Work life balance as a CEO with Chupi Sweetman

Speaker 1

We talk about wellbeing as being incredibly important, we put it under, you know, we give it an umbrella, we put the headline there, but we forget to culturally adopt it. Is it an important part of your culture?

Speaker 2

Welcome back to Zilo Talks. Today we are joined by Chupi Seaton. Chupi is the founder and CEO of Chupi Children. She has grown her business from herself in her front room to an international brand. As her company grew, one thing that has remained at the forefront is her love and need to look after the well-being of her team.

Speaker 2

First of all, thank you very much for joining us today, Chupi. My pleasure, I’m delighted to be here. I suppose just to start off, a lot of people will be familiar with you from your Instagram and from social media and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2

But for those that don’t know you, would you be able to just tell us a bit about yourself and how the brand of Chupi came to be?

Speaker 1

So my name is Chupi Sweetman, and I make very tiny, sparkly things. So I run a diamond business called, of course, Chupi. We’re based here in beautiful Dublin. We sell all over the world in 67 countries.

Speaker 1

We have an amazing team of nearly 60 people who, up until last year, were all based in our studio and our store, and are now working all over Ireland.

Speaker 2

that’s crazy it’s only a few years ago that you were a few people in your front

Speaker 1

room. Absolutely. And I can think that’s the thing, the journey with 2P. So when I started 2P, we started in our spare room. And it’s right in our little tiny rented house. And we had one little spare room, started in the spare room.

Speaker 1

And then she expanded to the second spare room was very exciting, then expanded into the stairs, then we moved into the kitchen. And by the time we actually moved out of our little house, every room had become 2P.

Speaker 1

So from that start of just one person on the team, nearly 10 years ago now, 16 brilliant people who make it possible to do what we love, which is making really beautiful diamond pieces for people’s most important moments.

Speaker 1

So it’s been, it’s been both really, really fast and really slow in a very strange way. But it’s been an amazing few years.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I can imagine. One thing I was kind of curious of, you were starting out Chupi as the brand, was your kind of motivation coming from that you wanted to create these beautiful things? Or was it more the drive to be your own boss?

Speaker 1

So I’m actually, I’m 37 and I have always been self-employed. I’ve always worked for myself since I was 16. Back then I started a little women’s wear business making beautiful little party dresses as my way of paying my way through school and then paying my way through college.

Speaker 1

And then I did fashion in college, got skied at my top shop, went off to be a designer and then fell in love with jewelry and how it marks moments and tells stories and quits to start a chippy and that’s nearly 10 years ago.

Speaker 1

So it didn’t come from, I think I’m almost, it’s funny, entrepreneurs are a really interesting word. I love climbing mountains. I think that’s what’s kept me in what I do. I’ve never reached a point where I thought, oh, I’m never done, every mountain we’ve climbed, so every goal I’ve ever set for us, every goal we’ve ever set as a business.

Speaker 1

When we hit the goal, I never felt, I love the joy, I named the high, I’ve been on top of the mountain and then I just looked to the next mountain. And so I think that’s what’s kept me self-employed is that I’ve always found a mountain to climb and I love it.

Speaker 1

There’s also a lot of jewelry. So I, yeah, actually it’s really funny. So partly why I started chippy was when I was in my 20s and a fashion designer. I really, I knew I wasn’t gonna do it when I grew up.

Speaker 1

I absolutely knew what my heart’s on. I loved it. I had an incredible job and an incredible brand, getting to design for the Kings of the High Street, it was the Cape Marse era, it was so much fun to be at that level, but I also knew categorically I was gonna do it when I was 70.

Speaker 1

I really knew that I wasn’t gonna be in love with it in my 60s and 70s. So when I fell in love with jewelry, when my husband proposed and I remember holding my engagement ring and just thinking, it was something my daughter would wear one day in the future, that desire to go and start my own business.

Speaker 1

Cause I guess at that point I could have gone and worked for someone else or I could have gone and started my own, but the impatience that I think all entrepreneurs have for faster, for better, for building something beautiful, but impatience is definitely a drive and force.

