Stories
Aisling Byrne set up her clothes swapping company Nuw two years ago and is raising £115,000 and recently expanded it across the UK and Ireland.
Yet, Byrne never considered herself as a businesswoman, and even dropped business as a subject in school because she didn’t like it. However, it was her passion for sustainability and her experience witnessing the human impact of fast-fashion that spurred her on to create Nuw.
In this interview, Byrne talks about what sustainability means to her, tackling fast-fashion, growing a business from the ground up and what it’s like to pitch a business idea as a young woman in Ireland.
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Cait Caden (CC) Hello there. I’m Cait Caden and you’re very welcome to The Currency podcast. Now, we are all becoming increasingly more aware of the climate crisis and the threat it poses on all of our lives.
We keep hearing about all of the things the everyday person can do, and one of them is being more sustainable. The word has been used so much in recent years in relation to climate change that it has nearly lost all its meaning.
Joining me today is 26 year old Aisling Byrne, who co-founded the clothes swapping up Nuw. We will be talking about why sustainability is so on trend, what exactly it is and how she made a successful business out of it.
Aisling, you’re very welcome.
Aisling Byrne (AB): Thank you for having me Cait, it’s great to be here.
CC: Thank you for coming. First thing Aisling, before you get on to talk a bit more about Nuw and its recent success, tell me about your understanding of sustainability and why did you, as a graduate of music from Trinity, get involved in this topic?
AB: Yeah, it was definitely a random life path that happened along the way.
I think my understanding of sustainability is understanding that we are not going to live on the planet forever. We’re just kind of passing through. We need to understand that there’s some limitations around that. For everyone to really enjoy life and for the planet to thrive, we need to love and take care of it.
“We’re really running out of resources and we’re using them up too fast and we’re not respecting it.”
I went to a really good talk by an astronaut with NASA back in 2016, and it really struck me what he said. I think I began to understand sustainability in a different way when I had heard him speak. And he said when they went up and took the first photograph of the Earth, a lot of the astronauts on that space mission talked about this weird phenomenon or experience that they had where it was the first time they realised that we only have one Earth. Before that it was just an abstract concept and you could never really see it from the outside. And then all of a sudden you start to understand that something that needs to be cared for and nourished and loved in the same way that we do that for people. And he just gave a really good point that we don’t need to protect it. The planet is fine by itself. It’s way better without us.
But we need to just care for it and respect it and grow with it. And I think when you look at sustainability, it’s just remembering that everything that exists in the world exists from resources from the planet. We can’t get it anywhere else, it doesn’t come from anywhere else. And if we want to keep enjoying everything that that has to offer and enjoying our life and having everyone have equal enjoyment of life when they are alive, we need to just take care of what we have. And right now, we’re not doing that.
We’re really running out of resources and we’re using them up too fast and we’re not respecting it. So, I think sustainability is a massive buzzword now. But the understanding is just we have one planet like let’s just go with nature a bit more than we do.
CC: With this ‘No Planet B’ mentality, you could have gone into the water bottle industry or something like that, but you decided to go into fashion and you were at the coalface of fast-fashion, as it’s called, in India. Is that where the interest came from?
AB: Yeah, sustainability is really broad. I think that’s what kind of turns some people off it. When you’re confronted by all of the global issues in the world and everything that’s happening, and you hear about climate change, and you start looking a little bit under the hood, the first thing to do is just to try and turn away from it and think, ‘I’m just one person and yes, I’m not going to really change this.’
“We really want to authentically bring in that feeling of sharing and swapping with friends without any more transactional processes within that.”
I actually just didn’t really know about sustainability. I was young, I was 19. I went to India with Suas Educational Development, an Irish NGO, and they do a program in India where you go for three months and you teach in a school for part of this, and then you can see the rest of India. I like Suas because they know that you’re not going over as a white savior. They very much have the mindset that you’ll go over there and you’ll have an experience that we hope changes you and later impacts how you live your life or what you go on to do.
I was over there in 2013 and it was the year when the Rana Plaza building collapsed. That was a seven storey building in Dhaka in Bangladesh. The factory collapsed and 1,130 people died. And that was the real coleface of what’s actually happening behind the beautiful facade of fashion. There are people, and our environment, suffering and really, really being exploited. That to me was shocking.
