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Terry Clune has started eight fintech companies in three decades to help such clients as Barclays, Wells Fargo and Harvard handle taxes, payroll and marketing in other countries. Having sold just one, he's already well on his way to becoming a billionaire.

In the misty rolling hills of Wicklow, Ireland, Terry Clune founded his first business. He was eight, the son of a farmer, and looking for a way to avoid long, wet days in the field. He began collecting and cleaning discarded fertilizer bags from neighboring farmers and selling them in bundles of 20 for one Irish pound apiece, mostly to wood merchants who would bundle firewood in them.

It wasn't long before the precocious eight-year-old had the newest BMX bike in his driveway and could afford all the Snickers bars he wanted. But, unfortunately for Clune, the high life was short-lived.

"Life was good until one day, this young guy, a seven-year-old, came across the mountain with a better bag and put me out of business," says Clune. "A smarter guy saw what I was doing, thought he could do it better, and he did, and I was too busy getting fat on Snickers to see it coming."

It was a valuable lesson, and one to which the 51-year-old credits his huge success.

Since his fertilizer bag business went bust, Clune has made a career out of seeing what others are doing, and trying to do it better. That has led him to start eight companies in the fintech space, all providing software solutions to help global companies or universities handle taxes, payroll and marketing in other countries, with clients ranging from Barclays and Wells Fargo to Harvard University. Clune operates these companies through CluneTech, his holding company in Kilkenny, Ireland. While he wouldn't confirm revenue or net profits, Forbes spoke to analysts and used publicly available information to estimate his net worth at $900 million.

The majority of his net worth derives from his estimated 50% stake in CluneTech's largest holding, TransferMate. The company, which facilitates cross-border payments for the world's largest banks, became Ireland's newest unicorn in May 2022, when it raised $70 million in capital from the U.K.-based pension fund Railpen at a $1 billion valuation. Clune also has an estimated $280 million in cash from selling his international payroll firm Immedis for nearly $630 million in June.

On deck are plans to raise money for Sprintax, which helps non-U.S. residents file taxes in America, and he's working toward IPOs for several other companies. If all goes according to plan, Clune will be a billionaire within a year or two.

Not that he's necessarily looking forward to that day. "He doesn't seek any accolades, banners or headlines," says Joanna Murphy, a longtime friend and colleague of Clune's who is CEO of two of his companies, including Clune's first venture, Taxback.com. "He's Mr. Ordinary, and values that as a currency above any other currency, including money."

But when it comes to his businesses, Clune insists he's just getting started. "I think I have a lot more company in me," he says. "I don't plan on retiring anytime soon."

B orn in London to Irish parents in 1972, Clune's family moved back to the Emerald Isle when he was just a year old to open a sheep and barley farm in the rural Irish county of Wicklow.

At 17, he left home for Dublin to attend Trinity College, studying business, but spent the summer after his second year in Germany working in a factory. "Back then, it was very common for Irish students to work abroad, and you could make a lot more money if you went to Germany," he says.

The woman who ran the factory liked his work ethic, and asked if he could bring over some of his fellow students the following summer. So, Clune started a business getting Irish students jobs at the German factory and finding them places to live. "At the time I had dreadlocks down to here," says Clune, pointing to his shoulders, "and Doc Martin boots up to my knees, and I was wearing a suit interviewing my classmates who are paying me 200 pounds each. It was quite the image."

A total of 120 students accompanied him to Germany that summer. The scheme went off without a hitch, until the very end. As residents of Ireland, Clune's crew should have been entitled to reclaim a portion of their income tax based on the much lower Irish rate. At least, that's what Clune thought.

"Throughout the summer, the students had paid about 50% income tax in Germany, and along the way I had promised them 'don't worry, we'll get that back toward the end, and that will be your drinking money for the year ahead,'" Clune says.

Nearing the start of the next semester, Clune gathered the tax forms for all of his 120 paying clients in his suitcase (a Guinness duffel bag) and ventured to the German tax office.

"I put the Guinness bag up on the counter as 120 students all waited outside the front door for their cash, and I said in broken German, 'I'd like to get this tax back please,'" Clune recalls. "They came back after five minutes and said 'es tut mir leid,' which means, 'I'm very sorry, but your students aren't due any money back.'"

"Rather than buying the brand new thing, I had to settle for the second thing, which was probably good enough-and there's value in that."

According to Clune, fate then intervened in his favor. "I was coming down the lift wondering what the hell I was going to say to these students, when the lift stops at level two, and a guy comes in wearing a beautiful suit and a twisty mustache," Clune says. Eyeing his Guinness bag, the man asks, "Do you happen to come from Ireland?"

The man introduced himself as the director of finance at the tax office. He had just returned from a vacation in Ireland, and was eager to hear what an Irishman was doing in a German tax office with a duffel bag.

After explaining his predicament, the man took Clune up to his 8th-floor office, and following an afternoon of phone calls to colleagues about international tax treaties, he told Clune that he and his friends could get all of their money back.

Not only did he save Clune, but he gave him his next big idea. Back in Ireland, he founded Taxback, designed to help the thousands of Irish people working overseas each year reclaim the foreign taxes they paid.

The plan was to become an accountant after college and run Taxback as a side hustle. But soon he became inundated with inquiries from prospective clients around the world. So he left his job at Price Waterhouse Cooper to focus full time to his startup.

For a kid who grew up on an Irish farm, adapting to foreign cultures and tax systems proved to be a significant adjustment. "The first time I went to China, I learned how to exchange a business card - you do it with panache and total respect, with two hands on the card," he says. Soon he was opening Taxback offices in countries like China, India and Australia.

He had to bootstrap to scale his business in the 90s, before private equity and venture capital made funding more readily available for companies like Clune's. "I had to be a lot more thrifty," he says. "Rather than buying the brand new thing, I had to settle for the second thing, which was probably good enough-and there's value in that." It also meant he held onto more of the equity.

Clune was short on cash, but had plenty of ideas. "When we were transferring our tax refunds to our customers in Brazil, very often we would send checks, and the checks would very often go missing in the post," Clune says. "The postman probably took the checks."

That's when he started using bank transfers instead, but they would regularly cost the customer up to $300 in transfer fees. "That's where the business of TransferMate came about," says Clune, who founded the company in 2010, "to cut out SWIFT, the interbank system, which is very, very expensive for individual payments."

The big challenge was figuring out how to operate in the highly regulated space of global payments, where companies need separate licenses in every country and, in the U.S., in every state. The process for acquiring those licenses, says Sinead Fitmaurice, TransferMate's CEO, took about nine years, but is now a key part of TransferMate's competitive advantage.

"It was quite an ambitious idea, but if you know Terry, you know that he would be the biggest advocate for identifying a problem and doing what it takes to solve it for the customer," says Fitzmaurice, who has run daily operations for the past 13 years and still speaks to Clune multiple times a day.

Clune got an idea for yet another venture just a few years after founding TransferMate. "As we were growing TransferMate and Taxback, we had to work with staff in about 30 countries, which meant managing the payroll for all of them," Clune says.

He tried handling payroll internally, then commissioned PWC. But the complexities of paying a staff spread across 30 different financial systems proved too overwhelming.

Hence, Clune founded Immedis in 2016 to manage cross-border payroll for businesses with a global workforce. His third venture, Immedis is the only company he's ever sold. He offloaded it to UKG, an American multinational workforce management company, in June for about $600 million.

"We are building these businesses to take them to the IPO stage, and if somebody comes along with an offer to take us off that journey along the way, I'm happy to entertain those conversations too"

W hile the seven remaining companies that make up CluneTech operate separately, they cross-sell to one another and also share office space. Roughly 300 staffers work out of the corporate headquarters in Kilkenny, Ireland, including Clune. Over half of the total 1,300 employees are based in Bulgaria, where Clune opened his first office outside of Ireland in 2001 with just 15 people. He first took a liking to the country after reading about it in a world atlas, and felt its black sea scenery made it the perfect place for a major office.

"Each of the businesses in my group, they've all got their own management teams and leadership teams, but they often work in similar spaces with similar clients, so we've been able to share a lot of business across each of the firms," Clune says. A new client for one company could mean a new client for three companies.

Clune thinks his younger businesses have high dollar potential too. That includesBenamic, which helps manage international marketing campaigns; Visa First, a visa facilitation service; and Sprintax, which he says he's most bullish about. Born out of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sprintax helps non-U.S. residents like college students file taxes in America; about a third of all U.S. international students, some 415,000 students, use Sprintax's software. But Clune says the real growth opportunity is in the corporate sector, where an increasingly globalized workforce means lots of potential clients looking to streamline their overseas payments system. "That software is very relevant for staff working in different countries where there are tax compliance issues," Clune says. "That company has some massive scale potential."

