Retales: E-Commerce Growth Stories
Welcome to "Retales: Ecommerce Growth Stories," a podcast series that brings you the unique and captivating stories of ecommerce retailers from every corner of the globe.
Each episode delves deep into the journey of different ecommerce entrepreneurs — from scrappy startups to established multinational chains — shedding light on the strategies they deploy to ride economic waves and seize new opportunities.
We feature candid conversations not only with these trailblasing entrepreneurs but also with the venture capitalists who back them, creating a comprehensive picture of the ecommerce landscape.
The entrepreneurs share their stories of innovation, growth, and resilience, while the investors give their insights into what makes an ecommerce business stand out and attract funding.
Every discussion covers topics critical to every ecommerce retailer's success — scaling operations, enhancing customer experience, optimising logistics, leveraging social media, and navigating market fluctuations.
Our guests share their experiences, insights, hard-learned lessons, and personal tactics for achieving success.
Whether you're an ecommerce veteran or just starting your journey, "Retales: Ecommerce Growth Stories" is your passport to understanding the dynamics of ecommerce, transforming modern day challenges into engines for growth.
Join us and draw inspiration, knowledge, and practical strategies from those who have journeyed before you in the exhilarating world of ecommerce.
Retales: E-Commerce Growth Stories
From Taboo to Triumph: How Coco de Mer is Defying Ad Bans, Redefining Luxury and Pioneering Female Pleasure
Imagine believing in the brand you work for with such conviction that you buy it outright 😱
That’s EXACTLY what Coco de Mer’s CEO Lucy Litwack did – and in this week’s episode of Re:tales she tells us why.
⚠️ Spoiler alert: it’s got a lot to do with Lucy’s pioneering belief in female pleasure as a path to empowerment.
In this seriously juicy conversation, Lucy also shares:
- The surprising trends that helped make brands which champion female pleasure more mainstream
- How luxury brands are having to pivot – and offer more emotional, personal experiences
- Her commitment to building a brand with purpose (and her success so far, including recently earning the prestigious Butterfly Mark certification)
- How her team are defying advertising restrictions on products for female pleasure by focusing on offline marketing, including some impressive collaborations
- The challenges of moving away from bricks and mortar to focus on a digital-first strategy (like late paid invoices)
Our host Caroline Baldwin describes Lucy as a force of nature – and she’s not wrong. Get ready to feel inspired…
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Hello everybody and welcome to Retails. I'm Caroline Baldwin and this week I set down with Lucy Litwak. She is the CEO of Coco D'Amir. This is a brand that's built by women, run by women for women. It's just a fantastic conversation. Lucy is a force of nature, so we talked about how there are trends almost outside of your control that can dictate the direction of the industry that you're working in and how you have to be really on your toes to be able to react to those trends. We also talked about the new definition of luxury and how interestingly for a brand that is in the lingerie space and women's pleasure how you have to, by its nature, work more in the offline marketing space and do brand collaborations and partnerships, because quite often the digital marketing side of things just doesn't work for you anymore. So having that chat about offline marketing was really fantastic and this focus on female empowerment and female pleasure. I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Lucy, because I definitely did so. From Bright Pearl. This is Retails.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Retails e-commerce growth stories, where we unveil captivating tales of triumph, hard-earned lessons and the secrets to success in retail and e-commerce. Join us as we sit down with e-commerce titans, disruptive challenger brands and industry experts to explore winning strategies, market and leadership insights, and future-shaping trends and innovations. From AI to venture capital, global expansion to automation these powerful conversations will fuel your growth trajectory. We believe every story contains valuable lessons. Retails is your ultimate destination to uncover them. Now to our host, caroline Baldwin.
