‘We’re chalk and cheese but we’re stronger working together’
Kiera Lawlor-skillen, 31, and wife Aimie, 33, run a successful business in Manchester. Having a relationship rooted in friendship helps them through challenging times at work.
Two weeks after opening our business, Feel Good Club, in the heart of Manchester in 2020, the country went into a second lockdown. It was a worrying time because my wife Aimie and I had both quit good jobs, we were too new to operate a furlough scheme and we had no other income.
But living and working together meant we could use those nine months of lockdown to plan ahead and get organised for our reopening. Things really took off for us and that’s all down to living and breathing the business together.
I started Feel Good Club in 2014 after developing an eating disorder at 18 and suffering depression and anxiety in my twenties. The Instagram profile gave me a platform to sell some candles I’d made and to post positive messages to help anyone else struggling with their mental health.
For years Aimie and I had talked about developing the business into a physical safe space with a coffee bar and club. We made a decision that we’d go for it if we managed to get 10,000 followers on Instagram, which we quickly exceeded.
Our friends thought we were mad to quit our jobs to run a business. It was a steep learning curve, but we were never worried about working together. We got together at university 13 years ago and married four years ago.
As well as having a loving relationship we have a really great friendship. We know each other inside out and love spending all our time with one another.
Aimie is super organised and good at budgeting, so she took on the financial side of the business. Having worked for a marketing agency and managed a team, I looked after the people side.
What was difficult in the early days was separating work from home life. We were devoting all our time and energy to the business and stopped going out with friends at weekends. In the evenings there were Instagram messages to respond to and social media channels to update.
We quickly worked out that communication is key for us. Aimie is a worrier, while I’m a risk taker, but as long as we talk to each other we can tackle any issues. We rarely argue and working together has strengthened our relationship.
The business is doing really well. We run open mic nights and spoken-word events and sell branded clothing with positive messaging.
We’ve even written our own book, A Guide To Feeling Good
‘We love sharing all our time with one another’
And Being Okay With It When You’re Not. We’ve got big plans for the future and would like to open more venues.
With aimie at my side I think we can achieve anything. Aimie says: “I genuinely love working with Kiera. It feels so special helping others, and normalising the conversation around feelings, with someone I love and share my life with. We’re chalk and cheese when it comes to how we do business, but it’s all about learning to communicate.”
Check out the business at feelgoodclub.co. Feel Good Club: A Guide To Feeling Good And Being Okay With It When You’re Not by Aimie and Kiera Lawlor-skillen (Harpercollins, £9.99) is out now