instagrammy or socially still felt like very medical not particularly interesting definitely not sexy and i was like a 23 year old girl who'd like been diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease i was like there's this this can't be this can't be the end of like what i'm producing on the internet so i started a youtube channel back when like youtube was having like this nice little resurgence just like me in my bedroom face massive because i was taking so many steroids at the time not for recreational purposes obviously for health and yeah that I think that kind of passion projects or like side hustle which I hate the term of but like doing that outside of my job and just allowing myself to be creative and playful and experiment but also having a bit of a purpose I guess then ended me up in the jobs that I had it's one of the reasons that I got the job at home things because I came from no experience of doing brand content community I was working at a design agency but just the fact that I was like okay well I've never done the job but I've got this YouTube channel that I've grown and I have sellout events that I've run three times so yeah it's not I'm not getting paid to do it but I obviously love it and I would love to get paid to do it and yeah luckily Matt and Tim who I adore the founders of home things took a big chance on me to be like yeah okay zero experience but take the job and yeah now that I'd say the past six years have been much more linear in terms of like progressing up and doing the same job and in a different environment but before that my god I really have done everything yeah no I love the squiggly career

22:06Lois Mills:routes um and from speaking to like 50 odd people now with the podcast I think it's great to hear like how different everyone's journey is like some people have very much gone came out of uni knew I wanted to get to sales so I followed that route did it through a big brand blah blah other people like well yeah I just literally went okay that brand's cool how do I work for them what can I do for them so I think there's there's so much merit and there's so many lessons in stumbling your way up the ladder or being taught. There's pros and cons to both. So I'd love to know from all these experiences, like if there's any memorable like learnings or lessons you had along the way that you're like, like that one's stuck with me or the way that I worked in this company, I really liked how they run things.

22:43Lois Mills:That's how I communicate now. Any kind of thoughts on that kind of idea? Yeah, I reckon there's probably some really nuanced learnings I think I've had from all of those different experiences I think the number one takeaway and I think I've grown maybe more in my career and my thinking in the last two years than I have over maybe a 10-year period just due to the nature and the environment of the company that I'm now working at but something I think really sticks with me is just like a bias to action and I think that can apply in in any circumstance but especially when you're in like a startup or a smaller team or you're you know you're trying to be like hungry and creative in the environment that you're working in I think it's very very easy to not move quickly and be paralyzed by decisions or things going wrong or things happening and changing or top down like stakeholders having an opinion on stuff I think as long as you always have a bias to action and no matter what you're doing you're leaning towards like moving forward and doing the next thing you often can't go far wrong I think the mistake is when you do nothing when you have the information you're too slow like if you think about it from like a social or content perspective even looking at like trends and I don't love like jumping on social trends I think there's a time and a place for that I don't think brands are always best suited to be the ones to jump on the trend I don't think that's like particularly successful for any brand but it's a good example of if something is culturally relevant or if it's happening rather than umming and ahhing and planning and thinking and wasting for something to be perfect it will likely never be perfect because you won't have the right money or the right time or the right team but I think just having that bias to action and getting something done is always like the best first step and I think that that then applies to learning new skills and doing something in the job like I like even this week alone we've decided that we're going to start experimenting on Reddit I don't use Reddit which I told someone yesterday and they found that shocking I can't believe you don't use Reddit which I don't know if made me feel like incredibly old or like a dinosaur.

24:46I was like, okay, I guess I don't. And it would be very easy for me to just sit back and be like, okay, well, I'm going to learn everything there is to learn, or I'll do a bit of this, or I'll do a bit of that, or I'll talk to some more people, all things that are obviously like really important and really helpful to upskill or to learn anything. But I was like, I'm just going to, I'm just going to download it. I'm just going to make the account. I'm just going to do a post. Like it's probably shit. I don't know where I'm meant to be posting what button I'm meant to be pressing like I really have no idea but I'm never going to learn that unless I at least start or at least you try and do that and I think if you apply that thinking in any job no matter what your role is I think you can't go much wrong even if that bias to action is you do something and it's a mistake or you take learning away from it you've got so much more information now than you had before that yeah it's not like a specific I guess job dependent learning but I think that has just been like a real like switch in my brain of like how it's a really good way to work and the most effective ways to work no matter what you're doing