I loved fashion. I had considered going into fashion design. So I was really, really creative. That’s why I went and did music. It was just always going to be something in the arts. I had this day where I just thought I’ve never actually thought of clothes as anything other than what I would if I was a designer and how it reaches the shop floor. I never thought before or after that. Where is it before that? Where is it after that? Who does that impact? Where’s my responsibility in that? I think the best way to describe a real change in myself, who was going into high-street stores all the time and buying stuff for every party and really enjoying fashion, for everything fast-fashion was giving us.
Then I had heard about this marketplace in Delhi where all of the clothes that don’t make it over to Europe or the US because maybe they have like a button missing, or something wrong with the tag, or anything really small. They are then sold at a knockdown price. Before that, I was so excited to get to this market where I’d get loads of clothes to bring home. Then obviously after I had really seen everything that was happening in India, I just got to that market, kind of accidentally because it was in a city that we were in, and I just felt so sick. I’ve never felt so sick then to just think all of these clothes are here and they’re just an illustration of a system that is so broken. Those clothes are getting sold for a cheaper than they are to even make. And that is saying something. It’s like 50 cents or €1 like. You just couldn’t believe it. Everything that went into those clothes and now they’re just there and they’ll probably be burnt or they’ll probably just make it to landfill.
“The factory collapsed and 1,130 people died. And that was the real coalface of what’s actually happening behind the beautiful facade of fashion.”
After that, I was in university, so there wasn’t a huge amount of sustainable alternatives. That’s where the frustration, which led to really beginning Nuw, came from. I had seen that, and I know not a lot of people have the privilege of getting to see that. And it’s also not fair to push that on someone either. But the fact that I had seen it and I couldn’t get away from it I felt like even though there didn’t seem to be an easy alternative,I did feel like I was someone who could make a difference because I was complicit in this industry. That’s really where the whole drive came from to go out for fast-fashion. I just got really thick about it.
CC: I love that phrase in The Devil Wears Prada, where he says, ‘It’s not just fashion. You live your life in it.’ But many people live their life in fast-fashion. What is your understanding of fast-fashion?
AB: So, if you think back to what fashion used to be back in the day, even before maybe we were born, it consisted of autumn, winter, spring, summer seasons. And you’d actually only really do two seasons a year. So, you’d have your autumn-winter and then your spring-summer and you would invest in clothes the same way you invest in things like a house or a car. You would buy them because they had a purpose. You saved up for them. They were generally expensive and you would have just a couple of pieces and you would wear them. You’d give it a really, really good life.
Then what happened was fast-fashion is just overproduction and way more than two seasons a year. So, now with fast-fashion, you have 52 seasons a year and sometimes 365. That’s new designs hitting the shop floor every day or every week, that’s fast-fashion. They’re really quick changing trends. The industry is constantly trying to make you feel like you’re not good enough, like you are off trend, like you need to reflect some sort of other lifestyle. Generally, behind that is really cheap clothing, which is kind of catered for buy-wear-dispose. So, instead of looking at something like a car, where if it breaks you try and fix it, you look at it like a toothbrush where you use it and then you discard it. And it means nothing to you because it was just as cheapas buying a toothbrush.
So, there’s a whole different way of looking at fashion. It’s difficult for designers. They’re trying to design daily instead of having that time to be creative. So it’s an industry that I think everyone loses in except for the very rich, often white men at the top of the chains.
CC: But it is cheap and it’s easy. For the everyday person who’s on the breadline, they will go to these brands, they will go to the shops and they will buy. Is sustainability nearly looking down on these people who live in fast-fashion because they have to, because it’s cheap and affordable?
AB: What’s difficult about fast-fashion is it’s democratised fashion for so many people, but for the consumer end. And so it pushes the exploitation to the start of the supply chain. So, there are some people now who are winning and people now who are losing, which is a really unfortunate situation to be in. That being said, I’ve been to so many talks, and actually when we were doing loads of research for Nuw, we went to loads of Facebook posts just about information on sustainable fashion and information on this. And the comments that would come up all the time were like: ‘That’s great for you, but you can afford that. Like, I can’t. And it’s not fair for you to say to me that I can’t partake in fashion and I can’t enjoy it because I’m not really wealthy.’ And often really wealthy people are just buying loads of clothes they don’t even wear. You have a lot of people buying fast-fashion who actually wear them. So, we need to understand this. I was definitely so frustrated. I was like, ‘that’s fine, but I can’t buy a €200 pair of jeans. I’m like, I can’t even buy a chicken-fillet-roll. That was in college and that’s why I would go to all the swap shops and do all of those kinds of things.
