When I caught up with Dubliner Sharon Keegan, founder of the Peachylean athleisure brand, she was still “riding the tidal wave” of interest from her appearance on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den programme, on which she secured an investment of £100,000 in return for 11 per cent of her business.

“After the last 14 months it is so welcome, so I’m lapping it up and enjoying the ride,” she says ebulliently. “I know that it only has a certain time span and then it’s back to business. We have had such a tragedy, it was a really dark time, and this is like someone has won the Lotto or something – not just for myself and the team but for my family too.”

It’s been a tough 14 months for the Peachylean founder, who lost her beloved younger brother Alan last March. Although he was three years younger than her, she says that she looked up to the talented music producer, and felt his presence guiding her during the filming of Dragons’ Den.

Despite usually being a “ball of nervous energy”, she felt calm. “It was so raw after what we’d been through but there was also a sense of calm and composure on the day… We used to watch Dragon’s Den as a family so it’s an epic win but it’s bittersweet.”

TV audiences love a tearjerker of course. While viewers only got to see around eight minutes of her time on the programme, she pitched to the Dragons for over an hour and a half. “I really tried not to go there [her brother’s passing] and my pitch was going really well and then about 45 minutes in they asked me, ‘What happened in March?’”, says Keegan, who cut her pitching teeth on the first day of the DCU Female High Fliers Entrepreneurship Accelerator programme.

“I had just found out that I was pregnant with my second child,” she says of her first day at DCU. “And, while I was delighted to be pregnant, I had this fear that I wouldn’t be able to finish the course. My confidence was very low that day. I stood up to do my pitch and bombed. I ‘ate the frog’ as they say. I promised myself then that I was going to nail every pitch I ever did from that day on.” 

True to her word, Keegan won Best Pitch of the Year 2018 at the end of the course which led to her partnering with the Enterprise Ireland Competitive Start Fund, through which she won €50,000 to fund and scale her Peachylean business idea. She credits DCU Female High Fliers Programme Director Niamh Collins (Manager AgTech UCD Innovation Centre at Nova UCD) as being an incredibly supportive mentor during the programme.

While speaking about her brother’s death made for great TV it was a challenge for Keegan who says she didn’t want to “look like a whinger” on television. While she knew her figures inside out for the show, she’d done all her forecasting in euros whereas the Dragons wanted sterling figures. She was undeterred. “I was well-rehearsed on my figures. I nailed that part and then they didn’t air any of it,” she laughs.

Keegan received investment from Dragons Touker Suleyman, Sara Davis and Tej Lalvani. She says that while she was delighted to get the support of Sara Davis there was something special about winning over Suleyman and Lalvani. “There has to be an element of heart and soul in it so that they can then open up their network to you. For me, the biggest achievement was winning over the men. I have pitched in front of a lot of men and I’ve seen their eyes glaze over as soon as I start talking about female empowerment. To get the validation of these two male investors, in particular, is incredibly rewarding for our little Irish brand.”

The Peachylean founder says that she is, in general, particular about her investors. “We have a really strong vision around what we want to do and the market we want to target. When you are in the investment circuit if the investor doesn’t get it or connect with it then they are not the investor we want to work with. Finance is easy to get, it’s connecting with the right people that’s the issue. We have been very lucky to connect with people who get what we are trying to do.”

“Social media is a gamechanger for brands to do well”

Keegan says that Peachylean is about more than “spanx and nylon”. “It’s about connecting with people – about their human story, their inner critic and facing their fears – we all get stuck at certain times in our lives and we question ourselves.”

She should know.

This former Irish Operations Director of British food company Pieminister was made redundant around the same time that her first son was born, and she began to suffer from postnatal depression. She had gained a lot of weight during her pregnancy and says that she was also carrying “emotional weight”. “I have struggled with really bad depression, I needed support and to pull myself out of that and that’s where this product came from,” she says.

Having regained some confidence and gone back to the gym, she couldn’t find the clothes she wanted. “I was wearing big box brands but could not find a product that did what I needed it to do. People who are insecure about what they are wearing are not going to stick to a fitness plan or get money out of a gym membership. I was wearing a well known shapewear brand under my leggings and decided that if I could create something that was like shapewear on top and a legging on the bottom I could give women the confidence they needed.”

In 2018 she got in touch with an overseas designer sourced on Alibaba and sent the designer a sketch and a sample. “The designer sent me back a sample – the heart on the back of the legging really tied in with the idea of ‘self-love’ that I was aiming for. A friend of mine modelled the leggings on social media and the interest took off from there. We didn’t even have a product, we were just gauging the market, and then we had to go back to everyone and ask if they’d wait for the product to arrive, which they did.”

Fashion and clothing design is a notoriously tricky area when it comes to copyright or patenting of designs. Isn’t she worried about others copying the Peachylean design with its recognisable heart-shaped pattern on the rear of the leggings?

