Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Patsy quit her job. Susannah quit the city. Now they’re on a quest to find the path through the wobbly middle of their careers. This podcast is for every woman who’s asking “What now?”.
Hosted by Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day, The Wobbly Middle features interviews with famed city superwomen, dazzling entrepreneurs and revolutionary midwives and doctors who reveal what they’ve learnt through their own wobbly middle experiences.
[00:00:05] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Season two of the Wobbly Middle, a podcast about women reinventing their careers in midlife.
[00:00:11] Patsy Day: Hi, Susannah.
[00:00:13] Susannah de Jager: Hi, Patsy.
[00:00:14] Patsy Day: How's your wobbly middle?
[00:00:15] Susannah de Jager: It's pretty good. Thank you.
I am about to leave Abu Dhabi for the summer, which is a sort of rite of passage because it gets so hot you can't stay. I'm a little bit terrified, having only just settled in somewhere new by the idea of picking up and living out of a suitcase for two months. But I'm very encouraged by how quickly we have felt settled in a new place.
How's your wobbly middle?
[00:00:39] Patsy Day: I've been thinking about our daughters both the same age, preteens, both heading into the wild waters of puberty and periods. It struck me how much shame there is still associated with periods, and I mean, this is nothing new. Even Pliny the Elder had something to say about it way back in AD70.
Crops, withering and dying. Bees abandoning the hive if touched by menstruating women's hand.
Yeah, it's so interesting because I do think we are coming to a watershed moment where the way that these things are viewed has altered, and I was so heartened in the most recent Olympics by the fact that there was a movement about wearing a red spot if you are on your period to just acknowledge that publicly for girls at home as much as anything else, because there was and has been historically a horrible dropout rate for teenage girls when they hit puberty, both because dealing with periods while playing sport wasn't very easy and because of physical awkwardness that could come in and changes of how your body feels during that time. I'm so encouraged that these things are now being spoken about.I think that's also thanks to people like our guest today, Rachel Newton.
Rachel was a hedge fund lawyer. Thriving in the city, suited up doing well, but then she and her husband moved to Canada to be closer to both their families. While Rachel was on maternity leave, juggling parenting and prepping for the Canadian Bar exam, something unexpected caught her attention, waste. Literally, physical waste.
[00:02:19] Susannah de Jager: There was a landfill near her home, and I love this. It sounds like something out of a 1980s film, called Mount Trashmore and it got Rachel thinking hard about what she was throwing away, especially when it came to period products.
[00:02:35] Patsy Day: Yeah. She made changes where she could reducing her household waste, but there was no great solution for period care products. Yes, menstrual cups existed, but she found their sizing was confusing. Some women complained about how they fitted.
[00:02:49] Susannah de Jager: And yet again, it's another example of how underfunded and under-researched women's health can be. The existing solutions were often just fine, not great, not dreadful, but not optimal.
[00:03:01] Patsy Day: Then Rachel has this light bulb moment. We'll let her tell us about it. But it turned into Nixit, an innovative one size fits all menstrual disc. It's reusable, can be worn for 12 hour stretches.
[00:03:14] Susannah de Jager: and in addition to product innovation, she had a mission about making periods normal human, something we can talk about, learn from and live with confidently.
[00:03:24] Patsy Day: Here's our conversation with Rachel from hedge funds to healthcare.
[00:03:31] Patsy Day: Hi Rachel. Welcome to the Wobbly Middle. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:03:35] Rachael Newton: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our chat today.
[00:03:38] Patsy Day: So, as you know, the podcast is all about switches and pivots, and very early on you made a decision between an acting career and a legal one. What were the factors that played into that decision making?
[00:03:51] Rachael Newton: Well, I loved acting. I did a lot of it at school.But at school obviously had to decide what I wanted to go on and study after I left high school, and decided to do law first and see whether I liked it and to do some acting whilst I was at university just to give myself the option of potentially doing it afterwards. But then was living in London, doing my degree, and by the time I graduated, just really wanted the financial security of having a job and had actually initially really wanted to be a barrister. Which for anyone listening who's not in the UK and sort of the lawyers that go to courtand present cases and all that sort of stuff. But ended up becoming a solicitor. Once again, because, when you left university, if you became a solicitor,you hopefully got taken on by a law firm and then they paid for your law college and, you then sort of went to do your training at your law firm. But if you were, if you wanted to be a barrister, you had to be a bit more self-sufficient, and I realized I wasn't quite ready to do that financially.