Up next for his assortment of companies: hopefully a public offering or sale. "We are building these businesses to take them to the IPO stage, and if somebody comes along with an offer to take us off that journey along the way, I'm happy to entertain those conversations too," says Clune, who has come a long way from being muscled out of his first business by an enterprising kid a year younger than him.

"Being the eight-year-old and being successful with one business is a huge accomplishment," he says. "It is slightly more difficult to do it again. Sustaining success is the hard part."

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After starting her business by saving €10,000 working as a makeup artist, Aimee Connolly's Sculpted brand now has a turnover of €22m ... but the determined entrepreneur has even greater ambitions, writes Ben Haugh

Aimee Connolly bursts into the lobby of Sculpted By Aimee headquarters in Dundrum, hunched over and holding a wet coat above her head.

The 31-year-old beauty entrepreneur curses the July downpour before composing herself and offering me a cup of tea.

"I've just come from Boots HQ," she says. "They had a celebration for us as we achieved number one in their mass cosmetics [sales], which is huge. We basically outnumbered Maybelline, Rimmel and L'Oréal.

"I think we take it for granted because we're in this hamster wheel of growth. But actually, it was such a significant moment. Like, I don't believe they've ever had an Irish beauty brand [in that position]."

Growth is an understatement. Sculpted By Aimee was founded by Connolly in 2016 after she saved up €10,000 by working as a freelance makeup artist.

Last year the company recorded a turnover of about €22m. According to its most recent accounts, it had after-tax profits of €2.1m in 2022 and accumulated profits of €6.6m.

Its staff count surpassed 90 this year.

The company opened stores on Belfast's Victoria Square and London's Carnaby Street last year, adding to its locations on Grafton Street in Dublin and Kildare Village. The shops, decked out in pink, also offer a range of makeup courses.

As we walk through the office's corridors, there is no mistaking what company operates here. Everything is a different shade of pink, from the plant pots to the cupboards. Slogans such as 'Beauty packed with goodness' are written on the walls.

Connolly, sporting a pink blazer, leads me to the kitchen where a pink Smeg kettle sits beside a pink Smeg toaster.

Greg, the company's senior supply chain manager, is shuffling around. One of a small number of men working in the office, he admits to being "outnumbered".

"We did do a Euros sweepstake, though," Connolly says defensively, before handing me tea in a pink Sculpted mug.

We sit down on pink chairs at a large shiny white table. Polaroids of the company's staff at events adorn
the walls. What would 18-year-old Aimee have thought if she was presented with a snapshot of the company in 2024, I ask.

"She would think, 'God, that's so cool'. But I also think there would be this inherent sense of, 'but of course that was going to happen'.

"Whether it was naivety or confidence or self-belief or just not thinking too far ahead, the whole concoction of the mix worked."

Launched when Connolly was just 22, the company's impressive rise makes more sense when you understand her inherent self-confidence.

"I come from a tiny family. I was an only child, just me and my mam, so that alone gives you this sense of grit. She provided for us her whole life.

"She was a working mom as well because she had to be, but she definitely had this insane 'I can do' attitude. That definitely drifts into your own psyche a little bit."

Connolly describes her upbringing in Ballinteer, south Dublin, as "totally privileged" but adds that "money wasn't flush".

Her mother, who worked in pharmaceuticals but now has a property business, was "badly hit" by the recession.

"I had to go work at 16. I was totally happy to do so and I'm thrilled that I did. I think I've always had this aversion to debt... like saving up [for] my first stereo or my first [ Volkswagen] Golf and the same for the business."

Connolly credits her work experience at Benefit Cosmetics, the US luxury brand owned by Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, for two weeks during transition year with setting her on this career path.

"I realised I loved dealing with people and selling products I was passionate about. I was your classic girly girl for makeup," she says.

She then landed a weekend job in Urban Decay, the US brand owned by L'Oréal, before moving to Mac Cosmetics, the Canadian makeup giant owned by Estée Lauder Companies.

After finishing school at Coláiste Íosagáin in Booterstown, she studied Commerce International at University College Dublin and started freelancing as a makeup artist.

"I would badger the TV3 crew about getting onto Xposé and doing screen tests. I spent three years working with customers, which is arguably the best thing that I ever did for my confidence, having to put yourself out there on a counter and try and sell things to all sorts of personalities."

When Connolly graduated in 2016, she had already been working in makeup for six years. She decided to build her own brand.

"The first thing I did when I finished my finals was google 'European cosmetic manufacturers'. I sent about 22 emails and got two responses, one said no and one said yes."

She travelled to the UK and created her first product, a trio palette for sculpting, using €10,000 in savings. Her big idea was to encourage women that less is more.

"This is in an era where people were wearing so much makeup, and Instagram-heavy makeup. I was really defying that by saying, 'you don't need 75 products, you only need five with a few simple tips and this is how you do it.'"

Connolly was not an 'influencer' at this stage and only had about 10,000 social media followers. She had to use old-fashioned tactics to get the brand noticed.

"I knew I wanted omnichannel. I don't know why, but I just had this sense of 'I want online and I want retail'. And so I said to myself, 'if I can get into the top five pharmacies then hopefully the independent pharmacies will look at what they're stocking and then approach me.'"

She drove around Dublin holding meetings and convinced the pharmacies to take a chance on her brand, then called Sculpted by Aimee Connolly. The surname was dropped two or three years later to "internationalise".

The products sold well and it was time to reorder, but Connolly was unhappy with their component quality.

"The company I was dealing with in the UK, I felt, weren't as professionally respectful to me, versus say another brand that they were dealing with, because I was a naive 22- or 23-year-old girl."

She flew to the UK again and threatened to end the business relationship if the quality didn't improve.

"Obviously to these guys, I had placed a tiny order and I was this tiny fish. I'm sure they weren't that worried at the time.

"But their response confirmed everything that I was feeling. It was like 'silly little girl' or something to that effect."

Connolly held back tears until she was out of the meeting, and decided never to work with the company again.

"But it was the best thing that ever happened to me so early on, because it forced me to go to a trade show in Italy where, by chance, I met our South Korean partner. I flew out to his factory in Seoul three weeks later.

"It's eight or nine years on now and they produce about 70% of our range still to this day. We have the most amazing relationship."

Connolly visits the factory two or three times per year and these trips feature heavily on her social media channels. But the entrepreneur denies it is all for show.

"I don't know the compounds, but I have a very good gut [feeling] about what will blend or what won't. They know when I come over for that week that I'll have the lab coat on [and will be] sitting there watching how they mix and [checking] what doesn't mix."

While Connolly insists that Sculpted does not sell 'white-label' products - generic products bought by brands who then add their label - she accepts that it's not always possible to innovate in such a saturated market.

"I push the originality factor and am always asking, 'how can we make this Sculpted?' But sometimes that's not right, because actually what's working is working."

Asked if she considers her brand's role in the pressure on women to look perfect, she replies "100%". She adds: "One of our biggest hashtags over the last few years has been #filterfreefaces and I think that's so important. We don't filter or Photoshop our images."

Connolly says the company's customers "skew older", which is a "surprise to people". Its core market is 25-44, but the "biggest segment" is 35-44.

In September 2022, Connolly opened her first shop on Grafton Street in Dublin. The pandemic was winding down, but the high street had not yet recovered.

"People thought I was mad," she says. "But I had such a strong gut [feeling] that experiential face-to-face [retailing] was going to come back even stronger than ever, and I was obviously proven right."

A branch in Kildare Village was next in July 2023, followed by openings in Belfast in September and London in November.

"The numbers were going in the right direction and also the units that became available were right," she says.

It was also a big year for Connolly personally, as she married long-term partner John Greene, who co-owns several Camile Thai franchises through Majestic Restaurants Ltd.

Seven hundred people attended the store opening in London, easing fears that the brand might not be sufficiently well known there. At the time, just one in ten of Connolly's social media followers were in the UK. That has since increased to one in four.

"I feel like we're in a really, really good place in the UK. You know, we have our flagship, we have the Boots distribution. We have a premium retailer opening up in September, and all the stars are aligning," she says.

When asked to name the premium retailer, Connolly seems unsure whether she can say, before revealing that Sculpted has landed a deal with Selfridges in Manchester and London to open in September.

"The plan is to keep growing every area of the business. There is a huge opportunity for the taking in the UK. We are only scratching the surface. All the while we are building the go-to-market plan for the US and that's the big dog."

Connolly wants to enter the US market in the first half of next year and says the company would ideally partner with Ulta Beauty or Sephora, the chain pharmacies.

"My ultimate plan for the next five to ten years is to be within the top ten beauty brands globally. I don't say that lightly. I know that's huge, but I so firmly believe that we can do that."