Speaker 2

We, a few months ago, for March on Devotalks, we looked at things we did in the podcast all about Women’s Day and all about how women are treated certain ways and all this sort of thing. As a younger female entrepreneur, what’s been your experiences?

Speaker 2

Have you ever felt it helped you get ahead or it was somewhat a bit of a disadvantage?

Speaker 1

I find it really frustrating. I’d love to say that being a woman made no difference to my journey. And I also find it funny, young, I’m dying to be not cold. I’m really, I was outraged. So obviously it was my birthday earlier this year and I thought I was gonna be 38, which was a few years closer to 40.

Speaker 1

And I was really excited. I was like, yeah, 40 is gonna be really serious, but unfortunately 37. So I’ve got that funny conundrum of actually enjoying getting older and feeling very grateful to get older.

Speaker 1

But being a young woman, being a woman is challenging, particularly running your business because there will always be a perception. And I think perception of women in business, perception of women in careers.

Speaker 1

There is still a hangover from when women, it’s not that long ago, women were forced to leave work when they got married, not that long ago, when women, it’s lovely, isn’t it nice? We call women, we say, oh, isn’t the dad great for reminding the kids, but we never say a woman isn’t she great for reminding her kids.

Speaker 1

So there’s still a perception of how men and women are perceived. I think there’s a cultural piece to be fixed there. I always think about a story of when I was 21 with this first huge contract for one of the biggest high street, the biggest brand on the high street.

Speaker 1

And I went into my bank to get a credit card. And this was back in the dark ages when you couldn’t use, it was laser cards in Ireland, and you couldn’t use your laser card to order things online. You had to have a credit card to order things online.

Speaker 1

And obviously as a business, we needed to buy internationally. And they wanted to get a thousand euro credit card. And the bank manager, the business relationship bank manager at the time was like, he’s sure you need it now, love.

Speaker 1

I remember thinking, yes, I am sure I need it. He’s like, why don’t you go and just use your boyfriends for the moment and come back to me in a bit. And whilst the language has changed and over the years, and whilst I’ve not experienced that level of discrimination since, the perception that female led businesses have a certain, a lifestyle element to them is still there.

Speaker 1

Like we look at, I actually, I now mentor in this incredible program called Going For Growth that supports female. So I came through the program and supports female entrepreneurs with huge dreams and ambitions.

Speaker 1

It’s got some phenomenal businesses that are, have been through the program and are coming through the program. I’m creating mine back when we were very tiny and maybe I started going for growth, which is a free program for female entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1

I started on it when I had four people on the team and now they are nearly 60. But the amazing statistics that come out of that, that most women in business will choose, will be, their ambition will be to employ one person or to employ two people.

Speaker 1

Whereas most men going in will be looking to employ 10. And so if you’re looking at the like Spentipise Ireland for how we support our female entrepreneurs, but also our female entrepreneurs. So women in working companies will tend to be less ambitious.

Speaker 1

So women will only apply for a role if they have something like 80% of the qualifications, whereas a man will apply for a role if he has 50% of the qualifications. So it’s thinking, it’s encouraging and supporting brilliant women to go and achieve their dreams.

Speaker 1

That’s how we’re going to get equality for both men and women. Very interesting. And it’s funny, so the glass ceiling, I think, has changed somewhat in that it’s no longer necessarily about perception.

Speaker 1

So I think women are perceived as being as strong, but one of the huge issues we have is childcare. So how we manage maternity and paternity leave and how we position children as being a woman’s responsibility.

Speaker 1

It’s obviously very relevant for me. We’ve had our gorgeous little girl who’s 10 months old, and my husband and I have fully committed to, she’s both of ours. We both take care of her. We both care for her, both as involved in her life.

Speaker 1

Whereas there is still a very old-fashioned view, almost perpetuated by employers, that, well, I like to look at the way the stage talks about maternity and paternity leave. We say 26 weeks for women and two for men.