There's a stability element, but you also loved it. I love the law, yeah. Was a real geek. you know, always remember the first lecture sitting there thinking like, oh, I can't believe I'm here and this is so exciting and turning to my friend and saying, isn't this brilliant? We're here. It's Introduction to Law, and she was like, no, just in an lecture. Like, what? I still find it, very interesting and generally,really enjoyed being a lawyer as well. Loved practicing. Loved what I did.
[00:05:14] Patsy Day: You've mentioned though that there was a moment when you were in private practice and you sort of glimpsed into the future and saw a world where you were a partner in private practice and also a mom, and the challenges that presented.
[00:05:30] Rachael Newton: This was back in the days though, when I started my training contract, the Blackberry didn't even really exist. So, you had to be in the office to work. The partner in my department that I qualified into said to me in this department, the weekends are yours, but we own you during the week. Which I thought was amazing because so many people I knew didn't even have the weekends to themselves. But what would happen is I was so exhausted by the weekend. I couldn't do anything anyway because I've worked, you know, 18 hour days or whatever for five days straight. But I was surrounded by incredibly intelligent, hardworking people, very passionate about what they did.
But looking around did find it hard to see, how I would even meet anyone and or go on to have a family and was doing a project very late one night, working with a female partner who was wonderful. It was probably around 2:00 AM and she sort of strolled in and she went, oh, my husband's really annoyed with me.
And I said, oh, why? And she went, well, I've missed my daughter's birthday party again. I missed it last year too. That was the moment I think where I thought, I don't think I want this for myself. I think I need to get out. So yeah, went in-house, I was doing hedge funds at the time. Went to work for a hedge fund. I was only there for a year actually. Mainly because it didn't have that same sort of comradery that a law firm does and that same sort of environment of collaborating, teaching each other, learning from each other, working together. It was a very, very small legal department and so I moved on quite quickly to an investment bank and was there until I left the UK actually, so I think it was over 10 years I was there for in the end.
[00:07:13] Patsy Day: Do you think it's different for women partners now in the legal arena?
[00:07:18] Rachael Newton: I've got quite a few friends who are women partners. I think it's different in the sense that if they can go home and see their kids and put them to bed, but I know they're still logging on after that happens and waking up early to get work in before their kids wake up. So it's still a hugely demanding career.
But the ones who have done it are extraordinarily passionate about what they do.Yes, it's work, but it's also something they really enjoy doing and Ithink it really has to be if you are going to be able to put those sorts of hours in.
[00:07:51] Patsy Day: And that's what's seen them through their passion for it has endured.
[00:07:54] Rachael Newton: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:55] Patsy Day: And you mentioned leaving the UK you were relocating to Canada because your husband's Canadian, but something unexpected happened somewhere between the UK and Canada. Do you want to tell us about it?
[00:08:08] Rachael Newton: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So we had had our kids they were three and one. My family are in the US, his family are in Canada. We were living in London, but realized that we weren't really taking advantage of living in the city because we had these two small kids. So we decided to move back to Canada. He had already worked, I think he ended up working like a year's notice for the company he was working for, and they said, and please can you stay on please can you just like work remotely? And so I was on maternity leave and we had this moment where it was like, well, we don't have to move back to Canada then if you're working remotely, we could go anywhere.
I had been in the hedge fund industry, and so called some people and long story short is we ended up in the Cayman Islands for a year, which was very lovely, and it's a wonderful place to live. I was meant to be studying for the Canadian Bar. I decided I wanted to continue my legal career, but if you want to practice in Canada, you have to pass the Canadian Bar. So I had gone with all of my books, and I'd signed up for this course and I was ready to go and I opened my laptop and I sat at the dining table and I started the first lecture. And I just thought, I don't want to do this. I don't feel the same as I did when I sat in that first university lecture. This is not exciting to me and I just can't do this right now.