25:44Lois Mills:or where you're doing it yeah no I completely agree um I always say from like when I had my ready meal business it was like the best thing I ever did was launch it the second best thing I ever did was close it down because there's so many lessons in both phases it's like looking back I'm like there's so many things I would have changed or like cost it out differently or thought about it but at the time you're just so naive and optimistic and going well I'm gonna go for it like what's the worst could happen I close it and then you go through the closing it phase and you're like well actually I learned so much from that I'm gonna take all these learnings with me into my next role yeah I think it's it's the same thing with you you're like yeah it probably wasn't the best time to launch it but the lessons you would have learned from that even if it's like well I learned that that wasn't a very good idea at the time it's still a learning 100 % and I think I think that's so important and I think more people are like so much more open about that kind of stuff now but not being afraid to fail and seeing that as like part of the process in itself like exactly what you said we both had businesses that launched and then like closed didn't work to shut them down and like you do maybe in the moment especially when you're a bit younger feel like oh I fucked up or it's a failure oh it's such such a shame but actually it's not at all and me even having that business in the first place it was the reason why I got so many of my jobs afterwards because they found like yeah okay it didn't work but the fact that you had the balls to try and like you you did something off your back and you've taken so many lessons from that I think it's epic and like you know unless unless we're sat here being brain surgeons it's not that it's not the end of the world like there will nearly always be a positivity that comes out of it even if you're like yeah okay I will never launch another ready meal business again okay cool well now you know now you're not going to fuck up and do it again like that in itself is a lesson worth having also it's a fantastic story to tell I always think it'll either go well or it's a good story to tell.

27:33That is a great way to live your life because you just think, all right, either solution is fine with me.

27:40Lois Mills:Yeah, you've already said it earlier, but like everything is content whenever anything is going on. Like literally buying a coffee the other day, I was like, content, like love this. Like literally anything and everything. And people are like, oh, I don't know what to write about on LinkedIn. I'm like, how? I could write 50 posts a day for LinkedIn if I wanted because there's always something that I see or do that I'm like, that would be quite interesting. So then it's just being able to tailor it. And another thing I'd love to like speaking of LinkedIn and you and Anya Jackson worked together for a little while at Yonder.

28:06Lois Mills:And Anya, I remember her just exploding onto the scene with Thursday. And like those posts were just absolutely wild. So I'd love to know like when the two of you were together, that's like an absolute power couple in terms of marketing. I think at the time when I launched the podcast, I was like, both of you, you need to come on together. But I know Anya's moved on as well. So what was that experience like? Because you must have bounced some wild ideas off each other. like what more can we do how can we go bigger it was it was absolutely epic I loved working with her so much and we're still friends now and we still talk so we could we could probably do like a post uh post therapy session of like what was it like to work together but she she was epic I think like you I had like I was well aware of who she was because of all the stuff with Thursday like I can even I can see it in my mind like her you know like cuffed to the lamppost or her with all the balloons like these things are now just like part of my internal psyche when I think about like marketing and like lo-fi ways that you can just like burst onto the scene.

29:04What was hilarious is when she had done all that, and I think her internship at Thursday had ended, she had done a post being like, oh, you know, I'm available. I want to work somewhere else. And when I was at home things, I had messaged her and I'd said to Matt and Tim at the time, like, we've got to get this girl in. She's so cool. I'd messaged her on LinkedIn, never replied to me. I was like, okay, fine. It is what it is. And then when I joined Yonder, she was one of the people that interviewed me and I was like oh my god okay this this girl I've tried to poach before who blanked me and now she's interviewing me no worries and I remember the next message that she sent me was when I'd accepted the job offer and I was going to the like yonder welcome party they were having monthly socials and I was going to the next one she was like hey lol so funny I never saw this message but like what pizza do you want for the social next Thursday and I was like oh my god this is just this is like the most humbling thing I've ever experienced but cool but working with her was was so great it was like the best like I like to say big sister little sister she would probably say like mother daughter given I like slightly slightly offended by that relationship ever she had fantastic ideas she was like you know kind of classic gen z like was up for anything stuff didn't have to be polished it could be just like quick and dirty like on the street with a phone which I think was just very refreshing I think for any marketer especially like a brand or a content mark.

30:20All you really want is someone else in the room to have a positive energy and to bounce ideas off with. That is just the dream ticket. It's really hard when you're a team of one or a team of two, but you don't creatively get each other or you don't have someone to riff with. Because the best ideas come from when someone says, I've had this really weird idea. What do you think? And they go, oh my God, yes. And rather than just being like, oh, I'm not sure. Why don't we think about it like that is just that would kill any creative and like you would stunt yourself massively but being able like we sat next to each other and it was chaos like the best I always said to her like she made the first like three months of my onboarding at Yonder probably the best I've ever had in any job ever it was just such a nice little creative power couple moment and we were in we were in our element it was chef's kiss I'm very sad that she left Yonder but she's gone she's like had a complete career change so I'm also like you do you babe you go off and do something else but that will always stay as like a really nice highlight of being able to work with someone quite iconic even though they're a bit younger no i love that yeah i think when i saw the two of