The company is aiming for a 50% increase this year on 2023's turnover of €22m. Retail accounts for half of sales, followed by 30% online and 20% in its flagship stores. But Connolly denies that she is motivated by money.

"I love the business. I love what I do. I feel really grateful that I get to do this. And I love the journey. It's taken me to wild places, meeting wild people doing wild things.

"I just want to see this brand achieve the full success that I think it should. And I don't have an exit plan. I'm not saying, 'right, in three years Aimee's off in the sunset on her yacht.' I have no intention to do that, and if I exited right now I'd just start another brand."

When pressed, Connolly accepts that she may exit the business at some stage in the future. How would she spend her time then, if not on an expensive yacht?

"I think I will always stay super-interested in business. So when I look at the proper future, I'd love to be a consultant or work at something that helps businesses to grow."

But for now, she's too busy building an empire to think too hard about that.
For more on this interview pick up a copy of Business Plus Magazine on sale now Photo: Aimee Connolly. Fran Veale

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How Aimee Connolly turned €10,000 savings into a multimillion-euro brand

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Aimee Connolly bursts into the lobby of Sculpted By Aimee headquarters in Dundrum, hunched over and holding a wet coat above her head.

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Makeup

Sculpted by Aimee founder says opening a new store in London is 'surreal'

She self-funded her own beauty brand seven years ago - and now Aimee Connolly is reaping the rewards.

The 30-year-old Dubliner has opened her first London store on the super hip Carnaby Street and says it is "surreal" to see her pink sign above the door.

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'Before people even get to fail, a lot of them don't even start' - Aimee Connolly's rise from a Mac counter to her own beauty empire

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She self-funded her own beauty brand seven years ago - and now Aimee Connolly is reaping the rewards.

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Aimee Connolly: ‘Showing my journeys to the factories eliminates any doubt around the whole process at Sculpted’

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Beauty entrepreneur Aimee Connolly has her sights firmly set on world domination and with famous fans, new launches and a flagship store she’s definitely on her way. She speaks to Jen Stevens about what’s coming next

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As part of Bank of Ireland's Money Smarts series, makeup mogul Aimee Connolly chats to presenter James Patrice, sharing her impressive journey to success through starting her own business and providing inspiration for budding young entrepreneurs.

Her award-winning makeup brand, Sculpted By Aimee, was founded in 2016, and having recently launched in Boots stores across the UK, global market dominance seems well within Aimee's reach.

Here, she shares her advice for students considering taking a similar path to becoming a business owner.

Aimee Connolly chats to presenter James Patrice, sharing her impressive journey to success through starting her own business and providing inspiration for budding young entrepreneurs.

So, where did it all start? Well, it was the common panic of finding last-minute transition year work experience that spurred Aimee's interest in makeup, as she eventually secured a job at House of Fraser's Benefit Cosmetics counter. From there, her confidence grew, largely due to the job's requirement of approaching customers for on-the-spot makeup consultations. Through this, a love of makeup began to blossom.

Like many others, Aimee always loved school, which is where she developed essential transferable skills that she still uses to this day as an entrepreneur. Things like adhering to deadlines, setting personal expectations and abiding by a strong work ethic are all vital strengths to have if you launch your own business. Although you may not realise you're learning these skills at the time, their worth will be proven down the line.

For those currently on the fence about its benefits, Aimee describes the decision to do transition year as 'game-changing', both in terms of personal growth and career development. Her acquired skills and clarity from that year have played a key role in getting Aimee to where she is today. The freedom associated with TY is unparalleled in professional life, as it's a pressure-free zone designed to help you try new things and figure out your passion.

Aimee advises that adhering to deadlines, setting personal expectations and abiding by a strong work ethic are all vital strengths to have if you launch your own business.

For those juggling a part-time job with their studies, Aimee proves that balancing both is very doable. While it may seem like a means of survival, a part-time job can provide strong foundations for having a healthy relationship with money in later life. The basics of budgeting, spending and saving can never be learned too soon. Master them early and you'll be more on track than you realise.

The best advice Aimee received in school was to push herself outside of her comfort zone. In turn, her advice for today's students that are unsure about which path they'd like to take after school is to simply be okay with being undecided about things. Reckon with the fact that there's a lot of time to figure things out, especially when you're in your teenage years. Even if you settle on one thing and find that it doesn't work out, Aimee assures the youth of today that it's okay to try something else to see what fits. Time is on your side.

Social media was where Aimee learned a lot about owning and growing her own business. She was managing her own makeup pages on Facebook at a time when social media wasn't hugely recognised as an effective marketing channel. Aimee recommends that budding entrepreneurs take a similar approach in jumping aboard new things, particularly with emerging social media platforms.

"Social is a great way to be creative and put your own stamp on things to put yourself out there", she says.

You can reach a large amount of people a lot quicker with social media than through traditional means of advertising. The emergence of TikTok is a prime example of how pushing yourself to embrace new things can lead to you figuring out a way to market yourself or your business, as many teens are now establishing success on the new platform.

With a successful and growing business under her belt, Aimee serves as inspiration to those considering a life of entrepreneurship.

For those considering starting their own business, Aimee advises you to trust yourself: "If you don't know everything, you'll learn it", she says.

Entrepreneurs tend to have the confidence to go out and find the answers themselves. She also stresses that you should know your product or service incredibly well. Since the market can often be saturated, it's vital to know your competitors' offerings and be crystal clear on what sets your product apart, since that's the first question potential investors will usually ask.

Although daunting at first, Aimee quickly got to grips with the financial demands associated with growing your own business. Thanks to her studies in commerce and majoring in tax and digital marketing, Aimee was on steady footing from the outset. Between ensuring people get paid on time and liaising with suppliers, it can be a learning curve at the beginning, but these days, it's an everyday task that Aimee's grown to feel comfortable with.

With a successful and growing business under her belt, Aimee serves as sn inspiration to those considering a life of entrepreneurship. Her perpetual appetite for learning new things and embracing the journey was evident even during her school days. Whether it's taking on a part-time job to fund your passion, becoming better at sticking to deadlines, or trying out new things to see where your areas of interest lie, every small action has the potential to carve out the future that you want.
For more information on financial literacy and the Bank of Ireland Money Smarts programme, click here.

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Finding the confidence to start your own business

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As part of Bank of Ireland's Money Smarts series, makeup mogul Aimee Connolly chats to presenter James Patrice, sharing her impressive journey to success through starting her own business and providing inspiration for budding young entrepreneurs.

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Kylie and William O'Donoghue tell Deanna O'Connor about the inspiration behind their FemFuelz women's nutritional supplements and how they plan to grow the brand

Sibling entrepreneurs Kylie and William O'Donoghue started their business, FemFuelz nutritional supplements for women, with little but a loan and some youthful exuberance, while Kylie was still in college.

By starting small and growing organically, they've built it up to a strong online business and 350 retail listings.

Both studied business in UL, with William graduating in 2017, and Kylie in 2019. The FemFuelz vision was already underway by the time Kylie (26) left college.

With her hurler brother regularly advising her to take supplements to benefit her gym training, she couldn't find anything in the market that felt targeted to her.

"William was always trying to educate me on what I should be taking before, during or after exercise, to fuel myself efficiently," Kylie recalls. "Through that inability to find a brand I felt I could relate to came the idea of a female-based supplement brand."

In 2018, they began to research the concept. "We reached out to dieticians, strength and conditioning coaches, and nutritionists to better understand how we could further develop sports nutrition and make them more tailored for the female body and nutritional needs," Kylie explains

While Kylie grappled with her final year exams, William got to grips with the business, looking to the Local Enterprise Office for guidance.

Coming from an entrepreneurial family it felt natural to them to follow in the footsteps of their parents, who run Elite Home Products, which imports and markets bathroom, kitchen and homeware products from its owned premises at Smithstown Industrial Estate in Shannon.

After graduating, William (28) had been working in an aircraft leasing company, while Kylie took up a position in Dell. Once FemFuelz launched in October 2020, Kylie committed to the venture full-time in November with William following her into the business a few months later.

Kylie recalls the evening the FemFuelz website went live for orders, with the sibling founders just finished work at their day jobs.

"It was fairly hectic," she says, and it underlined the need to commit to the business full-time. "You don't want to look back and regret not making that call earlier. We wanted to be able to give it our all."

FemFuelz could not sustain two salaries at the start. It hasn't been easy, but youth and inexperience has in some ways served them well they admit, giving them a 'just go for it' attitude. "Where we're at, at the minute, our performance month-on-month is consistent and seeing consistent growth," says William.

"At the start it was still very much unknown. We could have a busy day or a busy week, but we couldn't establish trends."

In January 2021, a time of year when gyms are busy, the uplift in sales looked promising. "Once January came around, we really got a foothold in the market," says William.