I remember I said to Tom I just, I'm not feeling it. I feel really bad and I don't feel like, and he said,
you've had a really busy, you know, three years. Why don't you just relax, just have some time off to yourself. Just do whatever you want to do. Which was amazing, and so I said okay, well maybe just for a few months,and so I did. And I don't think if I hadn't done that Nixit would've ever happened because it just gave me this mental space and sort of clarity to be able to think about things that I would never normally think about.
[00:10:00] Patsy Day: I'm desperate to get to Nixit, desperate.But I just want to pick up on what you're saying there. How do you think we can, in our busy lives, be more intentional about that next step?
[00:10:10] Rachael Newton: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, you have to be super intentional about it. if you've decided that you want to make a change, then you have to make other changes in order to make that change, right? So, you know, I do things like today I was setting up a Google form for myself, just for some self-reflection at the end of every day. Try and spot some trends and figure out what I'm happy with and what needs to change.
But I have to set up the systems in order for me to do something like that, on a regular basis to actually make it work. But I think it's incredibly difficult, you know, if you've got children, if you are a full-time mom or got a job full-time, that mental load that we all talk about and know and carry, it's very hard to build in that additional time.
I would say also just talking to your partner about it and saying, look, there's this thing and I want to spend some time on it. How can you help me develope a bit of room? So that I have the time to think about these things. That can be really scary too though.
[00:11:05] Patsy Day: Yeah. Now take us back to the beach.
[00:11:08] Rachael Newton: Well, my kids were still very young, still in nappies, and I always feel bad sort of calling out the island because this happens all around the world. But in Cayman, there's no recycling on the island. So all of your trash goes to one basically a massive heap in the middle of the island called Mount Trashmore.
And let's be clear, in Canada, the same thing happens. They just bury it. So nobody sees it. It's happening everywhere, it's just you see it. And so I became very aware of the trash that I was creating because it was all going to landfill. The percentage of things that actually get recycled compared to what gets sent, I think it's 5% or something awful.
But yes, I'd started to reduce my household waste. But you know, you're living on an island, so you just see a lot of plastic washing up on the beaches. You can be digging in the sand with your kids and plastic lids or you know, all the microplastics you see. Became very conscious of all the waste that we were producing and had made switches in our household and then just began to think about period care. So
we had been to visit friends and, you know, there were signs saying, don't throw your tampon down this toilet. We have a septic tank. I had actually always thrown my tampons down the toilet. I hadn't realized that you weren't meant to.
But as part of that, I had sort of been thinking, well, what's an alternative? What else could I use? And menstrual cups had come up. I'd heard about them before.
But I'd always end up going down these rabbit holes because they all came in different shapes and sizes and I just could never figure out which one I should get from my body. So I never ended up buying one.
Then we moved, I began looking more into tampons. I was a tampon user. So the statistic is, if you're a tampon user, you'll use around 11,000 tampons in your lifetime. They'll all go to landfill, or they should, if you're not flushing them down the toilet like I was, and they take around 500 years to degrade.
[00:12:53] Patsy Day: Wow. 500 years.
[00:12:55] Rachael Newton: 500 years. So always had this image in my head of me having left this Earth and my great-great-grandchildren being here and also my tampons still going somewhere in a landfill.
[00:13:11] Patsy Day: That's quite a legacy.
[00:13:13] Rachael Newton: Yeah, exactly right. Not a great image to have in your head. So I was like, I've got to switch, I've got to make the switch. I'm trying to be more sustainable. I can't do this anymore. Then during the course of that research realized tampons aren't necessarily that great for us. The cottons often bleached. There's dioxins in the tampon. We're absorbing from the tampons. They can give you UTIs. I was someone who had no idea what my flow was like. So would often be using like a super plus on a light day, and you know, we all know what it feels like to remove a dry tampon. I always say it's like nails on a chalkboard, you know?
But just again, would just end up down these rabbit holes would never actually like, make the purchase for a cup and felt like there had to be an easier way, something that would really simplify the process for people who were in the same position as me, want to make the switch and are just so confused by the variety of choices out there.