Speaker 1:My guest today is Lucy Litwak. She is a well-respected figure in the luxury-launchery industry, and her impressive career has taken her to brands such as Victoria's Secret, la Perle, and she's even worked alongside David Beckham. Since 2014, she has been the owner and CEO of London-based Coco de Mer, a brand dedicated to celebrating women and women's pleasure. Lucy is also a dedicated advocate against female genital mutilation, a mentor at the London College of Fashion and a passionate champion for women's rights. Lucy, welcome to Retails.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here with you.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic to have you. I'm so intrigued about your story, your journey to Coco de Mer. You've worked at some fantastic brands, but let's start the conversation by having a little bit of a chat about the overview of the sector and how it's changed. You've worked in lingerie for over 20 years. What do you think have been some of the most significant ways the industry has changed over that time? I mean?
Speaker 3:yes, it has been a long time, and I think that, in the period of time that I've worked in this industry, I'd say that there's two big things that have really provided a step change and changed things up. The first would have been the 50 Shades of Grey about a decade ago, and then, more recently, would have been the COVID pandemic, and then, I think, alongside that, you've got that sort of thread of sustainability, which has changed the products a lot. But I think, if we think about 50 Shades of Grey initially, you know sort of whatever you think of that, those books, those movies it definitely created a step change in the industry. It was over 10 years ago now, but suddenly people were talking about BDSM in public, they were reading the book on the tube, and it was bringing, you know, hidden desires to the surface, and we noticed it a lot through Coco, particularly in our boutique, because suddenly you'd have these people coming in asking for these you know quite hardcore products and you sort of say, okay, we know you've read about those, but have you thought of maybe taking a step back and starting a little at a little more of a beginner's level? But you know, it meant, though, that people were suddenly open and that was brilliant for us because it almost started normalizing the conversation a little bit, which is brilliant. But then it felt like things stagnated a little bit and then obviously, in 2020, covid hit, and COVID, and specifically those lockdowns, really enabled a lot of self discovery, which led to this industry's kind of natural growth, because, you know, it was absolutely such a challenging few years for so many people.
Speaker 3:But it also highlighted something that I'd always believed, which was the importance of self love and pleasure to a happy life. So you know that we've always felt like that uninhibited exploration of pleasure that we try to deliver at Coquitaine-Mare leads to that self acceptance and brings more confidence, more joy, better health. And you know, covid allowed suddenly there were a lot of people at home with very little to do and it, you know, on the one hand, it was great for you know the sex toy industry globally, because you kind of managed the people that were home alone and bored and then the couples that were home and bored, so you sort of managed to get quite a broad thing, but also it just felt like the pandemic empowered women to prioritise their pleasure and to focus on self care, and it was that, to me that was so important was that, finally, that understanding that female pleasure is female wellness and that pleasure is self care. And I think that now that we're coming out of that period, pleasure and sexual wellness are becoming a much more regular part of self-care.
Speaker 3:And you see it now with sexual wellness sitting within the beauty sector much more. And you know there are brands out there, like Colt Beauty for instance, that have had a sexual wellness section for years, but so many other people are catching up and it is just becoming that normal part of business. So I think that they're the sort of two really big areas that have changed the sector quite dramatically. And then you've got the sustainability sector, which is so important and which you're seeing a lot more. You know people being much more conscientious with lingerie and how that sustainability plays a key role in shifting and improving the design process. So, whether that started with organic materials and moved to recycled fabrics becoming more mainstream and the diversification of shapes and I think even the wellness industry has created that wonderful angle on lingerie whether it's the design of period pants or whether it's adding things like aloe vera or CBD ingredients into fabrics, I think all of this you know will continue to adapt for the industry it's incredible, especially those first two things that you mentioned.
Speaker 1:50 shades of grey, which, first of all, how is that? Over a decade ago, that is a terrifying fact that I've learned today. And COVID, you know these are two, two you know I don't want to liken them because there's about two very different things, but two things that happen completely out of your control you know, you weren't involved in the publishing of the book, you weren't involved in COVID that have come in and completely changed the industry and given your businesses a platform to, you know, really sing. And it's just, I suppose, it's just really interesting that you always have to be beyond your toes in any industry, obviously, but yours in particular, to be able to react, and quickly, you know, react to these, these trends. Lucy, it was a fantastic, fantastic introduction. I'd love to understand what drew you to the industry in the first place as well, and what, what kind of experiences have shaped your way along to Coco de Mer.
