New Business Mum – Alienor Falconer

Alienor owner of  The Bright Company is my new business Mum on the blog today! Have a read of her interview; then go and check out her awesome website!

Who are you?
Alienor Falconer, mum of Corwin 21 months, and a bump, wife, daughter, sister

What do you do?
I’m a former fashion industry product developer and I now own and run The Bright Company, we design and manufacture sleepwear for babies and toddlers, all of the creative force is mine.

When did you establish your business?
I left my job at Paul Smith last May and started pretty much straight away, after doing all of the background work we launched our first capsule collection in November last year, so we are still a very young company. 

What made you start your own business?
Lots of different factors affected my decision, the desire to balance family and work, I travelled a lot for my past job and couldn’t justify spending so much time in Asia in depressingly huge factories rather than being at home with my son. Having become a mum I was frustrated at the lack of decent baby sleepwear out there and knew I could do better. I’ve always wanted to work for myself, I’ve always been strong willed and opinionated and there are always things about companies that don’t’ marry with my principles. Through The Bright Company I’m really happy to be able to work with small UK suppliers making products that I’m proud of.

What do you love about working for yourself?
I can, to some extent set my own hours, I work from home and I work around family life which gives me great freedom. I feel really proud of my achievements when I meet a customer or someone who praises what we do, appreciates the design or the fit etc.

Is there anything you do not like about working for yourself?
Not having an income! It can be lonely sometimes too, I’m used to working in a team of people and bouncing creative ideas around so sometimes when it’s just me making all of the creative decisions it can be quite daunting.

Is there anything you would go back and do differently if you could? 
We are so young I guess there hasn’t been much time to make too many mistakes but as is traditional in the fashion world we never have enough time to get the collections together!

What advice would you give to a Mum considering starting her own business?
Be realistic as to what you can do, I used to develop products for a living so I knew that starting a product based company would be something I could do. Think about set up costs and when you will get an income, can you afford to make the investment now? Think about the time it will take you too, I have set days that I’m ‘in the office’ but if and when orders come in I have to be able to pack them and go to the post office with my toddler which can mess up our plans. It is very rewarding but remember that you never switch off from your own company!

Alienor is kindly offering one of my lucky readers an item of their choice from The Bright Company website – Good luck everyone; enter via the Rafflecopter below 🙂

a Rafflecopter giveaway