"I didn't set out to build a brand. I set out to stop my daughter crying at bath time."

The Story When my youngest daughter Bella arrived in 2008 with serious eczema, the doctor's solution was steroid cream and chemical-laden emollients that smelled of old grannies. I thought: surely we can do better than this. So I started researching, experimenting, and eventually formulating my own solution at the kitchen table.

When Bella had her first bath using what I'd made and said "It's not ow-ee, Mummy" — I knew two things simultaneously. That I'd found something that worked. And that other children needed it too.

That was the beginning of Childs Farm.

The Build It wasn't straightforward. I was a single mother going through a divorce, living on credit cards, with two small daughters and an unshakeable belief in a product that didn't yet exist in any shop.

I'd spent my career in investment banking — in Asia and the UK — so I understood numbers, markets and how to make a case. What I didn't know was retail, manufacturing, logistics, or how to get a buyer at Boots to take my call. I learned all of it. Fast.

We launched into Waitrose and Boots in 2014. By 2019, Childs Farm was the UK's No.1 brand in the baby and child toiletries category — outselling a 150-year-old market giant. In 2022, I sold the business to PZ Cussons, delivering a 17x return for my investors and building a brand that now reaches over 10 million customers across the globe.

It began with one little girl's sore skin. It became something rather extraordinary.

The Background Before Childs Farm, I spent over a decade in investment banking — at UBS, Paribas, and WI Carr  Hong Kong — building deep expertise in financial markets, client relationships and analytical rigour. That background never left me. It shaped how I read a P&L, how I assess risk, and how I think about the difference between a good idea and a viable business.

My grandmother founded hotels and restaurants on the South Coast in the 1930s and dealt in antiques internationally into her seventies. Entrepreneurship, it turns out, ran in the family.

Now These days I chair the EIS Association — working with HM Treasury on policy that supports the country's founders and investors. I sit on boards. I mentor entrepreneurs at Imperial College. I back female-founded businesses as an angel investor. I write for The Sunday Times. I speak at conferences, universities and events across the country. I talk on TV and Radio about business and what it needs to be better.

And I've written it all down — in two books that I hope will save other founders the six months it took me to learn things I can now explain in six minutes.

I'm a mother of two daughters, Mimi and Bella. I live in Marlborough, Wiltshire, with my husband Jonathan, two dogs, two and a half horses and a cat. I love food, sport, travel — and I am still, on occasion, surprised by what a business can become when someone refuses to let go of an idea.