But the Environmental Audit Committee in the UK did a really good report called the Fixing Fashion Report, and they had some amazing recommendations that came out of it. All of them actually got turned down by the government, but that’s like a whole other conversation. But one thing that was really striking about that hearing was asking one of the high-street brands, could you make shirts ethically and within the limitations of the environment for £5?
And the answer was no.
So, we have a real problem there where it has to cost more money to make clothes in a more sustainable and ethical way, but we also should be making that access affordable because there’s a real risk that the circular economy is going to become an elitist economy and we’re actually not going to achieve anything related to sustainability. Sustainability only works if it’s diverse and everyone’s involved.
How our capitalist system is working is it’s really competitive. There are now people who are trying to own clothes loop business models. It’s great. It’s a great move forward. But shouldn’t we be collaborative? Because the whole point of the circular economy is to be like that. Then we can look at making it more accessible for everyone to come along with it.
“It seems like this obsession that the fast fashion industry was pushing was that everything had to be brand new off the shop floor.”
I think with Nuw, a lot of problems that we saw from the top down. We just had to authentically say to ourselves, what are we setting out to build? Are we setting out to build something that we, when we came across this problem, could access? Or are we setting out to build something that’s just a business for business sake? And so I think that’s what’s really inspiring about so many businesses starting up in sustainability now. It’s so much more community led, collaboratively led and people led. And it’s just trying to educate people so that they can change and empowering them to make that change rather than just telling them that what they do is wrong, when that’s often the only alternative.
CC: Where do you think the fast-fashion industry is going? You were saying there that all these plans got turned down, was it by the Irish government they were turned down?
AB: No, the UK government.
CC: What were those plans?
AB: One of the examples was a 1p tax on every garment sold in the UK to put in recycling infrastructure. So right now, you can bring your clothes recycling centers, but they don’t have the infrastructure to do textile recycling. A lot of garments today are blends. So if you had something like polyester and just pure polyester, you could recycle that into another polyester T-shirt.
But a lot of these are blends, so you’d have like a cotton and polyester mix, cotton and acrylic mix. It’s really hard to break apart those fibres, especially if you have the likes of elastane and things like that. So, it’s not economically viable to actually do that. And so often the places that actually have that infrastructure are the likes of China or places where recycling is actually quite a good part of the economy and quite lucrative often.
And so you’re looking at that and you think that’s a great idea to build up the recycling infrastructure in the UK. A lot of the reasons they said no were on things to do with Brexit and having to implement and start over it. But at the end of the day we’re running out of time. This is a great report. It’s a brilliant report. Just do it.
And then the G7 Summit came along and they did the Fashion Pact where you had 150 brands sign up to it and they say they are going to put all these measures in place. But they have no policy underpinning it. And they also have the recommendations of the Fixing Fashion Report. So, why don’t the brands push it? It seems like they don’t want to actually.
CC: Let’s get on to your actual product now that tackles these issues of sustainability and fast-fashion. You are the co-founder of Nuw, with your friend Alison Kelly.
It was originally a Nu Wardrobe. So you dropped the ‘wardrobe’ off this. Why the rebrand?
AB: Yeah, so originally when we started, as we called ourselves, Nu for ages and the reason for that was just we wanted to play on the idea of having something new.
It seems like this obsession that the fast fashion industry was pushing was that everything had to be brand new off the shop floor. What we realised when we shared clothes with friends and we were coming up with these alternatives, was it’s just the feeling of wearing something that’s new to you. And so that’s kind of where Nu started. And we went with a Nu Wardrobe because, again, just playing on words and having it more as a product.
And then we just thought it was just really formal. And nobody uses it outside Ireland or the UK. People often say closet. So we just wanted to shorten it down, make it a bit more like a community led, a bit more informal. And we’ve just got with Nuw. So that’s been our change over time, I guess it’s kind of just grown with everything else we’ve been doing it.
CC: So, you started the business two years ago, is that right?
AB: Yeah.
CC: So, tell me about why you decided to come up with this with Alison and how you got it off the ground?
AB: Yeah. So myself and Ali had been on the Suas program. We were on the same one, but we weren’t actually in the same place. So, I was in Kolkata and she was in Delhi. And then we met two years later in university and we ran this student charity event called Jailbreak, so it’s basically like a fundraiser…
CC: I did that as well.
AB: Did you? What year did you do it?
CC: I would have done it in 2018
AB: I think we did it in 2015. We ran it then.
Ali was in Law soc and I was in St Vincent de Paul and so that kind of naturally fell into our roles.
Andwe always joke that we were always professional friends. We were always just talking about ideas and building stuff.
