Mum who’s making buckets of cash out of sea water
. . . and the baby food tycoon inspired by her own VERY picky toddler
MOTHERS setting up successful businesses from home while raising a family are one of the most inspiring trends of our age. Now the Daily Mail is asking you to nominate mothers who have created firms from scratch, while caring for children, for our first ever Mumpreneur Of The Year Award, in association with NatWest everywoman Awards.
Here, we hear from two very deserving contenders: a mother who launched Scotland’s first sea salt company and a woman who designed an innovative baby-feeding product. NATALIE CRAYTON, 33, founder of Hebridean Sea Salt, lives in the Outer Hebrides with her children Malin, eight, Amber, six, and four-year-old Freddie. NATALIE had a lightning bolt moment in 2010 after reading a newspaper article on gourmet English sea salt. Living on the Isle of Tiree in the Hebrides, surrounded by beautiful lochs and crystal- clear water, Natalie assumed she wouldn’t have to look far to buy Scottish sea salt. But there was a problem . . .
‘I couldn’t find it anywhere,’ she says. ‘It didn’t exist. I realised I was in the perfect location to set up the business myself.’
It helped that she had a degree in marine biology from Aberdeen University. ‘I had a great lifestyle but felt I had so much to offer, yet the island I was on was so small there were barely any jobs available,’ she says.
Natalie wrote a business plan at night when her children were in bed. Her partner, Will, 40, worked as a lobster and crab fisherman which meant he was away for six weeks at a time.
‘I’d never done anything like it before,’ she says. ‘Luckily I am a manic researcher and trawled the internet, calling anyone I could think of for advice.’
It soon became clear why no one was making sea salt in Scotland. ‘It’s not as easy as it sounds,’ says Natalie. ‘It needs a huge amount of investment to buy the equipment.’
SHE secured backing — £175,000 in total — from a variety of bodies, including Highlands & Islands Enterprise, Scotland Food & Drink and the Prince’s Youth Business Trust.
‘I had the brand’s image in my head from the beginning,’ she says. ‘It would be a pure, natural product, making the most of what our surroundings had to offer.’
Living and working on Tiree, with a population under 800, posed its own problems. ‘ There was not enough infrastructure or transport links for such an ambitious project. I needed space, so decided to move.’
In August 2011 Natalie and her children moved to the Isle of Lewis, while Will stayed on Tiree for work. ‘I felt like it was the only chance I had to do something really good. Money was unbelievably tight. We cut back on everything from holidays and clothes to only eating the most basic food.’
She found the perfect location for a factory near Loch Erisort, known for immaculate water with a Grade-A certification for cleanliness.
Natalie researched how to evaporate seawater to get the shape, crunch and flavour of salt crystals just right, while retaining the naturally occurring trace elements such as zinc, potassium and calcium.
‘I met a lot of engineers before I found someone who could make it work,’ she says. ‘ They were all men used to dealing with other men. When I arrived, with Freddie on my hip, it knocked them for six.’
She named the company Hebridean Sea Salt and the first package of salt was sold in July 2012.
After three months Natalie had 150 stockists. ‘The process ran overnight, so I’d be in the factory at 1am making sure everything was working, which it often didn’t. Being such a remote spot, it was expensive to get people out. I learned to fix boilers and the pumps myself.’
She also became adept at making phone calls with children crying in the background. Things expanded quickly and, through a £300,000 investment from two private investors, she was able to take on another factory unit with bigger, better and more reliable equipment.
Hebridean Sea Salt makes 40kg of salt a day and supplies more than 400 independent stores, as well as supermarkets such as Ocado, the Co-Op and (from May) Waitrose. The sea salt costs £1.95 for 150g.
The TK Maxx group has taken the brand to the U.S. and Canada, and Natalie is in talks with a chain of 300 supermarkets in China. She has bought a new pump that will transport water directly from the sea to her factory — no van necessary — and production is set to increase to 200kg of salt a day.
‘I had to turn down a lot of business while we were in the early stages as we didn’t have the capacity; it’s exciting that now we do,’ she says. ‘The company is on course to turn over £250,000 this year.’
The most surprising benefit of growing a business out of the Atlantic Ocean has been watching the impact on her children.
