Elliot Moss
Welcome to a brand new season of Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues and to kick off this season, we have a Jazz Shapers Encore, welcoming back a past Jazz Shaper, Emily Bendell, Founder and CEO of lingerie brand Bluebella. She last joined me 2012. Whilst studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, it was a summer job that gave Emily a spark for a future business. She spotted a gap in the lingerie market for a brand offering inexpensive but high quality pieces, a brand that would empower women rather than have women dress up for someone else. After a brief stint as a legal journalist Emily decided to follow her passion. Aged 24, she left her job, moved back home with her father and designed a small lingerie collection, before launching Bluebella in 2006. On a mission to redefine sensuality, Bluebella have since expanded their range to include swimwear and nightwear and now sell internationally, buoyed by a million pound crowdfunding initiative for US expansion. Emily joins me in a few minutes to talk about all of this and her successful campaign for the Garrick Club in London to allow female members for the first time in its 193 year history. Yes, you heard me right. With age comes wisdom, right, I mean here we are twelve more years into your business.
Emily Bendell
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
What have you learned Emily?
Emily Bendell
Oh my goodness, what have I learned in the last twelve years?
Elliot Moss
Give me one thing.
Emily Bendell
I’ve made loads of mistakes, as is natural I think in this process. I mean, what have I learned? I would say I think the biggest lesson which I probably knew academically but you know, now I know with real sort of brute experience is that the team is key, you know, getting the right people, having the right people around you, you know, there’s nothing more important than that in growing a business.
Elliot Moss
And your role in this team because obviously again back in 2012 it was a small team. I don’t know how many people you had, probably ten or so, but now how many people are in this team?
Emily Bendell
I think we’re now at 45 or something like that, mid-forty, yeah, edging towards 50.
Elliot Moss
And your role, your role as the older entrepreneur. Still incredibly young, I mean you set this business up when you were 24, if my stats are right, and here we are a few years later, eighteen years later or something, so you must be above 40, he says, hedging. How has your role changed?
Emily Bendell
I’ve done pretty much every role in the business over time, you know, when I first started, I was doing everything from sort of packing the orders, making the sales, the collection, the whole thing and then gradually as it’s grown, people have come in and I would say, you know, there’s been a shift change in my role, probably in the last three years because I’ve got a really good senior leadership team. I had a COO join who is very experienced and so I’ve been able to pull back a bit from sort of that real day to day to work a bit more on, you know, the business development or thinking about brand etc so, I mean I think my role is still quite split between creative and the business side, which I’m happy about because that’s what I, I love about what I do so I still love the product side, the brand, the marketing shoots, all, the ideas for what we’re going to do this year, what are we going to do to kind of tell our story and get that mission across and that’s the most sort of motivating and exciting thing for me because, you know, beyond selling knickers, I love sharing our view of the world with our young female audience, that’s what really motivates me. But then, you know, I did and economics degree, I like the numbers, I like the business side as well, so I still get to do, I get to flex both sides, which I still enjoy but it has changed a lot and as it’s grown internationally, you know, there’s very different approach, you know the US for us is our key market now so that, that’s also sort of thinking a bit differently, so yeah, it’s certainly, it’s certainly evolved but I think because I’ve done all the bits myself as well, that kind of, you know, I have this understanding and you know, experience in all the pain points of what everyone else is doing now.
Elliot Moss
You’d be really annoying because you’re going to say, “But ah, but, hold on, there might be a better way of doing that”. I mean that must be something you have to resist, I imagine.
Emily Bendell
Do you know what, what you want is people that are just way better than you at the things they do and that’s what we’ve got, so I wouldn’t got in and attempt to tell somebody who’s you know a far better merchandiser or you know a far better you know social media expert or whatever, so I don’t you know, I don’t claim to have better expertise than my team in their field but what I do know is I live and breathe the brand inside out so that’s the bit that you know I hold really close.
Elliot Moss
And has the story changed in your head, the birth story as it were? You know, we look back at when our children are born, if we have kids, and we look back and when our businesses are born. Do you tell a different story now about what it was all about or is it actually a doubling down on the same reason why you set this business up?