31:25Lois Mills:you i was like hang on i know both of you for doing really cool marketing things like what this is this is wild like fair play to yonder for bringing you in how big is the yonder team now you already kind of alluded you've got an office postcode for the the reigning campaign so yeah you clearly have an office like the team in there all the time like is it remote you seem to be at home or a very very nicely decorated office at home i'm at home i wish this was the office no the office is really nice I think we're about 50 maybe we're about 60 now I think when I joined I was employee number 30 or something wild which I'd always ever been just like employee number two or employee number one so even being 30 it felt massive to me at the time but yeah we're about 50 or 60 we've doubled roughly in the two years that I've been there not not massive but still pretty big like it's not like the tiny scrappy team that maybe people once assume that you are when you're like still a startup.

32:13So we're pretty sizable. And we've got an office in, it's like an old WeWork. It definitely used to be like, there's still the silver cups and there's still like the old WeWork signs. Like it definitely is of the WeWork era, but we've got a really nice office space over in Hoxton. And we do, like most companies do, we do like a classic hybrid model. So you go into the office three days a week, work from home two days, up to you when you want to do that. I think most people who I've met in any walk of life who have that flexibility, Friday is like the classic working from home. day classic like thursday day in the office always having like a nice little drink after work last night you escalated into karaoke and milder bone fine and then friday you're like okay i'm just gonna do my little podcast and try and get some adenance but yeah it's it's a nice vibe i think i really missed i'm always torn between like my feelings between working from home and working in the office because i think depending on this style of your work and your job role you know when you work with like great people and you're friends with people you work with the office can sometimes be distracting like me and Anya famously would get through and it would be like 11 a.m we'd be like my god I don't have even thought about work yet we're just like sat here chatting like about content stuff sure but also like you're just with your mate you're just having a great time so I was like we you know it's probably more productive if we work from home sometimes but I think when you work in like in marketing or you're with like a fast-paced team there's like there's a great vibe and there's a great energy in the office you kind of want to just be able to like go over to someone or shout across the room or be like oh can we like go and talk about this or go on a little coffee walk and I think that's really where a lot of the best like creative thinking and the best ideas come from I think you move forward by being in the room together and like our marketing team is just a team of three at the moment and we obviously have been off for two weeks and it came back on Tuesday and we're all sat together in the room and like the energy I was like I just feel you know I can't say I was thrilled about coming back off to work after like my nice little mini moon and wedding bubble i was like this is just like good energy that maybe i wouldn't have felt if i was just sat at home joining a zoom call like sometimes it's very distracting just to be like okay cool the washing machine's going yeah builders are outside like oh there's a nice bird flying through the window so yeah we we do a hybrid model which i think suits most people i feel like most people work like that now yeah

34:29Lois Mills:i think there's a lot a lot to be said for that approach as well because it also gives people flexibility for life things like oh i need to do my daughter's nursery drop off or like walk the dog on lunch break and all these things that sometimes like oh okay i need a dog walker or like those other bits that you kind of curate your life around and suddenly if it's like you've got to be in five days a week i think everyone's like oh i don't want to be here five days a week whereas when it's like on your terms a bit more you're like okay great i can i can do that then it makes more appealing it's bizarre i can't imagine now and obviously like i'm i'm of the older side of like now a lot of people I work with who barely done like the five day a week ever in their life like some people like yonder is their first job and they've only ever worked in the hybrid and I think god I can't even remember what it was like to just go in every single day and not have that like slight flexibility there there are times depending on like what I'm working on or what's going on in life or at home where like I will probably be in four or five days a week purely through choice but like what you're saying you know if I need like a Sainsbury's delivery yeah I'd probably rather it come at like 3pm on a Tuesday rather than 10am on a Saturday.

35:31Like why wouldn't you pick that option if you have the opportunity to do so? Yeah, life gets in the way.

35:38Lois Mills:I'd love to completely flip this very positive, happy bubble and talk about a tough time in the office. Because I think there's always lessons in that. Could have been your own business, could have been through any of these experiences, when something didn't quite go to plan. I think marketing and content is always the stuff that doesn't land, that ends up with an ASA ruling. I don't know if you've got any great examples of when something was a very tough day at the office, but you managed to overcome it. Yeah, I had many tough days. Many, many, many tough days. I think just such is life. Stuff sometimes goes well.