"Our online following was growing, and our email list was growing. It started showing all the right signs, although it still wasn't financially viable, and we were paying ourselves a low wage. But that drove us to say, 'Right, this has to work now!'."

Email newsletters have been the strongest marketing tool, educating consumers with recipe ideas, different ways to use the products or nutritional information.

"That comes back to where the idea of FemFuelz came from; there was nothing out there that was tailored to females that spoke directly to female nutritional needs," says Kylie.

Rounding out the marketing mix are social media and brand ambassadors, many of whom have been with the brand since launch.

These range from fitness influencers like Hilary Young, a Carlow nurse who shot to Instagram fame after she lost three stone in three months by skipping, to Bonnie Ryan, one of the late Gerry Ryan's daughters.

"We were always surrounded with some kind of entrepreneurial skills, and seeing the downsides, but also the plus side of working for yourself," says Kylie. "That was a motivator for us, having our parents there to help us through the whole process."

Weekend meetings with their father Murty O'Donoghue on a Saturday morning were a business bootcamp, where he pushed them to think about the business: "He'd be asking you all the questions that you didn't know the answers to, but that we should have known. Having them there to hold our hand through the journey has been fantastic."

Discussing the biggest challenges they've encountered, Will plumps for cashflow.

"It can be something that can catch out a lot of start-ups and force your hand. For instance, needing to do a sale to get some cash in can disrupt the flow and goals of the business."

Kylie says becoming caught up in looking at what other businesses are doing can be a distraction. While competitors' launches can be things to consider, Kylie remarks: "At the end of the day FemFuelz is the only Irish female supplement brand.

"And that's what we need to keep coming back to. It's extremely important to stay clear on your vision, and what you're trying to execute."

The siblings partnership used the first letter of their names for the operating company, Wkod Ltd. Accounts for the first year of trading in 2021 show some promise, with the company reporting a net profit of €60,000.

However with €89,000 tied up in stocks at year-end, cash was tight, at €26,000. Pay for the two directors was €70,000 and they were owed €26,000 by the company at period-end. To secure a loan facility of €30,000 from Bank of Ireland, the young entrepreneurs had to sign a personal guarantee.

The O'Donoghues' persistence has been rewarded with listings in Tesco, SuperValu and Nourish. A recent bonus was Aldi agreeing to stock the FemFuelz range of Gut Blend, White Chocolate and Hazelnut Whey Protein and Vegan Protein, which retail for €16.49 a pack.

There are additional products sold on the company website, and on the start-up's third anniversary Will says that turnover in the current year will be 50% ahead of 2022.

While online remains the larger part of the business, and more profitable per unit sold, retail presence is crucial for building the brand.

"When you meet customers face to face like we did at WellFest this year, you realise how important it is to be in shops," says Kylie.
Photo: William and Kylie O'Donoghue, founders of FemFuelz

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O'Donoghue siblings supplement each other to grow Femfuelz

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Sibling entrepreneurs Kylie and William O'Donoghue started their business, FemFuelz nutritional supplements for women, with little but a loan and some

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Looking back now, Will O'Donoghue is glad that being in the middle of a pandemic didn't deter him and his sister from launching their company. "If you're waiting for the right time, there will never be a right time," says the Limerick hurler. "We just adapted and rolled with it."

O'Donoghue would like to say that was his idea, but it wasn't. It was his sister Kylie, the CEO and co-founder, who had the brainwave for the brand which now sells nutrition products, formulated specifically for women, online and in more than 100 stores around Ireland.

"She would be quite sporty. She was doing boxing at the time, she does crossfit," O'Donoghue, a PwC All-Star in 2021, who has again been nominated this year, tells Balls.

"I was just loosely having conversations with her being like 'You should be taking protein, you should be taking supplements'. She was kind of saying 'No, that's for you and the rest of the fellas you play hurling with. It's not for the likes of me'."

While on work experience for her business course at the University of Limerick, a stint which had her sitting in front of a computer most of the day, Kylie began reseraching supplements, and concluded she should be taking them.

Finding the right ones wasn't easy. She felt out of her depth. Rather than head for the shallow end, she waded further into the deep end with her brother in 2018 by creating the products she sought.

"That's the one thing we've probably learned from this process: Looking forward can be daunting, but when you're looking back it all kind of makes sense, and it's not as scary or intimidating," says O'Donoghue.

"It was a long process because we wanted to create good quality products. While that might seem like a daunting task to go and create that, it was very enjoyable, it was challenging. For anyone who has any aspirations of this far out thing that seems daunting, when you break it into smaller tasks, it can be very achievable."

They launched the company in October 2020 with nine products including whey proteins, pre-workout mixes, and multivitamins. Their line was created with the help of experts. Neither stood in a lab wondering if their vegan protein required a touch more broccoli sprout extract.

Being an inter-county hurler meant O'Donoghue had plenty of contacts with relevant knowledge. Joe O'Connor - Limerick's strength and conditioning coach when the county won the 2018 All-Ireland, and a man O'Donoghue calls "one of the godfathers of S&C in Ireland" - gave them pointers. So did nutritionists when it came to decisions like what sweeteners they should use. They also work with manufacturers who have more than 20 years experience in the industry.

"It took an awful lot of investment from both of us, basically everything we had to try and develop those products and buy the stock," says O'Donoghue.

"Once we had launched, within every few months, we just kept bringing out products. I think every two months after that we were bringing out something new.

"The range is close to 30 at the minute. That initial launch, obviously, it's very frightening in that you see all your savings, all your hard work, coming in on a couple of pallets, and you have no idea what's ahead of you.

"We were slowly building a customer base. Come January 2021 it just seemed to get that bit bigger consistently. It never dipped back down and held kind of a baseline.

"It just became very demanding to the point that me and Kylie both decided that we had to leave our jobs if we're to do this properly, and we're to run this like the business we want it to be and not a garage business. That's another daunting task. I was in an aircraft leasing company, Kylie worked in Dell.

"Once we did that, the company went from strength to strength because there was no longer a handbrake on. Things just happened much easier then because you're both in the room for eight hours a day. You're getting through stuff, coming up with better ideas, better solutions. Us leaving [our jobs] led to where it could be a full-time sustainable business that was on an upward trajectory."

Femfuelz is still just a two-person operation. Hiring their first employees is in the plan for the next 12 months. Will spends his mornings at their warehouse in Limerick picking, packing and shipping orders from their website before heading to a nearby office.

"From the very start, I wanted this to be Kylie's thing," he says.

"She sees the needs, she knows what it is that she wanted. Kylie is very much kind of dealing with customers, dealing with product development. She's the closest one to it. Kylie's the person who's going to be taking it, people like Kylie.

"I very much help on the commercial side of things, when we're trying to come up with pricing, margins, and I'm in charge of logistics and the retail side of things.

"We're in over 100 retail stores across Ireland: Super Valu, Centra, Spar, and a couple of Nourishes. It's mad to see the orders come in [through the website] and you're seeing all the different counties every day, to know that you've created something that's reaching all these places."

'We have brilliant people in our Limerick backroom team'

Though running a company does take up more time than previous jobs, it does have the advantage of flexibility, allowing O'Donoghue to incorporate hurling into his day, be that with Na Piarsaigh or Limerick. It also helps that the Limerick management team, led by John Kiely, are mindful players have lives outside the game.

"One of the most powerful things about our group is how much they do care and how much they probably are aware," says the four-time All-Ireland winner.

"We have some brilliant people in our backroom team who take great interest in what we do as people more so than in what we're doing as hurlers.

"I know every single person in the backroom team, if I picked up the phone, and I had an issue with FemFuelz, or we were trying to break into a certain market, they wouldn't be able to do enough for me.

"John, as the head of that backroom team, he wants the best for us in everything that we do. He doesn't just want us to try and excel in sport.

"He wants us to try and apply that same perseverance that we have in sport to every other aspect of our life. That's something he's big on too. He definitely supports us as people, as much as he supports us as athletes. I'm very grateful to be involved in a setup that sees us like that."

The future of FemFeulz is about continuing to expand their range of products. They've moved into probiotics, and have a range of clothing. Becoming more sustainable is also an aim. By the end of 2023, optimistically in the first six months, they want their packaging to be 100 per cent recyclable.

In early October, they announced their intention to sponsor a sports team. After just a day, they'd received nearly 100 applications from teams. It's part of a desire for FemFuelz to be a company which gives back to its community.

"We want to show that we're not just saying that this is about empowering females, educating females," says O'Donoghue.

"There are several multinationals who potentially don't try and engage with their community. We very much want to do that; Kylie wants to be a face that the community can engage with and that we can have that interaction and that personal feel. The response has been incredible.

