- Kelli Aspland, from Wales, received the Daily Mail’s Aphrodite Award last week
- She founded a children’s sunscreen applicator business with Laura Waters
- Mother-of-four, 41, revealed challenges they faced setting up Solar Buddies
- She said being a mum needn’t limit any woman or her search for her dream job
Kelli Aspland’s business success is a lesson in self-belief. And winning the Daily Mail’s Aphrodite Award last week proved to her that ‘hard work and persistence pays off, no matter that other people think you can’t do it’.
At the NatWest Everywoman Awards ceremony, in the company of the UK’s leading female entrepreneurs, Kelli was ‘all over the place’ when she heard her name being called from the stage.
‘I started that afternoon feeling like a fish out of water, surrounded by all these successful women, and you do find yourself thinking, “Well, why am I here?” But everyone was so lovely and made me feel so special that, in the end, I felt perfectly at home. I’ve made some great contacts, too. All these women are so keen to share their stories and help each other.’
A mother of four, Kelli went into business with best friend Laura Waters after spotting a gap in the market for children’s sunscreen applicators. ‘But, if I’m honest, the real problem wasn’t finding out how to do it, but getting other people to take us seriously,’ she says.
Kelli calls herself a ‘very ordinary mum’, but, in fact, she’s faced extraordinary challenges. In what was a remarkably cruel coincidence, two of her children were diagnosed with potentially life-threatening illnesses within the same week in 2002.
Olivia was two-and-a-half when she was diagnosed with leukaemia and Sam was a newborn when a heart condition was discovered, which required constant monitoring and several operations. Kelli was just 23.
‘That week was nightmarish,’ she says. ‘You can’t believe it’s happening to you. In some ways it feels like a million years ago — Olivia is 20 now, almost the age I was then — and it’s hard to remember how I did it.
‘I just couldn’t let it affect me emotionally. I developed a kind of tunnel vision, I suppose. I knew that if I broke at that point, I’d never recover, and what good would that be?’
After more than two years of gruelling treatment, Olivia was effectively cured, while Sam, who’s 17, this year had open heart surgery to repair a valve.
Once the constant worry abated, Kelli decided to become a nurse and began her college training. But life was still exceptionally busy, with four children under the age of 11 and Sam still needing regular medical treatments.
In fact, it was Sam’s ruined school uniform that gave her the spark of a business idea one hot afternoon in 2013. Upon picking up the kids from school, she found the children covered head-to-toe in sun cream.
‘The nursery teacher explained she wasn’t allowed to put sunscreen on my three-year-old, Charlie. As he couldn’t do it himself, she sent for his brother Sam, who was eight.
‘So, of course, it was all over Sam and his uniform. I lost half a bottle of expensive sunscreen, and another child was badly burned because he couldn’t put it on either. There had to be a way for kids to do this.’
Kelli and Laura spent weeks talking over the idea of a refillable sunscreen bottle for children, a creative solution to the mess and waste of kids putting on their own cream, especially at school.
With the help of product designers at Cardiff Metropolitan University, they invented a rollerball applicator with a squishy foam cuff around it to trap mess and to rub in the cream. Perfect for little hands.
Today, Solar Buddies bottles are sold online and in JoJo Maman Bebe, while the business is fast expanding abroad, including Australia and New Zealand.
Yet Kelli, 41, is honest about the challenges of setting up Solar Buddies. ‘We knew nothing about any of it,’ she laughs. ‘How to make a prototype. How to source manufacturers. How to sell it. Nothing!’
The two friends from Monmouthshire, Wales, who have seven children between them, found they had to battle infuriatingly condescending attitudes. ‘Quite a few people humoured us. There was an attitude of, “All right girls, have a go, but we don’t think you’ll get anywhere.” If anything, it made us even more determined to succeed. We weren’t always sure of how to do things, but we always believed we could.
Now the challenge is to raise more money to expand the business. ‘We know where we want to grow, but we’re aware that the investment landscape can be tough,’ admits Kelli.
Time and again, our Mumpreneurs have told us grim tales of pitching to all-male panels at investment firms and finding either they don’t get the idea or don’t think the women are capable of realising it. The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, commissioned by the Treasury, found that, for every £1 invested by UK venture capital firms, less than 1p goes to women founders.
It’s also why women are increasingly turning to female angels instead, or crowdfunding. And here they’re outperforming men. Analysis of major crowdfunding platforms shows that women-led campaigns achieve on average 2.6 times more per individual pledge than those led by men, and are also more likely to reach their finance target.
In the early days of Solar Buddies, Kelli and Laura found their angel in Hayley Parsons, the founder of GoCompare, who’s also from Wales.
‘She loved what we were doing and gave us brilliant advice. Later, she invested in the business herself and helped us get our heads around the finances.’
For Kelli, Solar Buddies was an all-consuming project that meant giving up her fledgling nursing career. ‘That was a hard decision, but, in the end, I had to see where we could take the business. I wanted to do something for myself, and I wanted my family to be proud of me.
‘Being a mum needn’t limit any woman — or her search for her dream job.’
Article Credit: dailymail