Speaker 1

You know, what does that say about how we value care? So one of the wellbeing initiatives we’ve brought in at TUPY is that we do 26 weeks for our amazing female team, and we do 13 weeks for our amazing male team.

Speaker 1

So that they can go, and so we’re gonna get to parity. That’s one of our big goals. So we use a wonderful goal system called OKRs, and one of our big objectives for the next few years is to get to parity.

Speaker 1

So we’re able to offer the guys on our team the same parental leave, the same celebration of their parental rights as we offer our amazing women.

Speaker 2

That’s amazing. What’s amazing also is that it has to be amazing. It’s not an automatic.

Speaker 1

If you think about, you know, the Scandi countries do it so well, so you get a year’s worth of leave of which the man has to take at least four months. And that’s such a good way of doing it, you know, make it, make it balanced.

Speaker 1

But, you know, we can’t look at maternity and paternity and wonder why it’s so unequal when the state itself goes 26 weeks and two weeks, you know, that tells you immediately that, and that’s why we lose our brilliant women, you know, at a certain level.

Speaker 1

So it’s so important to me, we make sure that it’s possible for women and men and for everyone who needs to, to have those futures and those careers.

Speaker 2

I suppose you kind of touched on there some of the kind of they would that would kind of fall under kind of a well being how you kind of incorporate that and just from following your chubby grow trip years and everything.

Speaker 2

It’s been so evident that well being has been at the heart of everything going along. How was that difficult and how did you go about that to kind of put that at the heart of the organization when you were just so young.

Speaker 1

I think it never felt like a task. And that’s, you know, we talk about wellbeing as being incredibly important. We put it under, you know, we give it an umbrella, we put the headline there, but we forget to culturally adopt it.

Speaker 1

Is it an important part of your culture? And that culturally embedding wellness has been so important. It even comes down to small things. Like when we were based in the studio, as the team grew so versatile based in my house.

Speaker 1

So for everyone’s birthday, I made a birthday cake. It just felt like, you know, an extension of when someone chooses to come work for you, if you build a company and people come and choose to work for you and be part of your team, that’s a huge investment, a huge risk, a huge piece of trust.

Speaker 1

And for me, I guess I felt like that was an extension of my family. As we grew, that my team have been part of my family and that that has grown. So it was logical that I would make a birthday cake. And then as we grew up until we, nearly 30 people on the team, I made everyone’s birthday cake every seven, I was always teasing, going like when we were hiring, I was going, God, guys, like I’m already making five birthday cakes in that week in October and don’t think I can actually make another cake.

Speaker 1

But if it came something, and it was funny, because I would get challenged on that from slightly more cynical people that come to the business going, you know, how are you ever going to scale me making a birthday cake?

Speaker 1

And it’s not scalable right now at 60 people, but what it did was it embedded a culture of kindness and a culture of celebrating those moments. So, and then when we moved to working from home and I was so concerned about the loss of so much of that, so much of wellbeing, it’s much easier to do when you’re all on site, but it continued on.

Speaker 1

One of our incredible team took over ownership for that. So she made sure every single birthday, everyone gets cake, it’s on delivery. And if you’re not in Dublin, it comes through the post, chocolates or cakes don’t make their way to everyone on the team for their birthday.

Speaker 1

A bunch of flowers still turns up for their cheapy anniversary. So the day they joined the team, whatever day that is, your flowers turn up. If it’s your five year anniversary, it’s a 500 quid right here on five days annual, extra annual leave.

Speaker 1

So those things that I started out as that just felt like logical conclusions have become hugely culturally important to us.

Speaker 2

As you were this girl, I even know you, when you started off saying my birthday cake, I was like, it’s still like a family. Yeah, I love you.

Speaker 1

I think, yeah, look, very cynically, wellness is incredibly important for so many different things within your business. But it’s also important, we think, what do we want wellness to achieve? Like, is it another tick box exercise?