"We want it to mean something. It's not that we're gonna throw a lump sum of cash, hand over a cheque, get a photo and be like, 'Oh, look, we did this'. We want it to be tangible for them, to make going training more enjoyable, better and just to show that we do that we do care about our community.

"To think that the idea generated in the spare room has now become this well-known brand. For Kylie to have been able to create the product that she was seeking, to have been able to deliver that and to be able to deliver it to multiples of young women, and women of an older generation is incredible.

"They are now saying, 'I need this, this is for me. I need supplements.' They are no longer afraid to be seen in the gym with a bag of protein or a shake. What Femfuelz has done in terms of that is its most powerful effect."

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How A Limerick Hurler And His Sister Created A Nationwide Brand | Balls.ie

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Four-time Limerick All-Ireland Hurling Championship winner Will O'Donoghue runs FemFuelz, a nutrution and supplement company, along with his sister Kylie.

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DCU and UCD engineering and machine learning graduate Niamh Donnelly looks at a problem as a challenge.

During her research and development phase for a social development robot, Stevie, that she was creating as a social aid for older adults living in retirement communities, she identified a way her creation could go one step further and actually save lives.

Speaking to EVOKE, Niamh explains 'One of the things that came up was a superbug in nursing homes. The current way we manually clean hasn't changed since the Spanish flu pandemic. So we started looking into UV disinfectant technology. We thought we could attach it to a robot to be able to drive around and kill bacteria and superbugs.'

The concept was so innovative and interesting that it secured Niamh and her company, Akara, a grant worth € 3 million from the European Innovative Partnership.

The grant will enable Akara to build up their operations, hire more people and push for more permanent deployments of their technology to hospitals so they can integrate the machines into their cleaning routine.

'Our whole goal at Akara now is to make cleaning and hospitals more efficient,' Niamh explains. 'We've kind of built on from that one idea.'

Essentially, Akara is saving lives by killing the bugs that could potentially kill vulnerable people. But it's not just that, Niamh's work could have a massive impact on the healthcare system as a whole.

'Our whole mission is to allow hospitals to be more efficient. There's a huge problem with waiting lists. And reduce the time it takes to clean a room, then that room can see more patients each day.'

She continues 'So if you take, for example, a radiology department or a CT room, they might be able to do 20 scans a day and they have to clean for a certain amount of time in between each scan. But if we can reduce that then they can double the number of scans they can do in a day.'

Niamh acknowledges that for some people, the very idea that she is the engineer behind such groundbreaking technology is a bit surprising, due in no small part to the fact that she is a young woman.

'I always loved maths and physics and I just was always so interested in how things work,' she said. 'My parents said that when I was younger rather than kind of playing with toys, I'd be more interested in taking things apart and seeing how they were than actually breaking them.'

Niamh's dad is an engineer, and she always looked to him for advice and inspiration when it came to her career. While she didn't have any female role models herself, she is happily taking on this position for other up-and-comers in the tech world these days.

She said 'I'm passionate about importance of role models cause some kind of young girls or young boys don't really have that; and then therefore can't really see themselves in those roles.

'I actually didn't have another female that I could see doing those things. But it didn't stop me because I looked up to my dad. But I do think I didn't have that encouragement from him and that I could be in a role right now.'

Niamh believes that schools play a large role in breaking down the stereotype, and feels that if more women in tech were to address students, children, and teenagers would be able to fully appreciate all the doors that a science degree can open for them.

'I think there is kind of an unconscious bias sometimes that, that people might have because of the way you look,' she explained. 'A lot of times people would kind of say, "Oh, you're an engineer? I wouldn't have thought that." It's just very minor in passing, but it makes you think, "Oh, why not?"'

Niamh is quick to point out though, that this isn't any individual's fault as such- more that society doesn't fully embrace women in tech just yet.

'These women in tech movements are kinda rearranging things and even-ing the balance a little bit. People know that it's important not to make those assumptions and the kind of signing light of you might have unconscious biases.,' she said.

'I think tech companies are really great at making changes within or internally and to kind of knock that on the head. It's kind of like external forces really, as opposed to internal.'

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Meet Niamh Donnelly The Engineer Whose Idea Is Helping Hospitals Reduce Waiting Lists

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DCU and UCD engineering and machine learning graduate Niamh Donnelly looks at a problem as a challenge.

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I first came across Irish make-up artist Aimee Connolly a couple of years ago, when I picked up a lipstick by her brand, Sculpted by Aimee, and was blown away by the quality married with clever design. That lipstick, by the way, is the Lip Duo in Pink Pair and it is a lipstick with a liner on the other end - very handy - and it is now a staple in my make-up bag.
After that find, I started to try more and more by Aimee's brand and continued to be impressed. Aimee came over to mine to record this episode, and I found that the woman behind Sculpted by Aimee is no less impressive; she is a savvy entrepreneur who was brought up as an only child solely by her mum, from whom she draws inspiration. She never took a loan or investors in her business, and she started saving money in uni to fund it.
Aimee's grit and a clear vision has served her really well - Sculpted by Aimee is now in its 6th year, and has over 40 products in the range.
In this episode, we talk about how she has taken a small brand and grown it across the UK, how she now finds balance as a very involved business owner, and just how she achieves that signature glow.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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‎Beauty Full Lives: Aimee Connolly on Apple Podcasts

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I first came across Irish make-up artist Aimee Connolly a couple of years ago, when I picked up a lipstick by her brand, Sculpted by Aimee, and was blown away by the quality married with clever design. That lipstick, by the way, is the Lip Duo in Pink Pair and it is a lipstick with a liner on the ot...

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Executive Chair: Aimee Connolly, Founder & CEO of Sculpted by Aimee Connolly

Joining Bobby in the Executive Chair is Aimee Connolly, Founder and CEO of Sculpted by Aimee Connolly. Listen and subscribe to Down to Business with Bobby Kerr on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App. You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.
Start playing Executive Chair: Aimee Connolly, Founder & CEO of Sculpted by Aimee Connolly

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Executive Chair: Aimee Connolly, Founder & CEO of Sculpted by Aimee Connolly

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Joining Bobby in the Executive Chair is Aimee Connolly, Founder and CEO of Sculpted by Aimee Connolly. Listen and subscribe to Down to Business with Bobby Kerr on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.

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EE 359 - From Navy Officer to Global Entrepreneur: The Journey of Andy Mackin

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Episode · The Entrepreneur Experiment · Unlock the secrets of entrepreneurial success and personal growth with Andy Mackin, the founder of the Mackin Group. In this engaging episode, Andy shares his incredible journey from a Navy officer global entrepreneur. Discover how calculated risks, a growth mindset, and celebrating small wins can transform your business trajectory, no matter where you start.

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Exchange app Nuw leverages clothes as currency. Its founder, Dubliner Aisling Byrne, has been recognised as a rising star in fashion retail. She explains how the app is gaining momentum and her plans to disrupt the fashion industry

Launched in 2018, Nuw is a digital platform for exchanging items of clothing that have no value in the resale or rental markets. Essentially, it's a secondhand marketplace for fast fashion. Upload a cared-for item you've grown tired of at a cost of 99 cent, then use the silver coin you're awarded to spend on any other new-to-you piece on the site. The app leverages clothes as currency, imbuing fast-fashion items with a value in the Nuw economy that they don't have outside of it.

It was The New York Times that coined the term "fast fashion" when Zara opened its first store in the US in 1990. It wasn't intended as a pejorative then, but as a reference to the retail behemoth's boast that it took only 15 days to translate a design from rough sketch to hanging rail. Now, more than 30 years later, the phrase has come to represent the shady underbelly of the fashion industry.

The 'stack 'em high, sell 'em low' mentality, coupled with the rise in popularity of influencer outfit changes on Instagram - which have always relied heavily on quantity, not quality - have seen clothes become as disposable as chewing gum. According to Anne-Marie Tomchak, Irish founder and CEO of sustainability company DesignTracker, fast fashion is still on the rise despite an increased interest, and efforts, in sustainability and transparency.

She cites Chinese fast-fashion ecommerce site SHEIN - which recently pushed into the Irish market, hosting a pop-up shop in Dublin - as an indicator. "In 2021, it surpassed Amazon as the most used shopping app in the US," says Tomchak.

Byrne believes the Nuw app offers a first-of-its-kind solution to the 54 billion items of clothing sent to landfill each year; 33pc of them in the first 12 months of purchase. "I want every one of those pieces to wind up on Nuw." The site currently has 17,000 registered users and 2,000 active members. In 2021, the latter exchanged more than 20,000 pieces. "Inexpensive high-street clothes have a short life cycle with one individual, but they can be enjoyed by multiple owners before they reach the end of their lifespan," she explains.