Speaker 3:I mean, I actually fell into it by chance and then just couldn't ever leave. So I, you know, I fell into it through my first job after university, which I used to work agency side, and I was working for design and branding agency and one of my clients was a lingerie brand. So they'd come to us for corporate identity, for packaging, and I just fell in love with it from that moment on and then I went to work for them in house and the rest is history. And then 23 years have passed and I'm still in lingerie and I just think for me, I just and I feel like the world is now starting to catch up a little bit with this in that how important I think lingerie is for women and for women's confidence, and nowadays we do see more of that. You know the way that lingerie is almost a way to redefine sexuality on our own terms as women, and that it's, you know, it used to always be thought of as something that you wore for someone else, and actually what I always use to find so amazing is it's literally the one item of clothing that you wear that no one else has to see. You know, anything else you put on, the world just sees it as you walk around, whereas lingerie is actually that one secret item that other people don't have to see. And I think that that is powerful and I feel like lingerie really does give us a power that no one else can see. And I remember talking once I just I loved this story from a surgeon and she said to me you know, whenever I've got a really big sort of life and death surgery, I will always wear my best lingerie under my scrubs and it just gives me that secret power and confidence that I feel like I can do and achieve anything. And I just love that and I I agree with her. I really do think that it really does make a difference. And you know, as we speak to more customers from our stores and the feedback we receive, we've really seen a notable difference and kind of increase in the number of women that are buying lingerie for themselves, as opposed to the kind of the old guy dear that it was sort of men buying for women or whatever. So I really think that it is empowering and it does give you a confidence and as we've seen the industry grow so much from kind of a very functional service, as it used to be to a much more fun, fashionable expression for women, and you know, I think that that is so amazing and it's just great that that is how it's sort of happening.
Speaker 3:And I found that with with coconut, so what you know, I'd obviously worked at so many different brands over the years and when I joined coconut in 2014, it felt different and it felt special and I for me I think that was it was because there seems to be a very big gap between your sort of your comfort, casual product at one end of the market and then what you would consider the more kind of glamorous, sexier I mean I hate the word sexy but that kind of sexier end of the market, and you had that sort of concept of the female gaze very much in the comfort side.
Speaker 3:But as soon as you move to sort of sexier product, it always felt like it moved to the male gaze, whereas the one thing I felt about about coconut and there was that the focus was on women and even though the product was much more glamorous and much more sensuous, it was focused on the female gaze and I really wanted to move and sort of do more about that, which is why, you know, after three years of running the brand. I completed an MBO in 2017 and bought it, and it was just I felt like I really wanted to place that focus back on women, on the importance of female pleasure and the female gaze as a path to empowerment and realizing kind of how intricately linked those, all those, are. And so confidence, female pleasure, empowerment, the female gaze and being able to, you know, representation at the end of the day, you fell in love with the industry so much you literally went and bought this company.
Speaker 1:You know that was such, must have been such a powerful stage in your career as well, and that decision to buy the brand completely makes sense. So now, as owner and CEO of Coco Dima, how do you lead and inspire your team? You know you've got quite. You've got quite a small team. How do you make sure that everyone is on the same page as you are when it comes to this empowering industry that you're working in?
Speaker 3:I think that you know the reason I bought the brand at the end of the day was I was just so passionate about it and I felt like it had always punched above its weight. But it was yet to realize its full potential. And you know it had been considered such a niche brand in the past and as conversations around sexual wellness moved more into the mainstream, it felt like it had the potential to be so much more, to actually be able to be a global luxury brand focused on female pleasure. So I think having that clear vision is really key to keeping things on track and engaging others. You know, at the end of the day, enthusiasm and passion are infectious in all walks of life, so I think that really helps to inspire the team, because, you know, I'm inspired by the brand and I'm inspired by my team every day and you know, hopefully that's that's mutual.