Speaker 1

Cool, we’ve got a wellness team, right done with wellness budget assigned, but actually, it’s far more profound. So we have a phenomenal wellness team, they did so many beautiful and amazing things. They didn’t do it because they were, they were looking for points or that it was kind of, you know, an aside, they did it because they were really passionate about celebrating and bringing their colleagues together.

Speaker 1

I think that’s such an exciting thing to do. I also think it’s a real challenge to all of us. Now we’re working from home, how are we going to ensure wellness stays within our companies, that culture, community wellness, which is wellness, it’s not a task, it’s not, hey, let’s make sure everyone does yoga once a month.

Speaker 1

Wellness is our culture, our community. And for us, one of the things we’re looking at is the property budget we would have had to spend pre COVID. So as we’ve expanded and grown, we were obviously planning on renting bigger premises.

Speaker 1

And so taking some of that budget, which we now obviously can’t thanks to COVID, we have to be from from home, spending some of that on our wellness budget, and taking some of that money that would have kept us, you know, those water cooler moments, the chat, while making a cup of tea and canteen, trying to bring some of that together.

Speaker 1

And how those things maintains actually, there’s been such a lovely one. So we have 19 new people starting over the last few weeks. And one of the things for everyone, we’re all missing that human connection and how we bring in our new amazing team who are joining and making them feel part of the family and so someone’s we slack a lot from work, which is great.

Speaker 1

And there are complaints about all these technological schools we have like slack and my zoom, but good Lord, they keep us connected in such a powerful way. But Zoe, who is our head of brand marketing, set up a gorgeous channel called intros.

Speaker 1

So everyone on the team existing or new has put a little intro of themselves to who they are, what they do, and then a fun fact about them. It’s just been, honestly, the brightest light in my week, we’re all having so much fun.

Speaker 1

Mad things. We have aerial, aerial performers, we have someone who’s band was supported by Oasis. We have like, honestly, the level of people I’ve known for years and people I haven’t got to know that well, but that connection still keeping up.

Speaker 1

I feel, you know, somewhere else that might feel like, you know, write a fun fact by yourself might feel like a chore, but we started it out. So the whole leadership team started it, and then our senior managers did it.

Speaker 1

And so it really felt like, well, we’re here, we’re all doing this celebration here with you, you know, if you have to write something embarrassing about yourself, I 100% will write something embarrassing by myself first.

Speaker 2

That’s so true. When you’re talking about the working from home to stay connected and everything like that, it’s very hard over the last year, over a year now with COVID, working from home, the kind of the grey areas are kind of sneaking in a bit more.

Speaker 2

I suppose within Chupi, how has the kind of work-life balance, or as some people would say, the work-life integration, how is that kind of, how do you manage that? It can be quite difficult. Some people are very inclined to sit at home, they’re flicking on Netflix or whatever they do in the evening.

Speaker 2

I’ll just check my email, just respond to whoever.

Speaker 1

One of the things we have that’s really important is a no out of hours email culture. So we have no emails before 8 a.m. and no emails after 6 p.m. So it just means that if someone sends an email out of those hours, which they very, very rarely do or someone external sends an email, there’s no expectation on you to respond to that.

Speaker 1

I think we have to as companies set some cultural boundaries. So for me, I tend to work at night. Sometimes we’ve got a little girl, sometimes I’ll just catch up now in the evening and send emails, but I make sure that I never send them to my team.

Speaker 1

I schedule them for 8 a.m. So 8 a.m. your inbox will get a flood. So there’s nothing coming to 8 p.m., 10 p.m., midnight. It’s really interesting. So our HR company would say that actually one of the biggest challenges facing companies is that expectation of being always on.

Speaker 1

And so people are scheduling their emails to send at 11 p.m. to make it look like they’re busy at night. Whereas I feel like if I got an email from one of my team at 11, 12, I’d be genuinely concerned with everything okay.

Speaker 1

You know, I’d be checking in with them, checking in with their manager. And I think that culture has come from us as a leadership team, for me as a CEO, about how and when we communicate and that there’s no expectation on that edge of ours piece.

