FOUNDER STORY
I was a really shy kid. Growing up in the 80s of 90s with a rabble of siblings and cousins and a big loud (wonderful) family around me, I always felt like the odd one out. I can’t remember how many times I was told “you’re the quiet one”. At the time it always felt like a negative label, I realise now, it wasn’t really, I was just different to the other kids around me. It never stopped me dreaming big though. Since I can remember, I’d always had ideas for what I wanted to do, who I might want to be.
When I was 17, I started organising parties in nightclubs with my college friends. We’d book the venue and the DJ, print tickets and then sell them to our class mates and make a pretty decent margin off the back of it. I loved it.
At 19, I was thinking about setting up mobile massage parlours in airports for world weary travellers, at 20 I was dreaming about launching pop up nail bars (boy, do I wish I had followed through on that one!).
Throughout my 20’s I continued to search and come up with ideas while I forged ahead with my media career. I even trained to become a beauty therapist, convinced I would set up my own successful salon one day. I took a make-up artist course and moonlighted as a wedding make-up artist for a bit and am actually pretty proud of the number of happy blushing brides I made up in my time!
At 34, my first son Theo came along. 13 months of gorgeous maternity leave with my boy also gave me a lot of freedom, time and brain space to really explore different options and find out what I “really” wanted to do. Truth is, that year spawned a lot of business ideas that actually amounted to nothing. I did personalised frames and keep sake boxes, I came up with a parenting marketplace (still on the backburner 8 years later – watch this space!), I wrote a lot and thought I could write the next best-selling thriller (sadly not!).
“At the start it was very much about me wanting the right work/life balance and the flexibility to fit around my family life. But even then I had ambitions for what I wanted Muve to be in the future and what it should represent.”
My maternity leave ended and I was still no closer to finding out what my path was. I went back to work. My career up to that point had been three successful, long term tenures at large UK media companies. What followed was three jobs in very quick succession. A combination of inflexible working practices and two consecutive redundancies meant that at 37 I was at a crossroads. I could search for another corporate role in marketing or I could go it alone.
I chose the latter and it was the best decision I ever made. You see, what I wanted to do was staring me in the face the whole time. I had always loved working in media and marketing, but I wanted to be my own boss, I wanted to run a business and I wanted control over how and where I worked – I just always thought it would be doing something else other than what I had spent my whole career doing.
So in 2018, with the help of some pretty great people and companies supporting me (thank you Paul at Fourth Estate Creative, Jigs Pankhania at Reader’s Digest and Roy Moed at LifeBook,) Muve Media & Marketing was born.
“A small but successful female led, family run marketing agency with a diverse client base”
At the start it was very much about me wanting the right work/life balance and the flexibility to fit around my family life. But even then I had ambitions for what I wanted Muve to be in the future and what it should represent. That’s reflected in the name.
I chose Muve because I always want the business and the work we do for our clients to be one move ahead, to always be moving forward. I chose to spell it ‘Muve’ rather than Move’ as ‘Mu’ was my nickname for Theo.
It’s been five years and in that time, it’s grown from just me to a team of five in house marketing specialists with an established network of talented freelancers and industry experts who we work with to provide our amazing clients with an end to end marketing service and a solutions based offering which best suits their business needs.
Creating my dream business has helped me learn a lot about myself, and to find contentment with who I am. I no longer get told I’m the quiet one but neither am I the loudest character in the room either and that’s ok, I’ve realised I don’t need to be, to be heard or indeed, to run a business successfully.
“Creating my dream business has helped me learn a lot about myself, and to find contentment with who I am.”
I’m really proud of where Muve is today. A small but successful female led, family run marketing agency with a diverse client base, a flexible and collaborative work ethos and modern work practices. The vast majority of clients have come to us via referrals, which speaks volumes about how we treat our clients and our work.
During a recent clear out of my parent’s loft, I came across my National Record of Achievement. A huge, heavy and somewhat dusty book stuffed full of teenage academic achievements (I was a geek) as well as my hopes and dreams for the future. One page in particular stood out.
On it was a statement of what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had written…
‘I want to be a journalist or work in marketing.’
Job done I’d say!