“A company can’t’ copy your engagement with your customers, there’s a lot more work in the background than the product itself,” she says. “I was in Bray a while ago and a woman was wearing a pair of leggings that had a heart on the bum. I laughed to myself thinking ‘You know you’ve made it if someone is making imitation Peachyleans’. I think there are enough bums, boobs and tums for everyone to run a business. You’re always going to get people being critical of what you’re doing or trying to copy you but you just have to keep the blinkers on and keep moving.”

Ethos and brand

The core ethos of Peachylean is that of an inclusive brand and the products run from size 6 to 26. Keegan says that at certain points in her life she’s been very fit but never skinny. “I remember being at a Crossfit show and feeling a little underestimated because of my size – I’ve always been bigger built. Peachylean stands for being all shapes and sizes as well as all ethnicities – particularly in Ireland – as a brand we need to continue to educate ourselves on how best to be for ‘every body’ – not just for one type of person.”

Keegan has spoken elsewhere about “pitching to her inner dragon”. Does she believe that women in business find it especially difficult to battle those inner demons and, indeed, to allay imposter syndrome?

“Women find it very difficult and there is a huge bias there in terms of female-founded businesses and females in higher positions in business. It should be socially acceptable that people need to balance work and family life,” she says of balancing motherhood with business.

“Women struggle every day, particularly mothers. When the kids’ breakfast and lunches are made and they’ve gone to school it’s a question of ‘Am I good enough? Am I ready for this? Am I prepared for this.?’ We are on a hamster wheel of our brains telling us we are not good enough. I think if we own the struggle, speak about it openly and uplift ourselves and others we will achieve more.”

As a working mother she gets most of her work done while her sons are in creche and school and at night when they’ve gone to sleep. She credits the childcare providers, her husband, her mother, and mother-in-law for giving her the support she needs.

She says that the pandemic, while great for her business, has been tough from a personal perspective. It has, she says, been a ‘double-edged sword’ when it comes to the world of work: “I think we’ve worked harder than we ever have. I think we are online more and therefore more available to people. There is less structure in our day and therefore people think they can email at any time of the day.”

“On the other hand, I have seen a shift in terms of people being more open and vulnerable with regards to their home lives. It has become more acceptable not to have the business head on all the time or to let people see the kids in the background. That image of being dressed in a business shirt on top and a pair of pyjamas on the bottom for a Zoom meeting is kind of like a metaphor for how we’ve been trying to do business for the past year.”

“My dream is to be sitting on my outdoor veranda with a view of the sea.”

Social media has been the driving force behind Peachylean and 90 per cent of sales come through either Instagram or Facebook. After Dragons’ Den aired, Keegan had a full team working on social media night and day. She says that such platforms represent a very low comparative cost in marketing terms but that it is all about engaging properly with the customer online.

“You will see a lot of brands putting out a question to the public. The public will then start commenting but there will be very little engagement. We want to engage with every single one of our customers. Social media is a gamechanger for brands to do well – you have an ability to reach your core consumer if you spend a bit of time conversing with them. If you treat your customer right they will be your brand champion,” she says.

Part of this attitude comes from having a largely female founding team. Keegan says that when her brother passed away last year she really needed help and asked Fiona O’Carroll, her former mentor in Going for Growth, to come into the business with her. The other founding member is designer Carol Mahon who works in product design and is currently working on the rebrand too – taking on board the suggestions of the Dragons.

“I needed support and they supported me in my darkest time. I am also overwhelmed by the talent these women have,” she says. The commercial director of Peachylean is Dan Ryan, who brings his extensive retail experience to the brand having held senior roles at Lifestyle Sports, Shop Direct, Primark, Brown Thomas, and the Selfridges Group.

Keegan herself has a long list of academic achievements as well as business accolades including a postgraduate from UCD Innovation Academy and being the winner of UCD Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 going on to gain a place at the prestigious DCU Female Highfliers Entrepreneurship Accelerator as mentioned above.

Her first foray into the world of business was aged 19 selling spray tanning equipment and later running sales and marketing in Ireland for tanning brand St. Tropez. Looking back, she says that passion is everything when it comes to business.

“It doesn’t need to be a multinational business you’re running, passion is everything. It’s about doing something that makes you get out of your bed in the morning.” Having come through many dark days, she hopes that her story, of not giving in to the inner critic, might serve as inspiration to someone reading this article, someone who “needs to reinvent themselves, keep going and not believe that they can’t, because they can”.

She’s no longer driving her little banger of a Daihatsu Charade around Dublin industrial estates selling spray tan kits but will she be buying a new car when she hits the big time with Peachylean?

“I am already living the dream because I am helping people with their confidence,” she says. “But my dream is to be sitting on my outdoor veranda with a view of the sea. If I can do that somewhere sunny and hot, maybe Ibiza, I will die a happy woman.”