I'd had a friend at law school who was trying to convince me to get a contraceptive diaphragm, and she had said to me, well, you know, you have to leave it in after you use it and sometimes if I get my period, I don't even know that I've got my period and that's sort of where the connection was made and that's why Nixit sits in the same place as the diaphragm. But also simplifies those traditional pain points that people have with traditional cups because they use suction to stay in place and it can be very hard to create the suction seal or break the suction seal. Nixit doesn't need to use suction to stay in place, your anatomy holds it in place. People also don't like that feeling of suction and also there's a lot less nerve endings in your fornix, which is where it sits so 94% of our users rarely or never feel it when it's inserted. Whereas traditional cups you tend to be a lot more aware of.
[00:14:57] Patsy Day: I have a million questions, but I just wanted to ask, you know, you're a lawyer, you've been working in hedge funds. How do you go to then designing a menstrual disc? How did you start?
[00:15:11] Rachael Newton: So had this idea and was like, surely this would work. Luckily was a lawyer so I could do a lot of research on patents and what's out there and how they worked and all that sort of stuff. And then basically had been droning on about this to Tom who just said, look, if you think this is going to work, why don't you just figure out how much it's going to cost to make one and then just figure it out.
So I said, okay, I will. I always say I'd be an excellent stalker cause I, you know, I managed to track down the manufacturer of the leading kind of menstrual cup brand at the time in Canada. So they're Canadian based. They were super helpful about what I needed to do design wise, prototype wise, testing wise.
[00:15:50] Patsy Day: What is the material of the cup? What's it made out of?
[00:15:53] Rachael Newton: It's medical grade silicone and it's done in a one shot process. So that whole design process took us a long time as well. in some silicone products, they'll do one piece and another piece and they'll sort of stick them together. Ours is a single injection mold which is just better really.
So did that, figured out the costing, decided where I wanted to invest that much in just prototyping and RD At the same time, menstrual cups are medical devices, so they're regulated by the FDA in Health Canada. So you need to be following ISO 13456. But again, luckily, we're sort of familiar with delving into large documents and figuring things out and along the way have just met some incredibly kind, generous people who were happy to help me and give me advice.
[00:16:43] Patsy Day: And you forget how far you've come because you don't have to know about the ISO on day one.
[00:16:49] Rachael Newton: Exactly.
[00:16:49] Patsy Day: It's a layering over time.
[00:16:51] Rachael Newton: Absolutely.
[00:16:52] Patsy Day: What advice would you give to other people about how to start?
[00:16:56] Rachael Newton: I think if I were to do it today, I would do it a little bit differently. So I would do the same in terms of prototype and design and costing it out, but I probably wouldn't go into full production. I'd probably do like a Kickstarter. if you are doing a consumer product, a really good way to test whether there is appetite in the market for what you want to do, because I think it's really hard as well not to let ego come into it and think that you've developed, of course, something really incredible and amazing, but you really want to make sure that other people think that too, about what you've created.
[00:17:29] Patsy Day: And what do you think the Kickstarter would've given you?
[00:17:32] Rachael Newton: Well, firstly wouldn't have had to fund it a hundred percent from myself. But of course then just the confidence to move forward and or we could have got more feedback. It was almost like a secret project, right. While I was doing all the R&D and testing it before we went public.
But I think we could have approached it slightly differently and asked people what they thought. But again, it was such a new product that I don't know that we would've got feedback cause nobody really knew what it was when it came out.
[00:17:58] Patsy Day: And what were some early sort of pinch me moments where just was so exciting.
[00:18:03] Rachael Newton: The launch of the website obviously was finally we were there. The plan was, you know, just run ads on Facebook, see what happens, and the first day we ran them we started getting sales.
So, we knew we had something.
[00:18:14] Patsy Day: You've also talked about some of the difficulties there about feedback and you've also previously discussed that when you're doing something on your own it can be a bit lonely and you have to be very much a self-starter.
Yeah, it is very lonely and honestly Istill find it very lonely, even though I have a team.We've heard that from other entrepreneurs who have come onto the podcast to speak about, that loneliness, even though you have a very supportive, wonderful, warm team. But still, ultimately it's you.
