Eco entrepreneur Abigail Forsyth

ABIGAIL FORSYTH, 46, is the managing director of KEEPCUP, which makes reusable coffee cups. Born in Glasgow, she now lives in Melbourne with her husband and three children.

GROWING up, I would often go to Dad’s office after school before we’d drive home together. That led to my first foray into business — his IT company was in a row of factories, so when I was 11, I made sandwiches and sold them there to buy myself rollerskates. My poor mum had to drive me down every day, but I got the skates.

Later, I trained to be a lawyer and joined a small firm in Melbourne — my dad is Scottish and we’d moved to Australia, where my mum is from, when I was little. My brother, Jamie, had moved back to the UK and called me every week with a new business idea.

One day, he said we should start a line of coffee shops — he’d seen Pret a Manger take off in London. I thought, why not? So we did it, setting up a chain of cafes in 1998. I’d go to work and enjoy coffee in a throwaway cup.

In 2005, I had my first child, Bess. When she was a toddler, I was watching her drink warm milk from her sippy cup and a thought struck me: I’d never dream of letting her drink from a cup that was used only once then thrown away, so why did I?

That was my call-to-action. I decided to design reusable cups for grown-ups to combat the waste created by disposable ones.

The cups available didn’t fit coffee machines, so we came up with one that a barista could use and tweaked it until it worked.

When I set up KeepCup nine years ago, it was just me and my brother, but we sold more than 350,000 cups in our first six months. Now, we have a factory making our cups in the UK and are stocked in John Lewis, Debenhams and Selfridges.

uk.keepcup.com