And then randomly we’d go out and have drinks on the weekend or something. But we were always just planning things. During Jailbreak, we just got talking about what we had both seen in fashion and how much it had really affected us. And I think it was really nice to feel that someone else felt that way as well.
“I never expected to be a businesswoman.”
And so after we had finished Jailbreak and we finished our finals, Sua was running a follow up program called The Ideas Collective. Basically if you had seen a social justice issue that you wanted to get involved in, it was sometimes hard and nobody knew where to start. So, this was just a starting point. And from there, we then did Launchbox, which is Trinity’s incubator program for students. So that was really when we turned from just this idea and what we did with swap shops on the side of our jobs and education really turned into making this happen. It needed to be business.
Moving on from that, it took us a while of just thinking about it. And then eventually Ali actually got a Masters in Oxford, so she moved over. But it was the same time that I got offered the New Frontiers program with Enterprise Ireland.
So I always joke I never would have taken the leap if I had known Ali was going to go to Oxford. But we were just kind of at the stage where we said I might as well keep going with this and just see where it goes. And we both actually see each other quite a lot in London now. But if we really wanted to make this work and we wanted to scale it, it made sense to be a business.
And then I guess my journey as an entrepreneur kind of began becauseI never expected to be a businesswoman.
CC: How exactly does this business model work for the clothes swapping up? There is a subscription fee now. There wasn’t always, am I right in saying that?
AB: Yeah, there’s a subscription fee. So, essentially it’s a shared wardrobe with your community.
So it’s across Ireland, in the UK and all members contribute to the platform. So, we all crowdsource the platform and then you can borrow and swap from each other. So, if you have a wedding coming up, if you have an event coming up, you’re able to borrow things like you would from your friend’s wardrobe for a couple of days. And if you want to swap pieces, it works like the swap shops we used to do in real life.
So, you upload a piece of clothing, it gets tiered as either a silver or gold piece and you get a token. And then once you have those tokens, you can request to take a piece from anyone else on the platform. So, you don’t have to kind of swap with one individual person. You can use those wherever. There’s a €9.99 per month membership fee.And once you’re a member, you can borrow and swap as much as you like. So, everything after that is free. So, we really want to authentically bring in that feeling of sharing and swapping with friends without any more transactional processes within that. So, you’re not renting off people or you’re not kind of buying off people. It’s just about trying to recirculate our wardrobe as much as possible and as quick as possible.
CC: Okay, so you’re not actually buying the clothes from other people? It’s just the subscription fee.
AB: Yeah, just the flat membership fee. And then it’s like, imagine swap shops in real life. You just go to an event and you’d pop your clothes in at the start, you get a token and then you can browse the store and just take those pieces back.
CC: That’s one of the obvious questions of how do you differ from Depop, which is an international clothes swapping app and has no subscription fee, but you pay other people for their clothes.
AB: Yeah. And I think it comes back to the accessibility point as well.
It’s just about remembering that in real life, people don’t often buy or rent from their friends, but they do share. And we wanted to make that behaviour more widespread because it is so good for sustainability. Some things that can happen with reselling, and I think reselling is really good as well, there needs to be a lot of different alternatives and a lot of our members would use both platforms. But what can often happen is if a piece isn’t sold, it stays in a wardrobe for far longer than it should.
And we just want to focus on actually getting those pieces worn and having a new life. So, often times you could have pieces that are on Nuw and they’re getting lent and then eventually they get resold on another platform. And that’s great because actually they just had a life while they were in that person’s possession, because monetisation, especially for high street pieces, when you’re looking at that side of the market, they depreciate in value quite a lot as well. So they can be harder to resell.
But when you’re looking at swapping, that transaction is very different. It’s more communal and it’s more about the piece rather than the monetisation of that piece. So we’ve just found that that’s been something that our audience really values.
CC: Right, but one of the things that comes up on Depop, or just in general, say I’m borrowing clothes, something might have a makeup stain or a lace or a button might be missing or something like that, how do you regulate Nuw, or is that still something you’re thinking about?
AB: So, we have various different forms of verification. So when you sign up, you get verified, when you upload a piece, that goes through an approval process. When you’re borrowing or swapping, you sign terms and conditions that go between borrower and lender. So say if you’re borrowing something, you’ll let us know the retail value and the current value of that item and then the person who’s borrowing it would need to pay that back. Often we deal with things on a case by case basis, and fostering that kind of trust in the community is really important as well.