‘Amber loves that I am the boss and get to tell people what to do; you can see her thinking about it,’ says Natalie. ‘They now know they can influence their own destiny and don’t have to join the rat race.
‘I’m the happiest I have ever been in my life. The hard work has more than paid off.’ RIFAT JAN, 43, founder of Fill n Squeeze, lives in North London with her children Zara, six, and Sofia, four. THINGS came to a head at the supermarket checkout, during a particularly fraught shopping trip in Maidenhead, Berkshire.
Zara, Rifat Jan’s then ten-monthold daughter, had screamed her way around the aisles before suddenly falling silent.
At the till, Rifat saw why. Zara had grabbed, opened and eaten baby food pouches from a shelf. At that time, Zara was going through a phase of being off Rifat’s home-cooked food.
Handing over £1.35 for each tiny pouch, she thought there had to be a better way to get fresh, healthy food into her child at such a crucial age.
‘I’ve always been passionate about healthy eating,’ she says. ‘It broke my heart when Zara became a fussy eater because she was losing weight and I worried she wasn’t getting enough nutrition.’
Later that day, she played a trick. ‘I cut the end off a food pouch, emptied it and filled it with home-cooked food. I placed a clip at the end of the pouch and handed it back to her. The cheeky little monkey ate it all.’
THE seed was sown for a new baby-feeding product, but Rifat initially lacked the self-belief to turn her idea into a reality.
‘Then Sofia was born and I had developed complete baby-brain. My confidence dipped and I decided to park the idea for the time being.’
Things changed two years later after Rifat went to work as a part-time consultant for a retail project, overseeing a new product launch. ‘I finished the job and returned home full of energy and ideas. It gave me the push to finally act on my own,’ she says.
In between trips to the nursery, Rifat honed the design for a refillable, squeezable food pouch, wrote a business plan and found a local factory to build a prototype.
‘I wanted the product to be made in the UK. I knew I needed to be near home to read nursery rhymes, not
flying to China.’ She called it Fill n Squeeze and invited friends and mothers’ groups over to test it.
‘They thought it was amazing,’ she says. ‘Children ate whatever was inside. Everything was reusable, freezable, portable and machine-washable.’
Buoyed by her testers’ verdicts, Rifat approached retailers. Nobody had seen anything like it, and Jojo Maman Bebe and Amazon made orders on the spot.
‘I hadn’t even gone into production yet, so the clock was ticking.’
Rifat borrowed £ 15,000 from family members and was awarded a £ 11,000 government grant. In February 2013 she sold her first Fill n Squeeze.
‘It was really hard juggling the business with two children under four. They would be screaming and I’d have to run to the bathroom to make phone calls. They were in nursery for 15 hours a week, during which time I would work like mad.’
Eight months after launching, Rifat another suffered a setback. Her marriage to William, 52, an IT manager broke down. She moved out and the couple divorced. The change galvanised her into redoubling her efforts with the business.
‘I knew I had to make a success of it for my children,’ she says.
Rifat met with new retailers and learned to survive on four hours’ sleep a night. ‘It’s amazing how the body adapts,’ she says. I would work until 3am to meet deadlines and had no social life whatsoever.’
The juggling got harder, especially when either Zara or Sofia got sick.
‘There was an awful moment when I got a call from the nursery to say that Zara had chicken pox. I rushed back from a trade show and put everything on hold for a week to look after her.’
The hard work paid off. Rifat has sold more than 500,000 Fill n Squeeze products. They are sold in 20 countries from the UK and U.S. to Scandinavia, Taiwan, Poland, China and Chile, and any money that has been made has been ploughed back into the business.
Mothercare, John Lewis, Kiddicare, Amazon, Argos, Tesco Direct and Boots are stockists and the company is on course to see its turnover tip £500,000 this year.
‘My dream is to turn over £1 million, and it could be a reality in just over a year,’ says Rifat. She is now expanding. A new design with a spoon attached to the pouch is launching, as is a cookbook, an adult range and a collaboration with Disney.
Rifat has been in talks with the NHS, too, which is interested in using the product on wards.
What next? Rifat smiles. ‘I’d like Kate Middleton to pick up a pouch for George and her new baby.’