Emily Bendell
I think the heart is the same. I think it’s, you know, it’s definitely evolved, as I’ve evolved, you know, I think when I look back at my journey, I, particularly as a female leader, you know I think back to some of those early days and I think I had probably absorbed some patriarchal attitudes in business about what does leadership look like, what does business look like etc., and I think over time, you know I have evolved to be much more true to myself and my leadership style and so on and I think there’s probably a number of things that have evolved in the business I think positively. You know it’s a real problem we’ve got that most, you know I know you’ve had Sahar, the founder of Buy Women Built, on this, you know, really, we’ve got an issue that most young women or you know, girls, teenagers, they don’t have any reference points of female entrepreneurs, they can’t name any female entrepreneurs, they don’t have these examples of female leadership and it’s important that we normalise different styles of leadership, you know, my style is very collaborative, it’s you know perhaps different to that traditional sort of patriarchal, you know sort of decision making, strong, you know, and that that’s actually not how I lead the business and I think there’s a lot of things that have evolved over time but I would say positively.
Elliot Moss
The ‘Who’s it for’ question, which I think is central to your thesis as it were of I’m going to create a lingerie business and it’s going to be for women, not for men, who want to objectivise women and what women should do. How’s that going?
Emily Bendell
Yeah, I think that, that’s absolutely how it started so I, I started the business because I’ve always loved lingerie, you know, and for me lingerie should be just like any other fashion purchase, you know, so we might buy a handbag or shoes because it reflects our style, it makes us feel good and yet lingerie is always sat in this really weird space that you know oh it’s not for you, it’s for someone to look at on you and that’s really problematic if we’re telling young girls that this thing that they wear closest to their skin is not for them, it’s for someone else because then what does that, what does that tell them about their bodies? So that’s the really sort of important message at the heart of it. In terms of how it’s going, you know, I think we’re making progress but you know even now, as you say I’m, you know, no longer in my twenties, you know if I go to a party for example, I meet, you know, meet some new people and I tell them what I do, honestly, so often I get a response which is along the lines of “oh you have a lingerie brand, oh well you know I’ve been married for twenty years, I haven’t bought any lingerie” or “I don’t have a boyfriend right now so I’m not buying lingerie” and these are educated, empowered women and yet even they still have this view of lingerie as something they’re buying for someone else, for their partner, not for themselves. So, I think there’s still an awful long way to go, you know my whole kind of ethos that I’m trying to share is the bra is just like any other fashion item, it’s like a t-shirt, you know, a t-shirt is not inherently anything, it could be dressy, it could be a layering piece, it could, you know it depends how you wear it and a bra is the same, it might be styled up as outer wear, it might be sexy, it might be comfy and cosy, it can be lots of different things and it is just a fashion item and we have to take this patriarchal lens away from it. So, that’s what we’re trying to, through all our campaigns and all our messaging to promote but you know I think there’s still quite a long way to go.
Elliot Moss
And obviously on the funding thing and every time I have a female founder on the programme, there’s a question about the percentage of money that comes from venture capital, that comes from people that back, angels that back female led businesses, still terrible and your experience, no different.
Emily Bendell
Yeah, I mean the stats, I find them so baffling, right, because all the data suggests that actually female founders deliver a better return to investors and yet, you know, it’s about 1% of VC funding goes to female founders, which is, you know, it’s scandalous that the stats are so bad. I mean my experience, it was sort of double-edged, I found that the fact that my product was you know not only is it a female founded business but the product is aimed at women as well and so for the early rounds of investment, which is with the business angel community, which is predominantly male, what I would find is you know if an investor has made his money say in biotech, he’ll be investing biotech, he’s made his money in health, you know, he’ll invest in what he know, which is completely understandable but the problem is when the majority of that community are male that when you have a business focussed on women, whether it’s fashion or women’s health or whatever, there is no inherent understanding of that and so it’s much harder to get investors to understand what you’re doing and to invest in it, so that was quite challenging so, you know the, I eventually found some wonderful investors, including some female investors but it was hard in those early days to raise.
Elliot Moss
But no easy fix on that either.
