‘Women need to have each other’s backs’
Entrepreneur Emma Sayle on why she’s branching out from Killing Kittens sex parties to mentoring.
Emma Sayle has no time for women who complain about not getting enough opportunities in business. The 41-yearold serial entrepreneur, whose portfolio has been valued at £10million, is loathe to blame sexism for the lack of investment into female-owned businesses.
“It’s kind of victim chat,” she says. “Rather than going, ‘We’re not getting funding because we’re women’, a lot of the time you’re not getting funding because you haven’t actually done what’s meant to be done.”
The Telegraph’s Women Mean Business campaign has highlighted some of the difficulties women in this position can face, including discrimination from male funders, which a Government review agreed was a legitimate issue in Britain today. Sayle thinks women need to support each other more to combat any challenges. “Women need to have each others’ backs,” she says.
“I still hear from girlfriends that it’s not male bosses that are the problem a lot of the time, it’s female bosses and colleagues. I think that needs to change.”
Her solution is Sistr, the mentoring platform she launched in June that enables women in business to gain access to a network of female experts across a range of industries and skills, to help them develop their companies. Events range from social get-togethers and panel discussions with female founders, to workshops for women keen to find investment for their start-ups.
Sayle has built her own network the hard way, growing Killing Kittens – her flagship business that specialises in sex parties focused on the pursuit of female pleasure – slowly over time.
The parties now operate in nine different countries, and Sayle’s business,
The KK Group, employs 14 full-time members of staff and has an annual turnover of £1.5million. Killing Kittens’ success has grown hand-in-hand with the public makeover of female sexuality.
It is not that women’s desires have drastically changed, but their expression has become more acceptable; their existence absorbed into mainstream conversation and no longer relegated to the realms of the seedy and unsayable.
“It’s unbelievable how it’s changed,” says Sayle. “I knew it was coming and I knew there was a need… When suddenly the Metoo movement went, I was like, ‘This is our moment, this is what I’ve been waiting for to go mainstream.’
“Because when women start taking control, it’s [in] all aspects of their lives, from sexuality through to business. And that’s exactly what’s happened in the last three years.”
It’s not only Metoo that lies behind the most recent sexual revolution. Sayle points to the television series Sex and the City, which introduced vibrators to a huge audience of women.
“It opened the conversation up,” she says.
Ann Summers, the sex toy chain, has outlets across the UK and EL James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, released in 2011, became a bestseller. More recently, the body positivity movement has chipped away at the shame some women feel about their naked figure.
All this has helped to create a culture in which “women can talk openly and discuss their sex lives without judgment,” says Sayle, who lives in the Surrey village of Laleham with her husband James Tindall, a former Olympic hockey player, and their three children under six.
Today, we’re sitting in her company’s quirky offices in Southwark, south London, and from the way she talks – confidently, and at great speed – I can picture the nononsense efficiency with which she almost certainly operates.
But judgment has featured prominently in her business journey, which began after she walked away from a career in the City. A selfdescribed “Army brat” whose father served with the Welsh Guards, Sayle’s childhood was split between a girls’ boarding school in Britain and the Middle East. After graduating from Birmingham University with a degree in sports science, she entered the City, but “had a few harassment issues”. It was, she says, “nothing massive, but completely inappropriate and made me complain”.
She continues:
“I got told I’d be a troublemaker if I complained and probably wouldn’t get a job working in the City again. I was 21 or 22 and I left, angry and upset.”
She established herself as a freelance PR and worked on the publicity for an erotica show, “which got me into that adult world”. It was, at the time, a very maledominated sphere, she says.
She decided to strike out in it on her own. While attending a friend’s wedding in Ibiza and fuelled by three sleepless nights, she chose her brand’s distinctive name and set up a website where people could register their interest. The reception was mixed. “Ninety per cent of the people around me told me I was completely crazy for doing it and that I was disgusting and seedy,” she recalls. “But the more people do that to me, the more I’m very much, ‘Watch me, I’m going to prove you wrong.’”
She still receives raised eyebrows and “quite fired-up abuse” from “Alpha men” in their 50s and 60s who “feel threatened”. But with other demographics it’s quite different now.
“The younger girls [who sign up to Killing Kittens] have this sexual fluidity where one night they like guys, one night [girls] and there’s no judgment,” she says.
Older women are also on board, becoming members in their 40s or 50s, sometimes post-divorce.
“There’s a lot who have come out of a long marriage or been in controlling relationships, who have had a couple of kids but sort of lost themselves, who suddenly go, ‘Right, we’re reclaiming our identity now,’” says Sayle.
Grandmothers have also been supportive. “I have grannies come up and go, ‘High five, I wish we had that when we were younger,’” she smiles.
The idea of sisterhood has been a leitmotif in Sayle’s career. Around the same time she launched Killing Kittens, she also launched The Sisterhood – a group for women to participate in “crazy sports events all over the world” and raise money for women and children’s charities. (“I think we’ve raised nearly £1million to date.”)
In 2007, a single Kate Middleton, who had been five years below Sayle at school, was briefly involved. She was acquainted with Sayle through mutual friends and, during a temporary separation from her then-boyfriend Prince William, signed up to take part in a crosschannel boat race.
“She was involved for about three months, but then dropped out a week before the race [reports from the time suggest it was more than two weeks before] and got back together with William,” says Sayle. “I said to her, ‘Have you really thought about dropping out?’ Because… she was doing something really cool and hardcore and off her own bat, for charity, and dropping out the week before was not a good look. I said what I would have said to anyone who had dropped out: ‘Come on, you’ve got to do it, for you.’ I was disappointed for her.”
Kate’s decision, said to have
‘It’s not that female desires have changed. Their expression has become acceptable’
‘Kate Middleton isn’t a friend... we’re in completely different parallel universes’
been prompted by royal advisers’ concerns about the publicity and possible security fears for fellow crew mates, was not without consequence.
“It did cause a complete media s---storm the week of our race, which sent lots of my hairs grey and stressed me out,” says Sayle. “We were still trying to get permission to cross the Channel properly on the security side, so the last thing I needed was this extra attention.”
Is she still friends with the Duchess? “No, because we’re in completely different, parallel universes really. There are mutual friends.”
Sayle, who last year launched an app called Safedate for women going online dating to check in with family and friends, is happy to see that the business world is becoming more accepting of women’s place within it. No longer must women act tough and macho to fit in, says Sayle.
“A lot of women [were] being pushed into, ‘If you want to fit in, you’ve got to behave like a man,’ and what I’m seeing now is, ‘Actually, we’re women and we need to behave like women. This is who we are and this is how we work…’
“I’ve seen that kind of reclaiming [of ] our femininity a lot more… Less of women climbing over other women and stabbing them in the back, and more of the sisterhood happening.”