Certainly, this is borne out by the platform's performance so far, with 83pc of pieces uploaded to the site 'bought', and an enormous 50pc of Nuw's stock snapped up within the first 24 hours. "In charity shops, on average, only 10pc of stock is purchased."

The platform has attracted a highly-engaged community of enthusiastic 'shoppers' of which Byrne and the four women she employs are a part. There's one man on the team too, but Byrne says she's found no appetite for menswear on the platform. "Men tend to wear their clothes until they're actually worn out and only shop a couple of times a year, as needed."

Byrne tells me that everything she owns is from Nuw. "At the moment, the UK and Ireland platforms are separate, so when I moved to the UK, I had an entirely new community to exchange with. All of the women on the team are users, which means we can see any problems and fix them quickly."

The wider community feeds back continuously, and it's helping to shape the user experience. For instance, the app will notify a user when someone they follow (similar to Instagram, you can follow those whose style you enjoy) uploads a new item. "When you're trying to define a new behaviour as we are with this kind of exchange model, you have to learn as much as you can from your community."

Byrne believes people feel powerless to effect positive climate change. "Nuw affords everyone an opportunity to be part of the solution." Volume is key to the app's success, and the average user exchanges between five and seven pieces per month. The user demographic is 18-45, but Byrne cites a piece of research from Fashion Revolution, the world's largest fashion activism movement, which maintains that the most likely adopters of this kind of swapping model are, in fact, the over 50s. "This generation grew up in a sharing economy before fast fashion, so this is not a new idea to them."

The app founder wants to broaden Nuw's demographic as much as possible. "Sustainable solutions have to involve everyone." With this in mind, the "tech for good" entrepreneur reveals that the next evolution of the app will involve partnering with high-street brands. "When a customer purchases an item of clothing from a participating brand, they will have the opportunity to immediately list it on their Nuw account. Once they are ready to pass on that item, they can set the listing live on the app, and the brand will receive a percentage of the Nuw service fee each time that item is exchanged."

This will allow Nuw to track clothes from a brand through multiple owners to its end of life, as well as the environmental impact of the pieces over their lifecycle, while examining how different products perform during the recirculation phase.

Byrne is as passionate about the social enterprise aspect of Nuw as she is about the business potential. "Businesses should be good. It's time we started 'othering' organisations that don't operate ethically rather than singling out those that do."

The millennial was volunteering in India at the time of the Rana Plaza disaster - an eight-storey garment factory in Bangladesh, which collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 workers - when she became frustrated at being complicit in an industry that caused so much harm. "I've always loved fashion, but I was a broke student so a lot of sustainable options weren't open to me. Rental and resale sites can be pricey, and even a lot of charity shops have become gentrified. There didn't seem to be any equality in access to sustainable clothing, plus none of these options were tackling the problem of fast fashion."

As a student in Dublin, Byrne had regularly run Saturday swap shops in a venue on Abbey Street, where people traded their clothes using a similar coin system. "All the learnings for the app were there."

The concept has struck a chord with investors as much as fashion lovers. Byrne is currently seeking another round of funding and has met £700,000 of her £1.5m target.

It was the network of female founders she discovered in the UK that made all the difference, she explains. "All you need starting out are a few key female founders who are a couple of steps ahead of you. They were all so helpful to me."

Byrne's ambitious aim is to recirculate one billion items of fast fashion on the Nuw platform each year within the next 10 years. "I want Nuw to be the marketplace through which all of the fast fashion bought runs through for its second life. I'm going to disrupt this industry," she says determinedly. I've no doubt.

See thenuwwardrobe.com

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Irish entrepreneur Aisling Byrne of Nuw is taking on the fast fashion industry - one garment swap at a time

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Malahide native Aisling Byrne speaks of seed rounds, angel investors and venture capital like a seasoned entrepreneur, not a 28-year-old music graduate of Trinity College. The London-based founder of clothing exchange app Nuw landed herself on the 2022 Drapers 30 Under 30 list, a globally respected edit of the "rising stars" of fashion retail in the UK and Ireland.

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The freshly pasteurised, non-homogenised milk that comes from Salt Rock Dairy is something special and Catherine Kinsella's loyal customers are unstinting in their praise. This local milk for local people is sold direct from the family-run dairy farm that she owns with her husband Paul on the coast near Gorey in north Wexford.

When I visit, their black, white and pink trailer, emblazoned with the distinctive Salt Rock Dairy branding, is parked at the farm gate. Inside, there's a simple-to-use milk vending machine flanked with neat wooden shelves of reusable, branded glass bottles. Buy your bottle, or bring back a clean one, pop a few coins in the slot (1 litre, €1.50, ½ litre, €1) and watch the milk flow.

Catherine also has a selection of flavoured syrups mounted on the wall for anyone who's looking to add a shot of extra flavour - chocolate, perhaps, or the surprisingly tasty rhubarb and custard special that was available on the day I called round - to the bottle. The milk doesn't need it, though: it already has a naturally full, rich, creamy sweetness. In terms of flavour, this is an altogether different beast from the standardised supermarket milk that's readily available. It's also more sustainable, cutting down on food miles, plastics and packaging.
Diversification journey
Catherine and her husband, who grew up nearby at his family farm on Tara Hill, have been farming dry stock on 80 sea-view acres here since 1993. Ten years ago, they moved into dairy and now run a herd of 72 Holstein-cross cows. They also raised a family of four children, aged from 19 to 27, with the eldest three currently living abroad in Dubai, London and Wiltshire while their youngest daughter has just left school. When her family was young, Catherine - also working part-time as a nurse - started baking bread for her local farmers' market in Gorey.

"I always wanted to be involved in food," she laughs. "Eighteen years ago, I was involved in the farmers' market in Gorey selling bread and my sister had a cheese stall - we really just wanted to see the market working. Within weeks I was making all sorts of olive and tomato breads. I had a great few years there."

Economics pulled her back into full-time nursing around 2009 but it wasn't until COVID hit that she had an opportunity to get back into the food world.

"The idea for the vending machine was in the back of my mind but it wasn't until I had to be out of work and isolating for two weeks because of COVID that I had time to do the research."

Funded with the help of AIB Gorey, who she found "very supportive," along with solid advice from KDA Doyle Kelly accountants, Catherine invested approximately €120,000 on a second hand machine, which was fitted out by local cabinet maker, Robert O'Connor Kitchens.
First class milk
From a farming background herself, Catherine already knew what people were missing out on: "I grew up drinking milk straight from the tank and I knew what it tasted like. Every farmer in Ireland is producing milk that tastes like this."

Her belief that "good natural products should be untouched and available to consumers as close to source as possible" was the inspiration behind the vending machine. But none of this would work without first class milk.

She credits Paul with farming "grass rather than cows" and ensuring that the cows - "the employees" - are happy. After milking, the milk is transferred via a holding tank to the flow through pasteuriser, which heats it to 73 degrees Celsius for 20 seconds. "It's very quick," says Catherine, "and it doesn't seem to affect the flavour." Nor does this minimal processing homogenise (break down the fat globules) in the milk, another reason why there's no change in the deliciously creamy, old-fashioned taste.

While the mobile milk vending machine sits at the farm gate from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday, on Wednesdays it heads to John Bass Tyres in Gorey so that people in town can restock. Thursday sees it pop up in Ballymoney, Friday is Inch and then on Saturday mornings the trailer parks at Gorey Farmers' Market.

"A lot of local people do use the yard," says Catherine, "but the idea is that you could bring it [the trailer] as close to people as possible so that they can refill."

Catherine launched the vending machine on 23 October 2021 at Gorey Farmers' Market. "It was a great time to set up there," she remembers. "Markets were very popular at that stage in time because people preferred to do their shopping in the open air. Gorey [Farmers' Market] has been strong for years and there are core stalls, like veg from Fortune's Farm Fresh Produce and Helen Lyndon Home Baking that have been there from the start. Now we draw people into the market as well. People love coming to the market and being able to refill the bottles."

In total, she sells from 500 to 600 litres of milk through the vending machine every week; the farm also supplies Strathroy Dairies.
Meeting the customers
The vending machine is self-service. During the week, customers pay for milk on the machine, by SumUp or via an honesty box, but Saturdays see Catherine taking a more hands-on role.

"I wouldn't be enjoying it as much without the market. I have the one day when I get to meet the customer and the market is great for that. I love chatting," she admits. "I do create a queue!"

She had one customer who after queueing to gain access to the vending machine exploded with "Jesus, Catherine! It's like a confession box!" Describing herself as "a talker by nature" Catherine is very much a people person and the one-on-one market chats are one of her strengths.

"The reaction from customers: that's part of why you keep going. People love the whole principle of the reusable system, that it's local, that they can talk directly to the producer. That's the hook for them," she notes.