[00:18:47] Rachael Newton: Yeah, you don't share all the worries and concerns with them, obviously. You're left to sort of shoulder that and everyone is there to do a job, but you are left to do the sort of bigger picture thinking and where are we going? And how are we going to get there? And will we get there? And what do I need to do? And how are we going to do this with the resources that we currently have? So, yeah, it can be quite lonely. What I have found, I tried to get much better at things like LinkedIn, and so posted a couple of months ago and just said, are there any other female Canadian entrepreneurs out there who want to like, have a virtual coffee?
And had a really nice response and had some virtual coffees, and actually just yesterday, just didn't have a great day and just pinged one of the other entrepreneurs. She's in the period care space, but she doesn't have a menstrual disc and I said, do you mind just hopping on a call this week?
I'm just really struggling with some stuff and I'd just really love to just chat to you, and she emailed right back and was like, of course, like we're going to talk on Friday. You can find the people, I think to make it feel less lonely, but it can be quite difficult to get there because I'm also naturally introverted and so I don't like putting out there that I'm wanting to feel less lonely. And it's a funny place to be sometimes.
[00:20:04] Patsy Day: The image of the entrepreneur in our heads is very much sort of Richard Branson and we are not all built in that mold.
We've talked a little bit about the Nixit menstrual disc, and I'd love you to tell us more about this because I was really surprised, but I shouldn't have been about how late pads and Tampax became a consumer product.
[00:20:29] Rachael Newton: I was reading that it was the World War I nurses that were repurposing the military bandages, but it still took 20 years from that for it to become a consumer product and then it took a further 40 years for the little nice adhesive strips to be added to your pad to do away with the belt and the pinsand 50 years later we don't seem to have moved on that dramatically. Yeah, I think what I found so interesting when I came up with the idea is I started talking to my husband more about just periods and working in a law firm, working long hours, working at the bank. If I was on my period and using a tampon, I always had a ticking clock in my head of when I needed to change it.
And I had multiple moments at work where I thought, oh no, it's leaked. I'm going to stand up and that's just going to be my blood over my chair and I had never shared those things with him. Not because we don't talk about things like that, just because we just didn't. When I told him he was like, wait, and then he started speaking to his sister and his mum. He was going, hang on a minute. I didn't realize that you were all dealing with all of this, all of the time. He was saying if men had to deal with this, we would've solved for it a long, long time ago. He wasn't saying this in a derogatory way. I must add.
I
[00:21:42] Patsy Day: think he's talking about the power rather than women's ingenuity.
[00:21:46] Rachael Newton: Exactly. But you know, unfortunately because it is women that have them, we haven't had much advancement in period care. You might have seen last July, the first ever tampon study was conducted.
[00:21:59] Patsy Day: Yes, I did see that.
[00:22:00] Rachael Newton: No study had ever been done on tampons before 2024 and in that study all the tampons tested, they were organic, name brand, store brand, and non-organic. They all contained toxic metals. They all contained lead. They contained arsenic. it blew my mind that it had taken that long for a study like that to come out. But just to go back to your question, yes, there had been so little advancement.
I also think that we had been taught to think about our periods as something that shouldn't be discussed. That are a little shameful. That are kind of dirty and disgusting. You don't want to see your period blood, you don't want to touch it. Ew. But that exacerbates the culture of not speaking about it, not solving for it, and so when you change that narrative, when you start to ask people to think about the products that they're putting in their body to question what they've been using. People begin to think about alternatives and what else might be out there.
When I started Nixit and I had the prototype and I was using it, the way that I thought about my period completely changed. I felt, and continue to now feel, so in touch with my body because I understand my flow. I know when my heavy days are. I know when my light days are. I know if something's different. I mean, it sounds so corny, but I'd had two kids. I didn't know anything about my period. I was just learning about it in my late thirties and I had this newfound respect for what my body had done and was capable of and the fact that having this period meant that I could do all of those things.
So part of Nixit as well was I really wanted to change that narrative around periods. No one's ever going to jump for joy when they get their period, but I didn't want people to feel like I had like so many people had about it being just this sort of disgusting burden to view it in a different way and to appreciate their bodies.
