Kate Tilbury, Rowdy Kind
“EQUAL PARENTAL LEAVE POLICIES”
Kate Tilbury was inspired to start her business by her son. “He was sitting in the bath and asked, ‘Mum, why are you using baby product on me?’ He was seven at the time. And I went, ‘Good question, why am I using baby product? Ok next time we go to the supermarket I’ll let you choose something suitable.’ But when we got there, it was really hard to find something that wasn’t in a plastic bottle and didn’t gender stereotype the kids with ‘blue is for boys, pink is for girls.’”
From her background in the consumer goods industry, Kate knew how unlikely it was that a big brand would develop the product she and her son needed. “When a company really gets behind sustainability, they can make some big changes in a short amount of time,” she says. “The difficulty is that for the really big changes, legacy systems make it really hard. A business built around filling plastic bottles with liquid is not going to be able to change at the speed we need.”
Kate decided to solve her own problem. Earlier this year, she launched Rowdy Kind, a business selling plastic free shampoo and body bars for kids. At the moment, it’s just her and her sister-in-law Anne Marie Wright running the business. But as it grows, she plans to put policies in place to support employees who are parents and to always lead by example. “We already have ‘rule number 1’” she says, “families always come first.”
“There’s policy and then there’s leadership. You have to do both of those, otherwise there’s no change,” she says. “It’s the difference between having a policy where men can take six month leave but no one on the leadership ever taking it versus people on the leadership team taking it and therefore indicating all the way down that it’s an acceptable behaviour.”
Kate is also an advocate of referring to ‘parental leave’ not ‘maternity’ or ‘paternity’ leave and changing the culture around men requesting part-time work. “If men felt they could apply for part-time work and that request was valued, that would free women up and level the whole playing field.”