For kids - and some adults - a big part of the appeal is being able to make their own flavoured milk and that has been a real draw at the market.

"I started doing it at the beginning," says Catherine. "I tried all sorts of different flavours before I settled on a supplier. A lot were just too sweet. For me, it would be lovely to be able to produce the syrups but at the moment if it takes 25ml of syrup to get children to drink 475ml of milk, then I feel that it's justified."

She also encourages children to try the plain milk as well or to start drinking it on their cereal. "My creamy milk on porridge or in hot chocolate: it makes such a difference."
Taking the risk
While Catherine has her systems running smoothly after almost two years in business, the set up wasn't easy. She was advised by several people not to do it but, as she says, "I had enough determination to keep going. I was at a stage of life when I could take the risk and it was a risk well worth taking. I've learned so much and met so many people. There's been a lot of personal growth and development."

There has also been a lot of hard work put in by Catherine and her family to prove that a small dairy can viably supply the local area with delicious milk. A graduate of the ACORNS rural entrepreneurship initiative - "a really good programme" - she is also involved in the local Taste Wexford Programme, which supports producers keen to develop food tourism experiences, and is a member of the Wexford Food Family.

Catherine has plans to produce more than milk as well: she recently received an innovation voucher from Teagasc to work on product development and now she's thinking about "yogurt, butter, kefir, buttermilk, possibly ice cream down the line. I'd love to build a production unit on the farm, producing multiple dairy products on a small scale, and have a demonstration kitchen where I could show people how to make their own yogurt and butter - how to do the basics and do the basics well."

From a high quality basic product to brilliantly delivering it to locals in a sustainable manner, Salt Rock Dairy is ticking all the boxes.

Track the Salt Rock Dairy mobile vending machine on Instagram and Facebook.

Salt Rock Dairy, Tarahill, Gorey Co Wexford, Y25 RC62

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Investing in a mobile milking vending machine was a risk; but for Catherine Kinsella, success has been sweet at Salt Rock Dairy. Caroline Hennessy writes.

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Irish Business

Despite making a mint from the sale of the payroll software company, the Kilkenny businessman still has big ambitions for acquisitions, IPOs - and early stage ideas too

Kilkenny-based payroll software developer Immedis was heading for a stock market listing before it was snapped up in a €575m acquisition, its co-founder Terry Clune has told the Sunday Independent.

And, despite the current gloom in the tech sector, Clune said that initial public offerings (IPOs) for other companies in his Clunetech Group - which includes Taxback.com and Transfermate - were a definite possibility.

Join the Irish Independent WhatsApp channel

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'My foot will stay on the pedal. I enjoy the business of building businesses,' says Immedis's Terry Clune after €350m UKG acquisition payday

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Kilkenny-based payroll software developer Immedis was heading for a stock market listing before it was snapped up in a €575m acquisition, its co-founder Terry Clune has told the Sunday Independent.

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Niamh Donnelly has always been determined. As a teen the Dubliner persuaded her parents to let her change school in 5 th year to one which, her own research indicated, had a strong reputation for maths and physics, the two subjects she loved.

After her Leaving Cert in 2008 she studied mechanical engineering at DCU, one of only two females in her class. "It was tough to fit in so we stuck together. We're still friends," says Donnelly.

In her downtime she taught herself to write code, via YouTube, enjoying it so much that when she graduated she signed up for Springboard, a six-month conversion course. "It's a really good course for people coming from a different background who want to get into software development," she explains.

That led to an IT management role with Etsy, the crafts platform. "It's a really great company to work for. Because I was managing the IT teams there was loads of travel to New York, San Fransisco, Berlin, Paris and London. I loved Etsy and learned so much about how important diversity is to a team," she says.

Outside of work she had developed an interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) so, after two years at her job, she left to pursue it further, taking a Masters Degree in AI and ML at UCD. That led to a job working with a consultancy, but again, she knew what she wanted.

"I had an urge to work at a start-up and to be part of something from the ground up. At Etsy you'd hear a lot about the small team who had started this huge company and I really wanted to be a part of that," she explains.

Delivery robots and driverless cars were then emerging. "I knew a robotics start-up was what I wanted," she says.

Some of the most interesting work in the field was coming out of Trinity College Dublin. She joined the start-up Akara Robotics just as it was spinning out of the university and becoming a commercial entity.

"The team was working on a social robot called Stevie but hadn't implemented the AI and ML much yet, so my work was to build out his autonomous functionality," she explains.

As we move through to the next phase of the pandemic, we will bring with us a renewed appreciation for innovation

As co-founder and director of AI and machine learning at Akara Robotics, Donnelly began with on the ground research, moving full-time into a nursing home in the US to live with and study how residents interacted with Stevie, gathering feedback from them, and from staff, about the ways in which social robots could assist care home staff.

"It was really fascinating. With aging populations there are a decreasing number of young people and problems finding care workers. There simply aren't enough. A lot of a care worker's time is spent running things like bingo, when they could be interacting with people on a one-to-one basis. We found Stevie is a fun way to run games and quizzes," she says.

"We also found that when Stevie is around he is a great catalyst for group interaction. He brings people together and brings a lot of people out of their shells."

Such was the US interest in Stevie that he featured on the cover of Time magazine, one of only a handful of Irish 'people' to have ever done so.

Donnelly was busy researching dialogue systems for Stevie, to boost his conversational skills, when the pandemic struck. Immediately the team at Akara responded to the global crisis by looking for a way to help. What caught their attention first was disinfectant systems.

"Nursing homes are hard places to clean, with lots of soft fabrics and visitors coming in and out," she explains. What's more, Covid-19 meant that hospital treatment rooms, such as those which hold CT scanners, now needed to be so thoroughly disinfected between patients that it was drastically reducing the number of patients who could use them.

"We began looking at ultraviolet (UV) light disinfectant and developed a new robot, called Violet, who moves autonomously around a room and can clean it 10 times faster," she explains. Violet is currently being piloted in an Irish hospital.

Donnelly believes that as we move through to the next phase of the pandemic, we will bring with us a renewed appreciation for innovation.

"Innovation is something we underestimate the importance of a lot of the time. The pandemic showed us its importance as we all turned to so many start-ups for new ideas to help, even with things like video conferencing. We really leaned on technology," she points out.

"At Akara we are always looking to the future, whether it's a shortage of care workers in nursing homes or a need to improve disinfectants. Afterall, prior to the pandemic, the disinfectant systems in use were the same ones used in the flu pandemic of 1918. We saw a better way of doing things. That's what it's all about at Akara - making the future better."

The recently launched Kia EV6 which is distinctive in its design, offers progressive engineering, innovative technologies, and exciting electric performance. It brings long-range, zero-emissions power, 800V ultra-fast charging and is the first dedicated BEV produced by Kia using the all-new Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-GMP)

It is powered exclusively by electric energy; with a 77.4 kWh zero emission powertrain that delivers up to 528 kms on a full charge. The 800V charging capability means EV6 can go from 10 to 80 per cent battery charge in just 18 minutes, while the GT version (available next year) can accelerate from 0-to-100 km/h in 3.5 seconds with a top speed of 260 km/h.

Despite the EV6's compact exterior dimensions, its 2,900mm wheelbase results in a cabin space similar to many mid-size SUVs. One of the most striking elements is its high-tech curved infotainment screen. The simple form language of the wide screen and dashboard give the interior an open feel.

The EV6 offers an intelligent and flexible interior packaging and an abundance of cabin storage areas, including 520 litres (VDA) of trunk space with the second-row seats in place. With the second-row seats folded down, stowage capacity increases to approximately 1,300 litres. The car also features a front trunk, which provides up to an additional 52 litres of stowage space.

The EV6 offers class-leading levels of safety and convenience due to its enhanced suite of driver assistance systems (ADAS) helping to reduce many of the hazards and stresses of everyday motoring.

[ Visit kia.com to find out more about the fully electric Kia EV6 ]

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The Dublin start-up making the future better with an appreciation for innovation

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Niamh Donnelly is one of the co-founders of Akara Robotics, a Dublin based tech company creating social robots that can assist care home staff

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LAST month, Forbes announced its annual '30 Under 30' list, with a host of Irish names making their way onto the highly coveted rolecall. One entry stands out for a thrifty contribution to the fashion world.
29-year-old Aisling Byrne, from Malahide in Dublin, is the founder of thrift/swapping fashion app 'Nuw'. Nuw is a heavensend for those prone to overindulgence in shopping or looking to make their 2023 wardrobe a little more environmentally friendly.

Aisling's app is relatively new, having only launched in 2020. But it's grown quickly, having already amassed up to 68,000 downloads. Nuw's mission statement is to make fashion sustainable and affordable.