Speaker 3:I think empathy and adaptability are also vital these days and you know, I think because we're a small team, we can be really adaptable, really flexible, we can move quickly if there's something that you know we want to do. And because I own the business 100% myself, I don't have investors and therefore it allows us to really do what we think is right for the brand and to really keep that on track and to know that I can do. You know the charity work that I want to do. I can support women's causes and I can collaborate with other people or brands that I think are right. So for me that's really important and I think that the team appreciate that as well, because it means we can, you know, act really quickly and you know I live and breathe it. I love every part of it and I enjoy every day, even if it is stressful a lot of the time.
Speaker 3:But I think, you know, keeping the company at that small size, having everyone under one roof from the people picking and packing the online orders to the people running wholesale to the designers, you know, to have everyone together creates a really great energy and people really work together. They lean on each other because we are all based in the office, so we don't have people working from home, so that everyone really can collaborate. Because for me, that's the most important thing being able to work as a team and really being able to rely on and support your colleagues. And it means that I, you know, can be involved in every part of the process, which I'm sure has its pros and cons to a lot of people. But you know, it means we can stay focused and be, you know, agile, and I think that that reflects in the work that we do.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about lingerie in the luxury sphere. So Cocodamera is firmly in the luxury end of the fashion market. Your products are absolutely stunning. What makes lingerie different to other luxury brands out there that are not in the lingerie space? You know how do you differ from a Burberry out there? What makes that difference?
Speaker 3:For me, it's probably the intimacy of the products you know, I think they are, you know they're the products that go right against your skin, as I said they can be. You know something that only you are aware of, I think, and you know we are relying on those products to fit us well, to support us and also to feel good. So there's a lot, you know, there's a lot that you need to think about and also I think that you know the way that they are advertised, modeled, showcased, brings a different feel to the market. There has a lot that they sort of stand for. On the other side, you know it's very different to other parts of the fashion market because it's not necessarily seasonal. It's not like it's about coats in winter and so forth. You know it's more about being influenced by seasonal colors and surroundings more than you know the keeping you warm side of things, but at the same time it's also slightly less trend focused as well. So although we have trends and you know you will see things change you know during lockdown there was a much more focus on soft cut bras, for instance, because people were like home more. But I think you know for us it's more customer focused and it's more craft led.
Speaker 3:And I think, generally, you know, luxury is taking on a new definition today, across the board. You know it's no longer just about owning a designer product, it's about, you know, individual, exceptional experiences and that emotional connection. And I think women have quite an emotional connection to their lingerie. But the experiences in general need, you know, they need to be authentic and they need to be unique, they need to be immersive. So I think for us it's not just about offering products, we need to offer those experiences, we need to offer education in order for people to explore their desires and sort of embrace the, the idea and the complexity of pleasure, but in a space that is welcoming and non judgmental and, you know, a little indulgent, which you know luxury is about generally.
Speaker 1:Of course. How does Coco D'Amir itself stand out to compare to your competitors in the market?
Speaker 3:I think it's probably our purpose and together with our message and our designs. So we were the first luxury lingerie brand to respond to the emerging world of luxury within the context of sex and sensuality. So, speaking to that shift in consumer and cultural attitudes, really we've been referred to as pioneers of pleasure in the past and I really love that. I think for 20 years now we've kind of delivered these really luxurious products but at the same time we've harnessed this blend of sort of heritage and pleasure so that within the world of luxury we've been able to carve out a specific reputation. And being a brand with purpose is so important to me and so underpinning all of my goals for Cocoa is that desire to support women's causes and celebrate women. So I think that is sort of a slight difference for us in what is a very crowded market.