What’s really good about having a community where all members are both sides is they understand how it feels to be on the other side. So when you have platforms that are supply and demand, you can often have people who are buying stuff or purchasing stuff who maybe don’t understand how it feels to part with your clothes or lend your clothes out. Whereas on Nuw you can really feel how it feels to be a lender or a swapper, and you’re putting up your pieces and saying, oh, I really want the best for this or I want someone to take care of it.
And with that, we’ve also partnered with Superhog. So that’s a sharing economy insurance platform. So that’s just getting integrated to Nuw now, that’s giving people an extra piece of mind. And then within that, there’s just, I guess, a lot of community policing. We have really good relationships with all of our members. It’s really nice to be quite a responsive team. And you can see that kind of trust being built over time.
There’s enough barriers within that process that it’s annoying if you want to be a bad actor and come on. But it makes sense if you’re a user who really wants to be there for the right reasons.
CC: I think it’s safe to say that despite Covid and lockdown, 2020 has been a good year for Nuw. You officially launched your app in January of this year, across the UK and Ireland. So how has this changed your business from what you had been doing before?
AB: Yeah, I think when the pandemic happened that was a big shock, we had to take a second to be like, ‘do we survive this as a business? What’s happening?’ Everyone was really scared. And I think very early on we thought, life is going to be really different. This isn’t going to change. We’re not going to be back doing things in June, which I think was the attitude quite early on from loads of people. And I’m glad that we had those tough conversations at the very beginning.
I think what’s so funny is Steve Jobs talked before about when you can’t connect the dots until you move forward, you can only connect them going back.I remember we used to run swap shops all the time, and by the end of it I was like, oh, that’s such an effort, I’m just so tired why did we do that. The pandemic happened and everything we implemented was learned in our swap shops. So, we were very much focused on borrowing, very much focused on universities. Ball season was big for us, really good. Really local sharing, just saying OK, this is going amazing, launch of the app is in January. Everything’s going up, we’re like, this is great.
We finally get there and then we thought, okay, social occasions, they’re not our trigger anymore, what do we do? But we can see that pre-loved items, the likes of Depop were doing amazingly well during lockdown because people want to get more thriftier. Sometimes people are bored, getting fashion can make you feel a bit alive. It makes you feel really happy, we love fashion. We want it to stay around, that’s why we’re trying so hard to do something about it.
But we basically went back to the drawing board and were like, people are looking for more casual pieces. Adding impermanence swaps is always something we were going to do. So we just added in that feature, that allowed us to relaunch, which was great. We partnered with UPS and Parcel Motel, so UPS own Parcel Motel and Parcel Motel are doing a five year innovation project with Trinity College Dublin, for low impact deliveries.
So, that was right up our street and definitely something we wanted to get involved in. So doing that partnership allowed us to scale across Ireland and the UK and all of a sudden, that opened up our geography, our access to users. It was taking away that geographical privilege that sometimes surrounds sustainability as well. So I think it was just really interesting to realise we actually knew the answers from so long ago to get through it.
CC: Because you were only in Cambridge, in Dublin and London?
AB: Yeah, and they were really trials on the ground. Just how it happened, it worked out well and we just kind of realised, okay, we can make it through this.
CC: And not only have you launched your app, you are also seeking £115,000 of investment on the equity crowdfunding platform, Seedrs. So what will that money go towards? Was that just for the app or is it for more?
AB: Yeah, so it’s really our growth strategy. So we now have product market fit, we know the mechanics of how our platform operates, we need to find more people who want to use it. So we’ve really identified our kind of key target audience, definitely young women between 18 to 35. And now we’re just looking to grow and scale across the UK and Ireland for the next six to eight months. Then aiming to raise a large seed, around one to €2 million in early 2021.
“You have to master the skill of being often the only woman in the room, it’s harder when you’re the only young woman in the room, and if you pretend it’s not there, you can’t master that skill and learn how to combat the situations that you’re in.”
like to see grow consistently between 10, 20 per cent over the next six months, and also just getting that revenue model. So we’re generating revenue now. But the subscription was really interesting to us to how we build it. So there’s like A B tests in there that we do want to understand. And then when you build that formula for success and you get that seed round, you can scale it out.
So we’re just really looking to grow what we’ve created and built and to some extent figure it out. So we have the £115,000 that’s being raised on Seedrs. And then in addition to that we have a £25,000 convertible loan out from the London Fashion Fund. So it’s really good to have that kind of industry support as well alongside it.
CC: And how far away from your goal are you, of £115,000?
AB: We’re 20 per cent away. We just hit 80 per cent last night.
CC: Congratulations. So any big investors? Can you see the investors coming in?
