Charlotte Morley, thelittleloop
“MEASURE OUTCOMES, NOT HOURS”
“I always wanted to be the woman to beat the odds and prove them wrong. But the reality is the imbalance in the system means that inequality will affect every woman sooner or later. I was treated pretty awfully on maternity leave. But that gave me the final nudge I needed to start my business,” says Charlotte Morley, founder of online rental marketplace thelittleloop.
Founded in 2019, thelittleloop’s mission is clear: save money, save time, save the planet. Its subscription enables parents to rent clothes for their kids and swap them for another size or style when they’re too small or the seasons change.
Before starting her business, Charlotte spent ten years working in intelligence before moving on to work in tech. Reflecting on her time in both the public and private sector, the change she’d most like to see is around flexible working and presenteeism. “My one hope from the pandemic is that we start measuring people differently. Measuring hours worked disproportionately disadvantages women. And it’s a terrible proxy for productivity. But it’s easy to do so we default to it. Now, because people are working from home and you can’t see the hours that they’re sitting at their desk, you have to measure by outcomes - what they actually achieve.”
This mindset of measuring outcomes over hours is how she runs her own company. “I want to employ people flexibly, particularly parents if I can,” she says. “There are so many talented people out there who are not working or working in jobs that are not up to what they can do because they can’t find something that’s flexible enough to do around their family lives. We have a great opportunity now. We don’t need to go back to a world where we all work in the office 9am to 5pm, five days a week - it’s not necessary and it’s not efficient.”