Polly Marsh, 40, is a married mum of three girls (aged, six, four and 22 months), and one half the successful brand Cuddledry, creators of the original Cuddledry baby bath towel.
The brand is now has an award-winning range of bath, swim and beachtime products for babies and toddlers and has even had an appearance on Dragon’s Den!
She tells motherswhowork.co.uk how they managed to clock a fantastic £50k in profit in the first year, and what running a business online really means for a busy mum.
What work did you do before you set up your company?
Brand management in London, and I am also an ex-Army Officer.
How did you fund the business?
Privately funded with personal monies with my friend and co-founder of Cuddledry, Helen Wooldridge. We had £8,000 between us.
Profit in first year:
£50k
What was the motivating factor for staring your own business?
Having children is the biggest catalyst for starting your own business. Both in terms of coming up with the product ideas but also because owning your own company and being able to work flexibly is the best way to fit work around family commitments.
What do you enjoy most about running your own business?
The fact that I can have a career that fulfills my personal goals and ambitions without having to sacrifice spending important time with my family and friends, or miss any of my childrens goals and achievements.
Running your own successful company like Cuddledry and putting the right people in the right positions within the company, allows you to delegate, prioritise – and mobile technology these days allows for the ultimate in multi-tasking – which in turn means achieving everything (life, career, family) is more feasible than ever before. I am not saying it is easy – but if you are motivated and organised, it is possible.
Running a business can be a mixed bag sometimes. What have been you highs and lows so far?
Highs are when parents send in wonderful stories about their personal experiences with Cuddledry towels. The whole point of the original invention of the Cuddledry apron bath towel was to relieve the stress most new parents face getting babies out of the bath (voted the number 1 stressful moment for most new parents), so when we receive people’s thanks and praises (often with photographic proof of smiling baby!) for doing just that and solving their problem – this is the ultimate reward and it truly makes us feel like all our hard work and long hours have been worth it. 1 in 20 babies has a cuddledry towel now and it’s been voted the “Must Have Nursery Product of the Yearâ€, and “Best Baby Gift†among many others. Those are great moments!
Low points – whenever something goes wrong, Helen and I take it personally. Whether we are let down by someone we trusted, or someone returns of a faulty product. We get hardly any returns (a handful per year) but each one we are mortified about and always always make sure the customer ends up happy with whatever we offer as compensation.
It’s just business and we have learnt over the years that it’s not the end of the world, and in comparison to most companies, we have very few disappointments – but we are perfectionists and we care about Cuddledry so much, that we can’t help taking things to heart!
How have you managed to stay on top of your career with the demands of motherhood while running a business?
It’s hard work and you have to be dedicated. It’s all about prioritising your own work and delegating as much as you can to the right people (we have a fabulous team, of whom nearly all are flexibly working mums at home) and hired consultants, and using the ultimate tool of multitasking – the smartphone!
Being able to answer emails and get on line at the same time as all the swimming lessons, Rainbows, tennis and other activities my children take part in – gives me an extra five hours per week “office time”. It means I can get everything done during the day time and allows me to also have quality time in the evening with my husband or catching up with friends, rather than having to get online in the middle of the night to get all my Cuddledry work done.
My phone is my mobile office and I can do most things if I have my phone with me. I use up the five minutes in the playground waiting for the children to come out of school. I can talk to people at work while I push a trolley around the supermarket. Most working mums can only work between school hours – which is the same as me, but I gain another 20% using my smartphone on the go as well.
How has running your business impacted on your relationship with your partner and children?
Not at all as far as the children are concerned. I am there for them in the morning and afternoon school pick up, I take them to all their various after school and weekend activities. I think I am able to enjoy my childrens company far more than most working parents and I feel very lucky not to have to sacrifice their needs in anyway.
Of course, there is the odd weekend I have to go away for Cuddledry reasons, but they always have dad there, in the same way that if he has to go away on a work weekend, I will always be at home. My husband and I both run our own separate businesses so he understands the needs to balance work, family, and personal life because he has to do it too. He gets’ cross sometimes because he thinks I don’t ever relax (guilty) but that is my personality and he knew that before we were married. It’s not something Cuddledry created. Having an understanding partner, both at work and at home, is key to Cuddledry’s success.
Helen and I both work together and separately as required, on all aspects of running the company. Helen also has a husband and three young children, so we are all working together and understanding each other’s family commitments as well as the business needs, and being flexible to accomodate both means we are a good team, but we couldn’t do it without supporting each other.
Running an online store seems like a goldmine idea – is it really easy to make money?