AB: Yeah, so we had Bethnal Green Ventures who we did an accelerator program before, they’re a tech for good accelerator and then two angels who are investors, we have one, Chris Slater, he ran Simply Business, its an insurance platform that kind of scaled and went to the US. So there’s some really good supports that we have in there. And then, yeah, it’s quite fun to watch the crowd investors coming in and chat to them.
CC: Brilliant. And then obviously, you’re a very young woman that’s doing very well in her own business. But I know you’ve said before in the past that women in business has meant pitching to a boys club and that you’d be in a room with three men who are talking condescendingly about your ‘little project’. And you’re like, you come in here with a business plan and they say, ‘are you joking me? What a waste of my time.’
Is it easy in your eyes for women to develop business ideas in Ireland and/or the UK? Young women in particular.
AB: I would say you have to master the skill of being often the only woman in the room, it’s harder when you’re the only young woman in the room, and if you pretend it’s not there, you can’t master that skill and learn how to combat the situations that you’re in. That’s been the steepest learning curve, I think. And what I was disappointed with, I guess, was the fact that I really needed to go to London to make this business work, not because of the audience, but because of the network that was there.
The impact investment in tech for good networks is just a lot more mature in the UK. I think in Ireland it gets put off as though it’s charity or business that really wants to do good, can’t be a great, profitable, globally scaling business. I think that’s a mistake. And I think I’ve been in enough rooms where I’ve been told they showed our business plan to their daughter to just say, this is not worth my time.
But I used to listen to it at the beginning. So I’d get really worried, like, is this not a good idea. I would take advice that wasn’t advice I really needed to listen to, but just from someone who likes to talk. And what worries me is that there are a lot of young women who will be in those shoes too. And do they have the understanding that this isn’t how it actually needs to be. And I hope that we’re not letting really great ideas go because of men in high places, putting people off, building what they know to be a good idea.
So I just got, I think, frustrated enough to realise, I’m only going to spend my time with someone I feel will add value to what we’re trying to build and really gets where we’re coming from, and I got some really good advice once about always understanding that when you’re in a room, approach it from a place of equality. Investors are people too, you come with great ideas, no matter how young you are. There’s no one else who can have that because they’re not you.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have all these amazing skills, if you haven’t been to Harvard Business School or you haven’t done whatever else it is, nobody who’s there has your idea and your passion and your drive. And so, remember that there are people with money or there are people who can help you in that path, there are people who can hinder that path and just let them go, just don’t worry about them. But there are people who can help you. Don’t ever be desperate, I think that’s what I’m trying to say, you bring so much to the table because of who you are and everyone else wants to see that.
So if you believe that what you have to offer is good, find the people who are willing to listen and don’t just kind of give up because anyone can say whatever they want about it. People who come to you and say, oh, this is what you should be doing or that’s not going to work. It’s like, what is the point? This is unhelpful.But just always remember that you deserve to be in that room. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be there. Don’t let that stop you from keeping going just because you feel, oh this person knows more than me or there’s someone else or they deserve their voice to be heard over mine.
CC: That’s great advice. And then lastly, I read somewhere that you gave up business as a subject in school because you didn’t like it and you also just said there that you never thought you’d become a businesswoman.
But now you’re running your own successful company. So, now that you’re in the throes of the business world, are there any business people past or present that really inspire you?
AB: Tessa [Clarke], who runs Olio, which is a food sharing platform. She basically did a call with me one day when I was starting out and she gave everything to me straight. And then she gave me the whole talk about, it is really hard to raise funding as the woman and I was like, I want to raise €250,000. And at that time, I just had no idea how that was going to happen, I was just telling me I really needed to do that.
And she gave me amazing advice. And then she just said, I’m going to help you as much as I can and we need to lift each other up and help each other because there’s no way we’re going to get there without that.
And I called her all the time to ask for advice, it was just amazing. There was nothing that I could help her with. I was just like, I haven’t done anything yet, I can’t help you with anything. But she was basically kind of saying, don’t worry, you’ll help someone with that one day. And they have millions of users across the world. It’s just a phenomenal business model. And just to have someone who is so passionate about what they’re building but also so willing to take time out to help other people as well, I think that’s amazing.
And then Sara Blakely, who started Spanx, she’s quite cool as well, I like her story.
CC: Very good. Well, on that nice note, I think we should finish up. Aisling Byrne, thank you so much for joining me today. And best of luck with Nuw. And thank you to everybody who listened to us.
AB: Thanks a million.
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