I pulled my son out of school aged 14 so he could pursue his business dream & we’ve made £3.6MILLION flogging wax melts
A MUM pulled her son out of school when he was just 14 so he could pursue his business dream – and now the business has made £3.6million.
Noah Carlile-Swift was just a teenager when his mum Tara suggested they start a business together to help build his confidence after his secondary school education left him feeling “stupid”.
When Noah was just 11, he was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia, effectively meaning, as Tara, 50, says, he was “bright, at the top end of learning ability, but not in the way that school teaches it. So he struggled with exams and with comprehension, which is mainly what school is about.”
So, with the support of Noah’s school, they started Freckleface, a fragrance company selling wax melts - scented pieces of wax that release an aroma into the room when heated on top of a burner – and soon after Noah left his school in Spalding, Lincolnshire.
Tara told : “They [Noah’s school] agreed that he was doing stuff outside of school with the business - building the website, taking computers apart, designing logos - and was much better using his skills on something he got reward from, rather than feeling stupid every day.”
Starting as a kitchen table business, Freckleface now has its own factory in rural Lincolnshire and operates five shops in York, Cambridge, Lincoln and Stamford – with plans to open more outlets next year.
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Last year, the company had sales of £3.6million and a pre-tax profit of £600,000.
Tara is the managing director while Noah runs the retail side of things with the long-term plan being that he takes over her role in 10 years’ time.
For Tara, it was certainly an unconventional route into being an entrepreneur as her “only qualification” is a Btec in sign writing.
When she was just six months old her dad died suddenly of a heart attack aged 46 and her mum went on to remarry when Tara was six.
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Due to her stepdad’s job in HM Coastguard it meant the family “moved every few years”, including spells in the Isle of Wight and the Gower Peninsula in Wales.
Almost as soon as Tara gained her Btec, it was made virtually redundant due to the march of technology and “the whole signwriting world went digital”.
After she “bummed around for a couple of years” Tara did a course to become a personal assistant.
She chose a college in Nottingham after she met Simon, her husband, on a night out in the city.
Tara said: “I went for the weekend, met Simon, and we moved in together two weeks later. We’ve been together ever since.”
After her PA course she landed a job at Experian, the credit-checking firm, where she spent three years learning about business “through osmosis” as she sat in on meetings with the top team.
Tara added: “At the time, you don’t realise, but you’re absorbing it all, sitting with finance directors taking minutes of all the meetings.”
She and Simon were also trying for a baby, but after suffering a series of miscarriages, decided to take some time out from the corporate life and head to Australia for a year.
As they landed back in England Tara found out she was pregnant with Noah.
Tara then got a temping job with Boots, the high street chemist, which has its headquarters in Nottingham.
CHANCE CONVERSATION
It was while at Boots a chance conversation lead to a dramatic change in her career.
Tara said: “I was sitting in the canteen eating my sandwich and the people next to me were talking about products they were developing for pregnant people and I chipped in and said, ‘I don’t think you should do it like that, I think you should think about this,’ and they offered me a job in the marketing department.”
After a couple of years at Boots, she left as part of a restructuring and retrained as a project manager, taking the Prince2 (Projects in Controlled Environments) project management qualification, before working as an administrator for Siemens on railway bids.
That job though meant long hours and frequent travel, with Tara often being away three night a week, which she and Simon juggled alongside his shifts as an IT worker.
To help Noah make his transition to secondary school, Tara quit her job as Siemens and needing an extra income, became a foster carer.
The couple fostered 23 children in three and a half years.
How to start your own business
Dragon's Den star Theo Paphitis revealed his tips for budding entrepreneurs:
- One of the biggest barriers aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners face is a lack of confidence. You must believe in your idea — even more than that, be the one boring your friends to death about it.
- Never be afraid to make decisions. Once you have an idea, it’s the confidence to make decisions that is crucial to starting and maintaining a business.
- If you don’t take calculated risks, you’re standing still. If a decision turns out to be wrong, identify it quickly and deal with it if you can. Failing that, find someone else who can.
- It’s OK not to get it right the first time. My experience of making bad decisions is what helped develop my confidence, making me who I am today.
- Never underestimate the power of social media, and remember the internet has levelled the playing field for small businesses.
- Don’t forget to dream. A machine can’t do that!
She decided to start her own business just as the fostering was coming to an end but describes the first few months as “absolute carnage”.
Tara said: “We had a baby who we had from birth and he had gastric problems so he didn’t sleep and was sick constantly, plus I had a teenager who was neurodiverse, all while I was doing the business.
“We were making the products all week and then I was putting them in the car, driving all over the country, sleeping in the car, doing whatever we needed to get the products out there.”
But while it was exhausting, they knew they were on to something.
'SOMETHING SPECIAL'
She added: “It became obvious really quickly that we had something special.
“We would go to a fair, sell out, come home, make it all again. Go to another show, and sell out. And so on.”
The baby boy was then adopted permanently by “the most super family in the world” and the Carlile-Swifts still see him every six weeks but Tara said the initial separation was “awful” and she threw herself into the business.
Tara said: “We decided, ‘Let’s take the business really seriously’.
“We came up with a business plan that said we wanted to have stores on every UK high street and for the brand to be global within ten years.”
Freckleface moved into its first industrial unit in 2019, just a few months before Covid hit.
The pandemic could have derailed production but sales were boosted by people working from home and “everybody wanting their houses to smell great”.
FIRST SHOP
The firm was also helped by reduced rents and breaks on business rates during the pandemic which helped them open their first Freckleface store in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in July 2020.
Another shop in Cambridge opened the following year.
In order to save money Tara and Simone built the shop interiors for the first three stores, with Noah taking on the responsibility for the last two.
Along with its stores, Freckleface products are also stocked in more than 800 shops nationwide and the brand has run collaborations with the Royal Horticultural Society and Laura Ashley.
Freckleface now has a workforce of 60, including Tara’s husband, who joined in 2020 to run the manufacturing side.
Tara puts a lot of the company’s more recent success down to the initial slog at trade shows and local fairs.
She said: “The customer you meet at a show is a super-loyal customer. They will shop from you online and will seek out your high street stores.
“And our product is a consumable one, so they tend to come back every month or six weeks to stock up.
“So the hard work of schlepping around the country at shows is why the business built so quickly.”
The family has not raised or borrowed any money to finance the business.
At first, they struggled even to buy a kilo of wax, which would have cost “£10 or so”.
Even though working capital is “still the biggest stresser that keeps us awake at night and stops us from growing quicker”, Tara added she’s “not interested” in raising investment.
She said: “We want to be a heritage brand that’s still going to be on the high street in 50 years and we will hand down the generations of Frecklefaces.
“We’re not in it to make a quick buck.”
The company name is Tara’s nickname for Noah was he was tiny, because she had been taunted by playground bullies for being a “freckleface” and wanted to ensure Noah thought the name was a term of endearment.
She said: “We’re very freckly, we’re plastered. And we would call each other freckleface.
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“So it was a natural decision when we were naming the business, but we never thought back then we were going to have all these shops.
“And now people shout Freckleface at us across the street, but in a nice way.”