Speaker 3:But I think, if you think about it generally, in culture from art to culture, education to pornography the female perspective on pleasure is so little discussed or really truly understood, and that is starting to change a bit now, which hopefully we've had a small part in. But I think it's understanding that for general happiness and confidence, to really nurturing our relationships and appreciating ourselves, which is so crucial. Knowing and owning this female pleasure really can be life changing. So it's brilliant that it's now starting to get the attention it deserves, as the world kind of comes around to our way of thinking. But it's why we wanted to create this home of pleasure, so that we had this safe space to discover its potential, so that we're a brand built by and run by women for women. So it was founded by a woman. I now own the business. We are a completely all female team, so I think it's just allowing us to give women that opportunity to just explore the fun and joy of their own sexuality.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about acquiring customers, so maybe we can begin about talking about the restrictions that you must be facing on platforms like Metta and Google and how you approach customer acquisition for Coco de Mer and how tricky it's been in the past.
Speaker 3:Yes, we, you know, due to the nature of what we sell, we do have challenges, particularly with digital marketing. So, you know, our current customers are our strongest ambassadors, probably when it comes to attracting new customers. But I think that, you know, covid killed that sort of empty brand hype and I think consumers became collaborators, which I think has really helped us. But you know, we had to pivot our brand positioning at that time, bringing that kind of purpose of championing female pleasure to the fore, and we're now working on a more editorialized approach, I guess, to content and brand storytelling, as well as more of a digital first strategy. So, you know, we're building that engaged community of interest around the subject and I think, as today's world shifts shape, we are looking to drive growth in many different ways across consumer touchpoints. So, though our focus is on direct to consumer channels with our website, we're looking to, you know, grow more internationally with our wholesale business and I think for us it has to be so much more about offline marketing, because Metta just do not like to support female pleasure in any way. So you know, you've probably seen there's so many people out there trying to fight the algorithms and but you know we are basically banned from advertising on Instagram or Facebook. So we can't do what so many other small brands do to help, you know, raise that awareness and, you know, gain more customers. We just don't have that opportunity.
Speaker 3:And we've tried a lot and it's, you know, even if, because you are allowed to advertise lingerie, it's the other categories that we sell that aren't allowed. So, even though we will potentially only put forward a lingerie ad because we sell the other categories on our website, it is automatically denied. That's so frustrating. It is so frustrating and you sort of, for years now we've tried and tried and at the moment we've actually just given up on even trying because it was taking up so much time, just to be constantly rejected. Yeah, of course, no one likes being rejected, no, so I think it's, you know it's, it's so frustrating now and it makes no sense because you know you can advertise Viagra but you can't advertise a vibrator.
Speaker 1:Of course she, of course she can. That makes complete sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. So as long as it sort of relates to male pleasure, we're okay. But yeah, it just automatically. And it's the case for medical issues as well. You know you can't talk about the menopause. You know there's so many different ways that meta. Just keep us quiet.
Speaker 1:I feel like this could be a whole other podcast episode if it gets started, but still, we'll park that for the moment, the ever, ever frustrations there, and hopefully one day it will be a little bit more equal. But talk to me about what offline marketing looks like to you. Then maybe talk me through a couple of campaigns.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I mean, for us it's about sort of classic PR product placement. It's about collaborations and partnerships and about what we can do on social. Although obviously we can't use paid social, we can use regular social. So I think you know, for me collaborations are so crucial to our business. You know we have a history of strong creative and commercial collaborations and that is so important I love. I really I'm a big believer in things done together can be so much stronger. So I think you know we want to continue to develop, I guess continue to develop partnerships that are greater than the sum of their parts. So you know they're a strong driver of creative evolution, of business growth, a brand storytelling, of industry innovations, and you know these partnerships have always been core to how we surprise and delight our customers. So you know we've done lots of different types of collaborations and from, you know, really wide ranging from the V&A Museum to Playboy, to Sotheby's Auction House, to Helena Christensen, to Pamela Anderson, charlie Howard, maurice Deary. They're sort of very different women and brands that we feel had that connection with us. So you know to, for instance, and they've always been quite organic in the way that they've come about. So if we think about Helena Christensen. We've worked with her now for the last three years and she's always been a customer of Cocoa. So whenever she was in London, she would always go to our store in Covent Garden and so we knew that she already loved the brand. So when we got in touch, we actually first started working together in 2021.
