It takes quite a lot of work, worry and money to start a business, you often feel you are literally putting everything you love and believe in on the line. Are you being selfish, stupid, who are you to think you can do this thing? All thoughts and feelings that fly through your head and return frequently exactly when you need to believe you can! If it was easy everyone would do it, is a common comfort given by those cheerleaders in your corner, meaning well, encouraging, loving, adoring.
For some that's enough of a reason to keep going, pride is a strong emotion. We want taylor yates to mean more.
If we are lucky enough to reach enough people in the world, if they love our products enough to hand over their hard earned cash in exchange for something we have created and made for them, if we survive the start up statistics and last more than two years, if we have the energy and patience to allow our brand to grow and breathe, then we also want to be able to give back.
Author, speaker and global guru, Simon Sinek says we must 'start with why', your purpose. I worked for a large successful profitable business for many years, we all worked hard and brought home millions of pounds of business literally every week, the owners cared about the people they employed, there legacy was the families they supported through work. The business gradually moved overseas and eventually closed, luckily I had moved on, but sadly the legacy became an army of people unemployed and business owners focussed on selling their assets and lining their nest.
This is the norm, you start it, you take the risk, you lose the sleep, so you reap the rewards when they come, fair enough.
At taylor yates we want our brand to stand for more. Don't get me wrong, we need to make money, we need to pay our team and our selves but we also want to give back. It's not about legacy or pride, we believe it's about values, we believe every business should exist to give back and lots do but we can do more.
Research clearly shows that empowering women across the world can drive change and a create a better world for our children. This is our purpose, we create and curate beautiful things for our customers to buy so that we can grow our business and give back, but how does this work?
The world is bursting with good causes, amazing people doing great work, it's hard to pick one! We have to start somewhere. We started taylor yates together, my daughter and I, we encouraged each other, supported each other and slowly but surely launched it together. In fact the night that we launched the website to the world, I was at the women in business awards dinner, I don't remember much of the event and had to apologise to my colleagues around the table for constantly nipping out to make a call to Ellen to approve an email design and eventually give the OK to press send and tell our small but beautiful waiting list that we were open for business.
That was almost a year ago, we have found the women we will help. Our purpose is to grow a profitable, sustainable business that exists to delight our customers and give the freedom of choice that we enjoy to mothers and daughters around the world. We will tell you more in our next blog.
Thanks for reading