Speaker 1

So look, it happens occasionally, particularly in our very busy season and in those weeks before Christmas, sometimes it does, but overall to try and maintain that balance, to not be making those calls, to keep and contain it, because like all of us, we are working and living in our homes, which is, yeah, it’s intense.

Speaker 2

crazy time. Also, I suppose you’ve just said about a few times about your lovely little baby. How have you, in the last year, your business has completely changed? It’s gone from having a set off as a place, you become a new mother.

Speaker 2

How have you managed everything? How have you set aside and made time for yourself?

Speaker 1

Um I don’t know if I was ever any good at that. I’m really passionate about what I do. I love to be, I love getting to make beautiful things, working moments. My job is my hobby. So I um yeah I don’t think, I guess I love to cook.

Speaker 1

That’s one of the things I’ve always really loved doing. My brother and Irish cookbook call me your kids and that has stuck with me. I was teasing and saying I do actually need to get back to an office at some point because Brian and I are made of 90% cake.

Speaker 1

I’m distressed that this year has brought. But yeah cooking is definitely part of it. Um but yeah I think, I guess I feel incredibly grateful as well. You know I think this um I have to keep a gratitude journal.

Speaker 1

I think it’s really important to in the midst of all of this which is so overwhelming and so beyond anything we should ever be expected to cope with to take account for the good things. You know to wake up every day and remember you know write down the three things you feel grateful for and the three things you’ve done in the evening to take stock of them because it’s so overwhelming.

Speaker 1

Um yeah I think it’s really made me appreciate the things I have in my life and yeah I’m not sure I’m very good at managing that work-life balance. I love my job and so I tend to to live in it but that’s also kept me sane.

Speaker 1

You know it’s also been my beacon, my burning light and I’ve heard that from our team which is just the most amazing thing to hear that in a year that has brought so many challenges and so so many difficult things that work has been um a safe place full of you know wins that you can’t there’s so little you can control outside of what’s happening but in work you get to win and succeed and be part of something brilliant and beautiful and that’s that’s what I’ve seen in GB and that’s amazing to have.

Speaker 2

Okay, so I think we will just finish off here. I just have one thing to ask you. If you could, only to keep one pig from everything you do in shoot before out being, so birthday cakes are gone, all that sort of thing, what would you, what would be the one thing that you think would be the most important thing to keep your employees engaged and to keep everything going?

Speaker 1

So we have something, yeah, the cakes would be very, very high on my list. If I had to hold onto one thing, it would be win and whoa. So it’s something that we started doing a few years ago. So every Friday, when we were all in the studio together, we’d all stand up in a big circle.

Speaker 1

And we’d talk about our wins and our woes for the week. What did we win at? What was the thing? So you’d talk about what was your huge win? What did you succeed at? And what was your whoa? What was the thing that challenged you, annoyed you, irked you?

Speaker 1

And it was just such like, when you’re just standing around with your colleagues, having the chats, everyone has a cup of tea and just celebrating as a community, everything you did. And then it was personal and professional and all banded in together.

Speaker 1

And when we moved to working from home, it was really hard maintaining that. And then as the company has grown, we like try getting 60 people on one Zoom call to all do a win and whoa. So what we now do is every Friday, the team’s split up.

Speaker 1

So our goal team, our marketing team, our digital team, our e-comm team will all do their own Zoom, maybe like eight people on a call. And you’ll talk about your big wins and your woes for the week. And just have a moment to connect and celebrate.

Speaker 1

From that, we do one big one at the end of the month now, a big win and whoa and a time hole for the whole team. And someone comes from each team and talks about the win and whoa and like the laughter and the joy and the connection, which ultimately is what well-being is.

Speaker 1

Got a coach from that, is something else.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much, Chupi, for taking the time to come with us today. Chupi has shown the importance of having a well-being at the heart of an organisation and what that can mean for an employee coming to work each day.

Speaker 2

And thank you to you, the listener. We look forward to welcoming you back to another episode of ZDOTalks.