36:11Sometimes a lot of the time it doesn't. I'm trying to think of a specific example in any of the things that I've done. I mean, we've done a bunch of campaigns and stuff in the past. I think specifically at HomeThings, there was a lot of moving parts that maybe I felt more strongly because I was much more responsible for them. At HomeThings, we were a team of three for the longest time. So just the two founders and myself. So I took on a lot of the responsibility for stuff traditionally outside of marketing, whether it was like helping design our bottles or our packaging or placing orders. And I think in that time period, you're like incredibly bootstrapped.

36:44and you know sometimes you're making decisions without all the right knowledge either because you don't have enough time to gather all the the correct information or you've just not done it before so like how are you meant to know and I can't remember specifically what it was but I remember having like that classic sinking feeling I think we'd done something or I had approved something and something had gone out like a big thing I think it was a big packaging order and it hadn't been checked there was like a massive problem with like one of the things on the boxes and I think it was our new product launch it maybe was like the dishwasher tablets or the washing up tablets and it was basically my my fuck up like it was me who signed off it was me who approved it it was me who'd gone through the process and I just remember like I think we've all had that but that moment of realization where you're like oh god okay like I I've got I've got no one else to blame I would love to be like oh but you know so and so has done whatever but it It was purely my fault.

37:38And I think it was a problem. Like the outcome wasn't ideal to be, you know, to have the wrong. I can't remember specifically what was wrong on it. It was bigger than a typo. It was something like, I don't know if it was the ingredients list wasn't quite right or the quantity. It's something that was quite important in like a product where you have to put regulatory messaging on it. And I had completely messed it up and it had gone to print and it was either we ship it out but you know could cause us problems down the line if something happened or if someone complained or we take the financial hit and we we run it again which at the time we didn't want to do the product was already late to launch we didn't have that much money so it was like oh god I don't really know what the solution is here I think in the end we maybe like got some stickers printed and like manually stuck stuff over the top like it was fine in the end it wasn't ideal but I think the lesson that I have learned from that and since then especially at Yonder where stuff is a little little bit more I guess like the stakes are slightly higher in a financial services industry like we're regulated by the FCA so it's not just the ASA where you know I think at home things we'd mentioned like method a lot and we've got like a cease and desist less so like all those things like fine they're not really fuck ups they're just things we're like okay maybe that's a little bit spicy but in in financial services obviously you know we're regulated we're looked at all the time like things that have to go through certain processes and procedures and they can't really be wrong but i think the the biggest learning through all of those things big fuck ups and little fuck up is to just make sure that you you hold your hands up and you say

39:09Lois Mills:yep that was me yep i messed up so this is the final question i would love to know what song best represents your working experience um what song comes to mind that is such a good question how have i not how have i not pre-thought or pre-planned this i'm thinking something like chaotic something very chaotic but maybe like the first thing that came to my head was dolly parser nine to five but i think that's only because someone sung that on karaoke yesterday that is not that is definitely not how i would describe my job maybe um great famous song why is my mind completely blank hang on i'm gonna google i'm gonna google that can be it could be any song like that's always in the office it's a sing-along or your go-to karaoke track or you get you think back to like running your shop and if you had tunes playing and it was like oh yeah like that was always like first go-to like I remember working in a coffee shop and we would always play like Tom Mish and Jordan Recchi and like all these amazing people it's like perfect coffee shop music and whenever I hear it I'm like oh yeah like back to being an offbeat like it's just so good that is good when you've just said that there is a song that's just come to my mind because I this is what makes me sound really horrible though I play this in my headphones every time I'm in the office and you know when you're just like I just need to focus I just need to get shit done I need like not be disturbed like put on the proper big headphones i've listened to this song i don't know maybe like 75 times and it's not even that much of an old song but it's leave me alone by fred again and i will listen to that on repeat i don't know what like no one else can hear what i'm listening to but it's almost like if i'm channeling leave me alone energy maybe it's coming out somewhere but that that actually probably describes like i mean it's a banger just like leave me alone leave me alone let me do my shit let me get it done it doesn't make me sound particularly nice all collaborative but uh i promise it's just like one small part as i say i think the rest of the podcast kind of proves that that's not quite you it's nice nice to know that part does exist in there some way you're like yeah actually i just need this yeah everyone needs a moment everyone needs just like some aggressive music just to get them through the end of the day to be like right okay let's actually do some shit let's do some work because time is timing yeah i mean i'd recommend it if you've got some shit to do this afternoon whack those headphones on play that song and repeat like a good three or four times you will get a crazy amount of work done it's fantastic yeah uh fred again live sets on youtube is often my my go-to i'll uh i'll put them on all the time but although and junior deep that's my my shout out if you're if you want just like chilled relaxed like easy working music not always with lyrics it's just there's there's hours and hours of just continuous music and yeah that's always a go-to for me like pretty much every day on YouTube or Spotify.