[00:24:18] Patsy Day: I think that comes through quite strongly on your website where you talk about, not only improving people's psych, but also, and these are Nixit's words, to spark conversations that make people feel comfortable to talk about this human experience, this de-stigmatizing menstruation.
Being able to talk about what's normal feeds into this discussion that we are seeing now around endometriosis, around what normal cramps are, about why people say it's normal for women to have headaches and cramps and that it is just seen as normal and we should be saying, well, this is not normal.
Opening up this conversation is really important for our age, as you say, but also you and I both have daughters.
[00:25:03] Rachael Newton: Yeah, absolutely, and we talk about it a lot in this house and it's just talked about completely normally. But definitely that's part of it. You know, I don't think that Nixit is the period solution for every single body. The fact is it's not. Part of our role is to provide that kind of educational piece for people so that they can make informed decisions about their period care, whatever it might be.
And also, you've highlighted endometriosis, menstrual cups, Nixit, other cups, they're a great way for you to be able to measure your flow so that you can confidently say to your doctor, look, I'm sorry. This is not normal. I am losing this much blood in a period. You need to do something about it.
I think COVID was an interesting turning point. The Me Too movement came out. People were at home more. People just began to question things more. I've noticed a real shift since that time of people, particularly women, having more confidence to challenge and question and being told that it's okay to challenge and question and actually you should.
[00:26:09] Patsy Day: Definitely, I really love your branding, The color palette is fantastic, as we've said, you're pretty unapologetic about creating a dialogue around your periods. What was the original inspiration behind the Nixit brand?
[00:26:24] Rachael Newton: So I've always said that when I walked down the period care aisle, it was like flowery feminine care. I grew up when they literally had an advert, I don't know if remember this, it was in the UK of a woman riding a white horse and she was wearing like white clothes and everything's like flowing behind her.
I think it was for Always something. It was just so not correct. That is not how you feel on your period. So I really wanted something bold and bright. I kept on using the word edgy. Tom was like, will you stop saying edgy? You just said all the time. I was like, no, you know, I'm a very direct person.
I wanted the brand to be very direct. But also as I've said, to make people feel like they were doing something nice for themselves when they were buying their period care. So even when we designed the box, I wanted it to feel like an unboxing experience. So you open it, there's a message, there's a sort of flow to how you unpack the box and
we do have a lot of people who email us and say, you know, for the first time in my life, I'm looking forward to having my period. That's how we want people to feel and so we have these very bold, bright colors, but I want to make it fun and recently we launched condoms. The TLDR on that is when I got into this space we then started to sort of branch into the sexual wellness space because people use lubricant to insert their menstrual cup. So we made a lubricant, that's a personal lubricant as well. But we designed a really beautiful bottle. It looks really lovely on your bedside table, again, we're saying just because you need lubricant, it's nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody uses lubricant, leave it on your bedside. It looks gorgeous. But that has again, made us look more into like, what are the ingredients in, you know, your normal lube that you, you buy off the shelf? Are they good for our pH balance? And then that led us into condoms. There are so many added ingredients in condoms that just aren't that great for our vaginas and so we made condoms.But even those I wanted those to be really fun. Those were in pink boxes and we sort of ended up in this case where pink was like girly and a sort of default if you were trying to make a product for women. No, like, we want to own pink. We love pink. Pink is gorgeous. It pops on shelf. It looks lovely. So we've made it really fun. The three pack is the sprint trio. There's the stamina squad. The marathon pack. we want people to feel excited about buying these products but also, you know, when it comes to things like sexual health. We want to empower people to take control of their sexual health. We want them to feel confident buying condoms that they know are made with their vagina in mind and to give them that confidence to say, I want to use this condom because I know that this is actually better for me. Our packaging tries to reflect that fun side, but also to say we've made this for you. Like these are made for you. When we made these condoms, we thought about vaginas and we made them pH balanced and we got rid of all the nasty ingredients and you're not going to have irritation after you use these.
[00:29:22] Patsy Day: From a technical point of view, how did you identify the tone of voice? How did you find Nixit's identity? it's very clear on your Instagram. It's quite playful. Your graphics are fantastic.
