Dragon Slaying: Interview with Rachel Watkyn

We asked James Forryan to have a chat with local business entrepreneur Rachel Watkyn OBE. He discovered an unconventional journey to being the owner of Tiny Box Company – a successful multi- million-pound Sussex business

A little over 15 years ago, Rachel Watkyn found herself standing in front of a BBC camera crew alongside her then business partner, Christian Richardson, pitching her idea for a sustainable packaging business to the panel of potential investors on the channel’s hit series Dragon’s Den. It wasn’t going well.

“Pathetic,” was the stinging summary from Duncan Bannatyne, the first of the Dragons to declare themselves ‘out’. Deborah Meaden and James Caan quickly followed suit. Fortunately, the two remaining Dragons - Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis – saw potential in the idea, offering Rachel the £60,000 she needed to kickstart her nascent venture. It proved to be a shrewd move.

A decade and a half later, the Tiny Box Company is the UK’s largest manufacturer of recycled, eco-friendly packaging, with an annual turnover of more than £10 million. The basic idea came from working with small-scale jewellery businesses who wanted packaging for their products, but most manufacturers offered their boxes only as part of a minimum order of 1000 units. “I was an industry disruptor in that sense,” says Rachel. “At the time it was the start of things like Etsy and Not on the High Street, and I was thinking: There's all of these jewellery businesses out there who just want a bangle box or a ring box If you're a small jewellers, what are you going to do with a thousand ring boxes in each colour?”

Funnily enough, going on Dragon’s Den wasn’t even Rachel’s idea; in fact, the application had been submitted without her knowledge by her former business partner. “I mean, it was a clever plan, but he'd overlooked the fact that I wouldn't be too happy when I found out!”

Despite her initial reluctance, Rachel decided to give it a shot. “I really didn't think we'd get any investment. We had nothing patentable, we had no trading history. By the time it was filmed we'd been trading for about five or six months, and we'd been successful in that time, but I knew nothing about packaging, my background was in software. We had nothing going for us. So, when I agreed to it, I just thought: OK, we've got a ten-minute advertising window, so let's just try not to look too stupid in that ten minutes.”

Besides the initial investment she secured, I ask, were there any other lessons learned from going through that process? “Post-Den, absolutely, and it was that I don't know why I doubted myself so much. I think because of my childhood and other things that I won't bore you with, I just didn't have any confidence. So, when I had the chance of being mentored by two of the dragons, I thought I needed that, because I never thought I would be successful without it.”

The childhood Rachel speaks of is not one that many would describe as boring. After spending several of her formative years in a children’s home, her parents eventually asked for Rachel and her siblings to be returned from care and relocated them to Suffolk. Even then, her early life was far from stable. “As kids, we never knew what we were walking into, literally. Whether our parents were going to be in an okay mood, whether we were going to get beaten up, or mum had walked out. We just didn't know.”

Despite growing up in such a chaotic environment, Rachel describes the experience as “a blessing in disguise” and says that her childhood is part of the reason for her entrepreneurial drive. “I was determined that I was never going to be poor,” she says. “My parents were entrepreneur wannabes, but there was no follow-through. Every week there was a different business idea.”

She compares her dad to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Catch Me if you Can: “One minute he was an auctioneer, the next he was an accountant, a spiritual healer, a Grade I & II listed buildings expert, you name it. And I thought he was successful, as a child. But it turned out it was all debt.” Nevertheless, Rachel remains sanguine. “It does make you incredibly resilient because you just learn to go with the flow. It's like: OK, it's happened, how are we going to survive now?”

That resilience has proved useful on more than one occasion. Along with personal setbacks that have included being diagnosed with breast cancer twice, her path to building the Tiny Box Company into the successful venture it is today hasn’t exactly been free from obstacles either. In the company’s early days, disaster was narrowly avoided when a warehouse fire almost destroyed all of their stock. Later, during the lockdown initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic, an accounting error left a £500,000 black hole on their books.

Adaptability is one quality that helped the business survive, alongside what she describes as an “organic management structure” which enables a certain amount of agility: “When we need to react or make decisions quickly, we don't have to battle through layers of management, rules and procedures.”

In February this year, Rachel was awarded an OBE in recognition of her charity work and advocacy for female entrepreneurs – a subject that she is passionate about. “Even now, of all venture capital funding, only 1.8 pence in every pound goes to female-led businesses, which is staggering.”

Rachel laughs when I ask her if the OBE came as a surprise. “OK, this is no joke,” she says as she begins to tell me the story. A year earlier, Rachel had been at an event where she met former tennis star Tim Henman. Frustrated at the time by the difficulties in making female voices heard in the business world, she found herself wondering what she could do to make herself more credible in the eyes of the establishment and, as a lark, used a photograph of the event with Henman to create an image of her receiving an OBE, which she added to her ‘vision board’ at home. She told no-one apart from her husband.

Soon afterwards, Rachel tells me, she received a phone call from someone that she vaguely knew who worked in government. “She said ‘I need to ask you some questions, but I can't tell you why – and I need your full name and your date of birth.' I thought they were trying to get security clearance for me because I'd been doing quite a bit of stuff at Downing Street on female entrepreneurship.” Then, for a while, nothing happened. “Because of my vision board, I kept teasing my husband relentlessly. When the post came, I'd run to the front door going 'Oh, but where's my OBE?' Then in November of last year, I was winding him up, I run to the door doing my whole bit, and there's an actual letter from the cabinet office!”

So what’s the single most important piece of advice she would give to a woman starting out in business? “Without a doubt, it's having a vision of where you want to take your business. A lot of the time, women just don't have a clear picture of where they want to take it. If you ask a man, they tend to be very specific about their aims. 'I want to sell it in five years', or whatever. Often when you ask women the same question they say 'Oh, I don't know.' And I'm like, well, how can I help you get there if you don't know where you want to go?”

When asked whether she would have done anything differently herself with the benefit of hindsight, Rachel applies the same logic to her own career: “Years ago I wanted more warehouse space – we keep growing out of it – and our landlord said he had another unit we could use. So I went to have a look at it and thought 'Oh wow, it's very big, I'd have to sell a lot.' Classic nerves kicked in, so I asked him to build a wall down the middle and split the unit in half. He was very obliging and he did just that. So can you imagine how obliging he was when I went back a month later and said 'actually, can I have the other half too?' If I'd had a clear vision and more confidence in myself, I'd have taken the whole unit and made it work”

Having recently secured a publishing deal, Rachel is currently in the process of writing a book about her experiences, which she hopes to release next year.

Rachel Watkyn OBE will be guest speaker at the Sussex Business Conference & Awards on Thursday 10th October at The Hickstead Showground.

Free tickets available from: www.sussexbusinessconference.co.uk