Speaker 3:So, during during COVID, and we did a campaign with her called the Ultimate Female Gaze, and we it was basically Helena acted as model, photographer and art director and basically shot herself in our lingerie at home, because we obviously no one could travel at the time and it was just about really giving women that understanding of how they want to be perceived and how they want to be shot. And I think, you know, she's obviously a renowned supermodel, but she's also a really renowned photographer, so it was great and she loved that creative freedom to really shoot herself how she would ideally like to be viewed, and that was a really strong campaign. And I think generally now you know, we only work with female photographers, we only work with all female crews, so that we are really focused on that, on that female gaze. But you know, that was our first campaign with Helena. The following year, we did one where she was just the model and we. She was shot by the photographer, claire Rothstein, which had a very different feel. It was just post lockdowns, post COVID. There was a much more glamorous feel to it because suddenly we were allowed out and everyone wanted to kind of dress up after not being able to. So it had a very different feel. And then this year we're actually launching a new campaign next month where it's Helena's actually photographed, charlie Howard, who's our current ambassador. So we've sort of gone full circle with Helena. And that I loved the concept of the passing of the torch between Helena and Charlie this year, because I feel like women are so often pitted against each other in the media and I love the idea that actually women love supporting other women and, you know, lifting up other women and I felt like that was a really empowered passing of the torch from one to the other. So you know, I think there's some really great campaigns there.
Speaker 3:And then Waris Dewey was another one who was in.
Speaker 3:She was a supermodel a few decades ago but she had the most incredible story. She's an FGM survivor from Somalia and she has this. She wrote these books, which is how I read, which I'd first heard about her and I was just so moved by her story. I got in touch with her straight away and we've been supporting the fight against female genital mutilation ever since so the last seven years or so Because it felt like just a something that was really important and authentic to Coco because, you know, we are dedicated to celebrating female pleasure and FGM is a direct disabler of that pleasure. So it felt like a you know, the right charity to support, and I've met so many incredible activists and survivors since working in that space and I'm now a trustee of the Five Foundation, which is Nimco Alley's Foundation Against FGM. So you know that was a great campaign that was focused on raising awareness and raising funds for Waris's Foundation. So so, yeah, so I think you know there's we have to be creative and find, you know, ways, ways to market the business.
Speaker 1:So let's go on to talking a little bit about inventory. So you're 50% DTC versus wholesale and that's, you know, quite a reliance on the wholesale customer side of things. How are you finding any challenges with cash flow and how are you mitigating that in terms of the wholesale side of the business?
Speaker 3:Well, it's actually a newer problem for us because we used to have a retail business as well, with bricks and mortar stores, and online and wholesale was a much smaller part of the business. But now that we've have pivoted towards a more digital first strategy and not having the bricks and mortar but then growing the wholesale business, it has been a challenge, you know, because we are again, as you say, so much more rely on other people paying us than we used to be and you don't have that kind of immediate money that you would get from a store. And that did actually come as a surprise. That shouldn't have been a surprise, but because it had been, it was a new challenge. It sort of surprised us this year a little bit and it is hard.
Speaker 3:It is hard because I think everyone is potentially struggling a little bit and trying to push payment terms and paying late, and we do have that content. So, on the one hand, it just takes so much time having to do credit control and pushing for people to pay you within the time frame. So I think that is has been really challenging. But, you know, for us it's constantly about, I guess, negotiation of those payment terms, negotiation of MOQs. You know we produce to order when it comes to our lingerie, so that we don't struggle with being having kind of huge inventory that we don't need and really constantly analyzing our own business. So hindsight is improving our own buys so at least we can control that side of it, and having really close partnerships with our wholesale customers. So really you know we'd rather have probably better relationships with less of them, but you know it's right for the brand so we have to make it work. But it does bring up challenges that are hard to mitigate because they're out of your control a little bit.