It’s not easy – you have to drive traffic to your site and promote the website in forms of traditional media which costs money. Social networking and joint marketing activities and data collection all take time, money, dedication, long and boring hours of research sometimes, and lateral thinking for new ways to attract the most people to your site. If someone is starting out in business, the stock is often kept at home, and picked and packed by the owner (ie – me at the time – in my house which was rammed to the rafters with boxes of stock), which takes more time and effort. Selling direct to the consumers online is the way to make most profit of course but the vast majority of our sales are via retailers and their websites, and very few in comparison are sold via our own website. This is intentional as we want to support our retailers, and not compete with them of course.
Retailers and independent people who run shops online have lots of other products to sell rather than just one, so there is all that administration for sometimes hundred of products to be taken into account. On line retailers do not have the overheads a bricks and mortar retailer has, so there are often discounts to be had, which is good for the consumer but bad for all the other retailers out there who are unable to compete.
How do you drive traffic to your website?
All sorts of ways. We collect data from everyone who buys from our site (with their permission of course), and from everyone who buys one of our products at a show where we sell direct to consumers. We run reciprocal marketing initiatives with other like minded companies (we never swap lists) – in order to increase our database.
We advertise in magazines and newsletters. We have a full scale social media campaign – twitter and facebook all help promote the name which in turn moves people to check out our website. The website is featured on the packaging for every single product we sell – it’s part of our Cuddledry logo and we show it off wherever we can! Carrier bags and t-shirts etc…
We have used Google Adwords in the past, but we don’t have to anymore – although it’s still a good way to support specific marketing campaigns. We find the social media and general word of mouth about Cuddledry and our products is extremely important.
Did it require a lot of financial investment for your website and promotion?
It was a large sum for us. The original Cuddledry website cost us £5,000 to set up initially. Since then, the website has grown and changed, largely behind the scenes – incorporating Customer Management Systems, and websites available only to trade, or international, or media – so it costs a few thousand each year to maintain, but a valuable tool outside of pure sales.
£50k profit in the first year is fantastic. Did you pay yourselves in that year? How did you achieve such success?
We didn’t start to pay ourselves until year three. The first two years everything was ploughed back into the company so it’s growth has been organic. We have not had to take on large sums of investment, although who knows what may have happened if we did! I think the original Cuddledry Apron Towel simply sold itself in that first year on the basis of being a fantastic product that really does make bathtime easy, and parents lives less stressful.
Dragons Den awareness, of course, has helped enormously, but Cuddledry was already in Mothercare by that stage, so the word of mouth campaign was well underway. We have to be frugal with where we promote Cuddledry – ads simply have to pay for themselves and create sales to continue to pay for future promotions. Return on Investment is analyzed on everything we do and spend to make sure we are not wasting money.
With the hindsight of a few years of trading, is there anything you would do differently?
No – we are glad we own the majority of our business and we could not have got to where we are any faster because we both wanted to be there for our families too. However, we are now at the stage where we can expand no more without additional help – there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for the current team. So we are taking on Hippychick, a great nursery distributor which will give us access to twice the number of retailers currently stocking Cuddledry in the UK. Hopefully then every nursery store in Britain will be selling Cuddledry and the feedback from the new retailers so far has been fabulous. We have a large range of new Cuddledyr products as well as the original Cuddlerdy baby apron bath towel of course!
Any tips for expectant mums, or mothers who feel that you can’t have a successful career and a happy family life at the same time?
1. It’s hard work but it is possible. Don’t expect any free time so if that’s important to you, being a working mum is going to be more difficult.
2. Go into partnership with someone else if possible – dividing and sharing the workload not only means your company can keep moving even if you are not around, you get the benefit of having someone to share the roles and responsibilites meaning you can be there with the family for the important things. Also you need to bounce ideas, steer the company, and share the highs and lows with someone. Without a business partner, I think it would be a very lonely job.
3. And get mobile internet/email. It’s essential if you want to be able to go anywhere and enjoy it. Helen and I resisted getting mobile emails because we thought it would negatively impact on family time. In fact it has done the exact opposite. It allows us to relax when before we could not. People who are on their smartphones all the time when they are on holiday, or out with family/friends – we are definatley not that sort of person! I don’t work all the time when I’m out with my family or my friends – I check once that nothing urgent needs my attention and then work is forgotten about til afterwards – which means I can relax and enjoy the precious times I have without constantly wondering what is going on at Cuddledry.
Polly Marsh is working with mobile network Three to help busy mums gain valuable time by having a smartphone. For more information go to www.facebook.com/ThreeUK.