[00:29:38] Rachael Newton: Did you go to a design agency? How did you find them? Yeah, so again, a lot of Googling. We worked with abranding agency. I think I found her cause I read somewhere she'd done something for Benefit, who I really liked at the time and she was wonderful at helping me to develope the brand voice and figuring out how we wanted to speak to people.
I think the language she came up with was the confidential confidant. Like your friend who you can turn to, you can ask questions of who's going to give you like a straight answer. I think it's also honestly rooted in the fact that, it's just how I speak in general and say that's kind of easy, in terms of brand voice.
[00:30:21] Patsy Day: Were there any branding missteps?
[00:30:23] Rachael Newton: Yes, we wanted to appeal to everyone. Our first iteration of the website we put in brackets W O closed brackets, menstruation without worry, (wo)menstruation without worry. It was just meant to be a bit playful and whatever.
But it caused a problem. People didn't like it.
[00:30:44] Patsy Day: Ah, interesting.
[00:30:46] Rachael Newton: Yeah, it was meant to be inclusive, but ended up making people feel excluded.
[00:30:51] Patsy Day: And taking you back to your, entrepreneurial side, what else has surprised you about being a founder? Did you ever see yourself being a founder?
[00:31:02] Rachael Newton: No. Never had it on my Bingo card, to be honest. I had this notion in my head that if you are an entrepreneur you sort of would have loads of free time.
[00:31:14] Patsy Day: That's like people thinking they're going to have free time on maternity leave.
[00:31:18] Rachael Newton: Yes. I remember when I was ready to launch and I was saying to my husband, I'd seen a job posting and I was like, I think I should apply for this because I think I'll have loads of time and I could do that part-time and I could do this part-time and, I could definitely fit it all in.
No chance. Even now, five years later. There's just always something to do.
What's surprising is it became, and still is my third child, and I have put as much time as I would into it as having a another baby.
I care about it as much as my own children. Don't tell them that.
[00:31:56] Patsy Day: I wonder what you would've done if you hadn't had that time off and you just carried on.
I sometimes think that not giving yourself that time to think about it actually shortens our careers because the law is very demanding and after a while you get tired. It'll take whatever you can give, and even though now you may be, in a role that's taking everything you can give, it's different and it's changed and you've had new energy. I just wonder, whether it has had the effect of lengthening your career even though it was a pivot.
[00:32:37] Rachael Newton: I always think lawyers are quite interesting because ultimately we're rule followers aren't we? Even when I was a lawyer and thinking, what else could I do? You know, on my sort of unhappy days, I found it very hard to think outside of that legal box.
[00:32:49] Patsy Day: Especially since your first decision law or acting, you chose stability and security. I suppose your circumstances were different. You had built in that stability over the course of your career and then had a bit more flexibility.
But we are still those people.
[00:33:05] Rachael Newton: Yeah, and I think my husband is entrepreneurial and I think if he hadn't said, why don't you just go and figure it out? I probably would still be talking about it today, doing whatever I'm doing, and you are right. I don't know if I would've continued to be a lawyer had I moved back to Toronto and thought that was the path that I was following, and I think as lawyers, we have so many great qualities. Incredibly organized, detail oriented, you know, we're pretty adaptable actually. Yeah, I don't know whether my mindset would've led me to anything else.
[00:33:38] Patsy Day: Yeah.
This is something we ask all our guests, but what would you tell your 30-year-old self about where you are now?
[00:33:45] Rachael Newton: I always find it funny because, if you asked me when I was 30, where I'd be in five years, I'd probably still have me in the UK, and my life has changed so much over the past 16 years. If you asked me where I'd be in two years, I wouldn't be able to give you a confident answer, and so I'd probably tell myself to just not worry so much about the future and just focus on the present and enjoy it.
Thank you so much, Rachel. It's been so lovely having you on the show.
Thank you for having me.
[00:34:15] Patsy Day: Thank you for listening, for sharing your stories, and for being part of the conversation.
[00:34:20] Susannah de Jager: New episodes of The Wobbly Middle are released every other week. Please follow us and leave a review. It really helps others to find us.