Emily Bendell
I mean we need to get more women into angel investing. There’s a number of campaigns around that, there’s some great tax breaks associated with it, women now control about half the wealth but they’re not for whatever reason angel investing, so that’s part of it. You know, it’s a very complex problem in the VC community because originally people trying to get more women into VCs so that women are more likely to fund women but actually there’s some interesting data coming out of Harvard that shows actually, if a woman invests in a woman, at the second round of funding male investors discount the credibility of the investment because it’s women to women. There’s so many layers of unconscious bias around this that it’s complicated and needs a lot of focus and a lot of work and I think the male, this is a problem for all of us, a male investment and VC community, as well as women need to really focus on it.
Elliot Moss
I was going to say it sounds like you need a bunch of allies that happen to be called men.
Emily Bendell
Yes, exactly.
Elliot Moss
And that will be the next obvious step. Much more coming up from my guest, Emily Bendell, she’s back in a couple of minutes. But right now let’s hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Emily Knight talks to Charlotte Yonge, a fund manager at Troy Asset Management about why women historically invest less than men and what’s being done to change it. Let’s hope this is helpful.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you choose to, you just have to pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Emily Bendell, Founder and CEO of lingerie brand, Bluebella. We’ve talked a lot about the patriarch and your beliefs and I think I’ve read somewhere you’ve said, “sometimes it’s tricky because my beliefs that I have may not be the best option commercially”. There’s this kind of juxtaposition between what is right in society to fix and how that actually plays into the numbers. Where’s this strong belief Emily come from because again I meet lots of people who do what you do and there is inevitably a spectrum and some people just say, “it’s the economics, I’m just interested in the numbers” and some people have a different view. You have a different view which says “no, no, this business I have can play a bigger role.” Where do you think that started?
Emily Bendell
I don’t know where it started. I think I wouldn’t be able to stay so passionate and so engaged in what I do if it was a purely commercial enterprise, you know that’s no judgement on you know people that do that, that’s, that’s up to them but for me, you know, I think we sit at a kind of interesting place culturally because lingerie is a very emotive space, you know, it’s about, you know physicality, sexuality, sensuality, gender, there’s all these interesting themes and conversations around it and so I think it’s an important place to sit to put out the right kind of messages and as you say, they’re often not commercial, you know on Instagram we lose thousands of followers over some of the things we post, you know, I’ll give you an example, if we post a girl sort of openly with body hair, you know perfectly natural thing, we lose thousands of followers over that but it’s important to normalise you know women have body hair and if they choose to have body hair, they, we should absolutely accept and normalise that, or you know sometimes we post male looking bodies or nonbinary people in lingerie because my personal view is it’s really important we celebrate the femininity in men as part of seeking equality and an equal playing field for men and women but people find that very upsetting and offensive and we, we will lose thousands of followers from that as well so, you know we’re, I have to kind of grapple with, obviously I have a responsibility to my investors and growing the business and all those things but equally, we think it’s important and I believe it’s important to share our view of the world, try and normalise different body types, celebrate different types of bodies in lingerie to help normalise that.
Elliot Moss
And that difference, do you think that embracing of difference and you call it, I think you call it ‘diverse beauty’ and celebrating diverse beauty, is that, is that a mum and dad brought me up to kind of you know embrace the world thing or is that just an Emily thing?
Emily Bendell
I think so, I’m half Danish, my mum was Danish and I think she gave me a real gift in that, which is probably sort of typically Scandinavian, in that I grew up very comfortable with my body, with my sensuality, I didn’t have a lot of the issues, hang-ups, concerns that so many women have to grow up with and have to endure and so I think if I can help women see themselves reflected in diverse images of beauty then that’s something perhaps a little something I can pass on from the positive experience I’ve had from my own mum.
Elliot Moss
And when you set the business up did your dad get it? Did he get that there was a bit of that in you saying, “You know what, I’m, I am who I am, we’re here because of mum to a point and the way I was brought up so, not only is there a business in this dad but I’ve got something to say.” Do you think he took on all that or do you think that’s years later? Because I know he was a key investor wasn’t he at the beginning.