Speaker 1:So there's only so much you can do and are you using any technologies to help you get that view of your inventory and where all your stock is and who it's going out to? What kind of services or apps are you using in that space?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean we don't actually use a huge amount of technology or quite sort of manual business with you know a little old school when it comes to you know picking up the telephone and using email and that side of things. That's really how we manage our wholesale business and the rest of the kind of administration side of the business.
Speaker 1:And lastly, what does the future hold for Coco Demer? You know it's your business. You're built, founded, run by women, for women. What are your goals for the brand in the coming years?
Speaker 3:I think in the short term, we are still kind of still super happy that we, a couple of weeks ago, received the positive luxury Certification, which is a sustainability program for luxury brand. So it's sort of. And so we got there. We received their butterfly mark, which was super exciting. A lot of work getting there over the last year, but I think it's given the team such a collective drive to keep riding that wave, to keep improving our impact on an environmental and social level.
Speaker 3:So that's something that you know we're going to continue working on and I think you know we're really clear and consistent about our purpose driving that forward, waving the flag for female empowerment, and we'll continue to strive to educate and celebrate and hopefully create a genuinely positive change in society and culture. And then you know we want to continue raising awareness for inequalities and injustices against women. So you know we'll continue to work in helping to end FGM and we'll continue to use our platform to highlight and educate on the need for gender equality, which, sadly, is still necessary. You know you feel like you take so many steps forward and things seem to be doing so well and then you'll have massive things, like you know, the end of Roe versus Wade, and you suddenly realize that actually there is still so much more that we can do and still so much more that needs to be done. So let's continue to break down those taboos, to encourage more open conversations and increased respect for the female body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sadly, there is still so much to do, but, lucy, you've been doing such an amazing job on this, on this. It's been so lovely to speak to you. Before I let you go, we have our rapid fire round, which are just very quick fire questions that I've got in front of me here. I don't think you've had visibility of them, so it's all think about it on your feet, so to speak. So are you ready? Yeah, perfect. So Netflix or Disney Plus.
Speaker 3:Netflix.
Speaker 1:What do you do to stay mentally and physically fit?
Speaker 3:Walk my dog and read anything and everything.
Speaker 1:And on the subject of pleasure, what is your Sunday morning guilty pleasure?
Speaker 3:I mean sadly. With my extremely spoiled and demanding dog I literally do nothing than whatever he needs to do at the first thing. So I'm up at the crack of dawn on the Sunday, like any other day of the week, so that he can get his long walk in. But otherwise, if I have time to, literally after that walk, just lie on my sofa and watch some Law and Order, svu or something that's been on during the week, that for me would be heaven, because I very rarely have the opportunity.
Speaker 1:Amazing. And if you had five minutes with the Prime Minister, what would you ask them for? Gender equality, great answer. And in terms of retail, what is the one metric that you, as a retailer, obsess over and you would recommend others do the same?
Speaker 3:I mean as the owner of a small business, I obsess over every single day possible metric there is, so it's hard to pick one. I think you know I'm probably too close to all of them, bottom line probably.
Speaker 1:Yes, fair enough, fair enough. And one last question what do you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning of your career?
Speaker 3:I would say to risk more. I think that you know you have the time and the energy when you're younger to take risks, and I think nowadays I probably think I wish I'd taken more risks younger, because you know, without you you don't know what's going to happen without, without risking things sometimes.
Speaker 1:Yeah taking that leap of faith. Yeah, Lucy, it's been so wonderful speaking with you. Thank you so so much for sharing your story today.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.