Emily Bendell
He was, he’s been really supportive, he was my first investor, he remains really supportive. I mean my dad is somewhat eccentric and perhaps a little non-conformist so I think he enjoys seeing me challenged laws.
Elliot Moss
He enjoys telling people that his daughter is running a lingerie business and she’s saying all these things, I guess.
Emily Bendell
I think he just enjoys, yeah, and he, I guess from him I got not having to live within, not being scared to push against norms, to be non-conformist in certain ways, that’s certainly something that I’ve got from him.
Elliot Moss
Non-conformity is a good thing, Emily, lucky because that’s why you’re here. Talking of things that are conformed for 193 years, let’s talk about the Garrick Club and how you got involved in that. So, important businesswoman, entrepreneur, founder obviously for change and for equality between men and women gets involved in the Garrick Club. Explain.
Emily Bendell
So, basically it was quite random, I came across the Garrick, I was looking at private members clubs, my offices east so I sometimes need to do meetings more centrally so I was sort of looking at what clubs were out there and I came across the Garrick, I had never heard of it before to be honest and then I noted it was a male only members club and that piqued my interest and a quick Google search revealed that this club had had this staunch no women policy, as you say for hundreds of years, and actually it was a club highly dominated particularly by the legal profession so, you know, The Lawyer magazine estimated that a majority of High Court judges were members, it was quite well known as a networking space for the legal community. It’s particularly important I think for the legal profession to have good representation and actually very few women have reached the top of that profession you know although half of solicitors at a junior level are women, at senior level that’s absolutely not the case and the few women that have reached the top had spoken quite openly about the Garrick being problematic so you know Lady Hale and Diana Rose and so on. So this really piqued my interest and I thought well how on earth is this still the case, I couldn’t believe that this club still existed with this controversy around it so quite naively I thought I would jump in and shine a bit of a light on it and I thought oh if I shine a little light on it, everyone will be terribly embarrassed and they’ll immediately change the rule and that will be that. Which was very, very…
Elliot Moss
Didn’t quite happen like that did it.
Emily Bendell
Very naïve of me so you know initially I did a legal challenge under the Equality Act and what I learned from that, it was an absolute media storm and what to me was very obvious was problematic, was not obvious to everybody and it really highlighted to me that actually my little bubble of people who are closer aligned to my opinions, when you actually looked more broadly, a lot of people were not aligned and so that’s how it all began.
Elliot Moss
And it ended well. And they changed the rule.
Emily Bendell
Yeah so I was campaigning for initially the first round was quite depressing because all the coverage focussed on me and it wasn’t meant to be about me, it was this juxtaposition of me as a female entrepreneur and these older Garrick Club members, I think the headline in The Times was “Bra queen’s rising passion” which was great and so what I did then was I realised I needed to kind of keep me personally out of it so I went out created a petition explaining why the club was problematic and 130 cases signed that petition and a number of other legal professionals that helped sort of get the right message across. We did another round, pulled in some MPs, we had an Early Day Motion in Parliament, Cheri Blair joined the campaign explaining why the club was problematic so, I campaigned for four years I think it was from beginning to end and gradually the cultural norms were moving, people were starting to understand why it was problematic. Amilia Gentleman at The Guardian was also doing some really great work and eventually she actually published a members list which was so professionally embarrassing to those involved that that sparked finally a vote. It was a little bit depressing how it ended in a sense it that what I hoped was that the Garrick members themselves would realise why it was problematic but the two-thirds majority required would happen to change the rule there, never quite got there and actually they managed to change the rule based on some legal technicality that only needed a 50% vote but anyway, it got there.
Elliot Moss
It got there.
Emily Bendell
It got there.
Elliot Moss
And it, and very briefly, what did it teach you about change?
Emily Bendell
That culture is key and that’s what feeds into my work at Bluebella because you can have all the, you know there’s the you know the laws and there’s the rule books and so on but if you have cultural support, you need the culture to support and understand what you’re doing and that takes lots of little things and that’s why I carried on with the Garrick because I believed the path to equality is paved with a thousand small battles and so we need to fight each and every one to move the dial.
Elliot Moss
Final chat coming up with my guest today, Emily Bendell and we’ve got a classic from Antonio Adolfo, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Emily Bendell is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes in this Encore Special in 2024, twelve years on, drum roll, since the last one. I’ve mentioned progress a little bit and we’ve talked about that and the evolution. How good do you feel about where things are at now? Not just personally but professionally. Are you positive about the next twelve years if we were to catch up then?
Emily Bendell
Yeah I mean I’m still really excited about what we’re doing at Bluebella and where we’re going. It’s really interesting going into the US market and understanding that and sharing.
Elliot Moss
Big though, I mean there’s a lot there.
Emily Bendell
There’s a lot of people there, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Have you focussed in one particular area to see how it’s going to land?
Emily Bendell
I mean we’re predominantly sort of east and west coast, yeah, so sort of New York and LA is our biggest customer base but that’s really interesting understanding that market, the women there, how we can speak to that and looking at you know we’re growing in Europe and other places too and we’re developing the product and the categories, I think you mentioned earlier that we’ve added swim, I love swimwear so that’s been really exciting for me and we’ve got a lot of exciting plans in the pipeline so, so yeah, I’m really, still really enjoying it and still feel that there’s a lot more to do.
Elliot Moss
Are you much more at home in yourself as it were in terms of being a leader who happens to be a woman in the world of business? Has that become just who you are?
Emily Bendell
A 100% and I think I’ve been able to hopefully take my experience and then project that, you know, with the rest of the company, I mean I, I think back to when I was pregnant with my first child and, and I almost apologised to my Board about it and that is no reflection of my Board who are wonderful and supportive, it was all my own absorbed issues around what I thought that I should be apologetic about that and so on, so I think I’ve really now become very sort of comfortable in my own female leadership style and hopefully can, can do some good by sharing that with others.
Elliot Moss
And the confidence thing, do you think just, is this a matter of time and age or is it something else? Is it about having made a tonne of mistakes and kind of it doesn’t matter? What do you think’s really driving the sense of being more comfortable with yourself?
Emily Bendell
I think that I’m always really honest with people when I speak to young founders etcetera that the entrepreneurial journey is one of making loads of mistakes. The key thing is to learn from them, to pick yourself up and get on with it so I think…
Elliot Moss
Easier said than done though Emily.
Emily Bendell
Maybe but it’s, I think by understanding that the mistakes are part of the journey that helps you not dwell on them but, but get up and learn from them. Tenacity is the most important quality I think you need to do, to do this job so I think there’s confidence from understanding that you can do things wrong but then grow stronger from that, there’s confidence I guess in you know having grown a profitable and growing business and having confidence in my decisions but also admitting when I get it wrong and you know saying to me team you know I’m quite open if I think I’ve got something wrong as well, I think there’s power in that. So, I think take me own experience, you know, having a family and, and the importance of having a balance with your work and family life, being quite open about sharing that, I think these are all strengths that people should feel are strengths and not things to be covered up or weaknesses, mistakes, family life, it’s, we all have to manage those things and I think it’s a much healthier environment if we can all be much more honest about that.
Elliot Moss
Strong is beautiful.
Emily Bendell
It is.
Elliot Moss
And good luck. Listen, it’s been fabulous catching up with you and really, really good luck and it may well be twelve years but maybe it will be sooner but looking forward to watching your business grow and you grow because it’s, it’s been great, been great seeing that too just today.
Emily Bendell
Well thank you for having me back.
Elliot Moss
Absolute pleasure. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Emily Bendell
My song choice is Ruby, My Dear by Thelonious Monk. My dad, who is a big jazz fan - I was dragged to jazz festivals throughout my childhood - is a fan of Thelonious Monk and so am I and so this is why I’ve chosen this track.
Elliot Moss
Thelonious Monk with Ruby, My Dear, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Emily Bendell. She talked about team, “Find people way better than you.” In terms of change, she said “culture is key” and she’s absolutely right. “Mistakes are just part of the journey”, that’s how you’ve got to view them and above all, above everything else, tenacity is the most important quality that a founder can have. Absolutely great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.