Opening up the app, it's easy to see why the Trinity graduate has garnering so much acclaim. The interface is incredibly well laid out and bursting at the seams with users (called 'Renuwers') looking to offset and swap clothing.

Renuwers upload their preloved clothing to the app, earning themsleves silver or gold coins, which act as currency on the app. Coins can then be used to request a pre-owned item from another user (pending a €0.99 transaction fee). Users can also arrange to swap items amongst themselves.

Nuw makes it relatively easy to shop sustainably, managing to find a simple way to make slow fashion more affordable and easily accessible. This is a refreshing take given the impact the fashion industry has been reported as having on the planet.

The app also takes into account that users have busy lives of their own, and so puts an emphasis on lowering expectations on shipping times, within reason.

Nuw is a must have for eco-conscious fashionistas. It's available on the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

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ONE IRISH entry on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list stands out for a thrifty contribution to the fashion world, writes Jody Coffey.

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Wexford sensory clothing company Sully & Juno wins best newcomer at Showcase 2024 awards

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A craft and design business from Wexford has won Best Newcomer of the Business of Craft Awards at Showcase 2024 which took place in the RDS this week. Sully & Juno, supported by Local Enterprise Office (LEO) Wexford, won Best Newcomer category in the inaugural Business of Craft Awards.

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The young owner of 'Flower Child' has embraced her medical reality to build a thriving business

But in January 2023, Alexandria's health took a turn for the worst as a severe seizure landed her in hospital with a brain injury. In that moment, Alexandria was faced with a choice. Either let the epilepsy consume her life as it had tried to for the past 16 years, or take control over her life and not let the epilepsy win.

Alexandria chose the latter and poured whatever energy she could afford into building her own company, 'Flower Child'.

Finally at 27 years of age, Alexandria is six months seizure free and the owner of thriving business. But to get to this point, it has been a constant balancing act for the entrepreneur. She had to grow her business, keep her epilepsy in check while also minding her mental health as she faced setback after setback with her health.

"Flower Child started as a creative blog in 2021 as a creative outlet for myself," explained Alexandria. "I started talking about mental health topics that I was dealing with myself, as all my blogs are from a personal perspective.

"In 2022, I launched my first products. What started all of this off is that I was going through a difficult stage with mental health and one of my very close friends gifted me a set of essential oils to boost my mental health. I started using those essential oils to make things like balms with coconut oil which I used on myself and then I started making candles and fragrance sprays. I then launched my first products which was a candle and a fragrance bottle in gift boxes in three different fragrances and I started selling them on Esty."

Alexandria was in her final year of college in SETU Carlow at the time, so Flower Child remained a hobby. She then graduated and got an internship with SETU Carlow and kept Flower Child as a side project she did for fun.

However, the corporate life was never meant to be. A deterioration in health forced Alexandria to leave her position at SETU.

"I have lived with epilepsy since I was 11. I was misdiagnosed at first but at the age of 13 I was finally diagnosed with frontal lobe cortical dysplasia. Due to this my energy and stamina haven't been the same as people who don't suffer from this. I knew that going into a 40 hour work week would be hard on my body, but I told myself I could do it.

"A couple of months into the internship, in January 2023, I got really, really sick," said Alexandria. I had a massive convulsive seizure in January and it left me unconscious for a couple of days. I had the seizure on the Monday and I wasn't lucid again until the Thursday.

"After that I was left with a brain injury and I was very confused and disorientated for a good month afterwards, which meant I had to leave my job in the college. I had no choice, my health had taken such a nosedive."

Flower Child became the only sense of normality for me

As her new corporate life was snatched away from her, Alexandria was left re-evaluating her life. But she soon realised that not everything had been taken away from her and while epilepsy had closed one door, it had secretly opened another.

"I realised, I hadn't been left with nothing. I still had Flower Child, I still had the brand that was at that point just a hobby, but I knew I could grow it into something more.

"Flower Child became the only sense of normality for me, the only thing I could control during a time of complete turmoil. At this point I was having about 40 seizures a day but I was still determined to have something like Flower Child ready for me for when I was better. I was constantly looking towards the future, beyond the present health scares.

"Although the days were very tough when I was experiencing so many seizures a day, I forced myself to do at least one thing a day for my business to bring me one step closer to having the company and having my dream, even if that just meant answering one email on one of my bad seizure days.

"I was not putting my life on pause for my illness, so in between the hard days I was still chipping away bit by bit at the business, making sure I had products ready to go if I had to go into hospital.

"Looking back on it now, I do believe that Flower Child was my way of coping and my way of holding onto the future."

As the seizures got worse and worse and Alexandria was getting little respite from any medication or treatment, it was decided that she would undergo brain surgery on July 12, 2023. Although the surgery was risky due to the fact the surgeons would be operating very near to Alexandria's motor Cortex, she was excited at what the future would look like if the surgery was successful. Little did she know that she would be hit with yet another setback.

"After my first surgery in July 2023, I woke up and I had limited use of my left side so my arm was affected, luckily my leg was fine. But all I could do was move my shoulder. I started doing physio to help rebuild the neural pathways to get all the other muscles engaged. I slowly started to regain function of the arm so I was really hopeful and on a good path. But then suddenly it was like someone had flipped a switch and I started losing the use of my arm and my seizures returned. In that moment, I lost all hope again.

"On August 9, I was rushed for emergency surgery to wash out the wound from the first surgery and to reopen the site and take samples for microbiology to investigate. It turned out I had meningitis, which even though it was a simple thing to treat once we knew what it was, at the time it still felt like another setback.

"But luckily once they knew what the root of the problem was, they gave me antibiotics and the swelling reduced. I had no seizures and my arm started to come back fully."

Several brain surgeries and 16 years of seizures later, Alexandria could finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. Her future with Flower Child, that she had worked so hard to build during those difficult years, was still there waiting for her as she had always hoped it would be.

"There were many days that I wanted to just give up," sighed Alexandria." But on those days I would go to my mum and beg her not to let me quit and give up on Flower Child, my business that I had worked so hard to grow.

"There was one particular day I was having a tough time with my epilepsy and I told my cousin "that's it, I just want to pack it all in" but she said to me "never quit on a bad day". That has stayed with me and on those bad days I remind myself of my cousin telling me that and that has kept me going. It reminded that although I had days that I wasn't able to work because I was so unwell, there would also be days when I would be well enough to work."

For most that hear about Alexandria's story they assume that having a very severe seizure would be a life shattering event. But in a way Alexandria is grateful for it, as she described how it guided her onto a path she was always meant to take.

"I really do think the health scares in 2023 were a blessing in disguise. It forced me to commit to Flower Child full time and now the company is at the stage where it has its own staff, website, our own manufacturing area and we even have wholesale orders being shipped out.

"If I hadn't got sick and I hadn't left the corporate job, I would probably still be in the corporate job. It was a blessing as it forced me into this role, it forced to where I was always supposed to be. I really do think I was meant to have my own company, I just didn't realise it at the time."

For many people who suffer from a life-altering condition, becoming an entrepreneur may seem like something that is too far out of reach.

"Sometimes I got into the mindset of 'oh I have epilepsy and it's so restricting and I can't do this this and this. I can't ride a bike, I can't drive a car, I can't swim'. I was so focused on what I couldn't do and that blocked out the possibilities of what I could still do," explained Alexandria.

"I would advise anyone in a similar situation to me to focus on the things you can do and what you want to do in the future, for example setting up your own business. While you might not be able to do that right now, there might be a version of it you can do in the meantime, until you get to the point of being able to do that. You should focus on that and put your energy into that.

"If I hadn't of held onto the things that I could do through all those years and pushed myself to do those things, I would never have built Flower Child. It's important to not write yourself off, wrap yourself in bubble wrap, pull down the blinds and hide away from the world. Focus on what you can achieve and what you can do, because you can do a lot more than you give yourself credit for."

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How a severe brain seizure closed one door but opened another for entrepreneur Alexandria Kelly

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For 16 years, epilepsy was a constant in Alexandria Kelly's life. It tried to consume her, forcing the young Carlow woman in and out of hospital as she grappled with multiple seizures a day.

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"Everything was an obstacle. There was no area that I was comfortable in"

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Award winning Irish businesswoman seeking support for Galway chocolate factory

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Kilchreest native Gráinne Mullins founded Grá Chocolates in 2020 from her parents' home, and she told the Irish Independent many things have changed since then as it has been a "crazy" journey.

She said: "The business has grown, it's no longer just me anymore, we have an amazing team of 18 people, it's developed, people know about us, people love the product, and we have such incredible loyal customers.

"When I first set up I didn't even know if anyone would buy the chocolates."

Her chocolates, crafted over three days using the finest ingredients, were immediately a success and as her business kept growing, so did her ambitions. Now, Gráinne thinks it is the right moment to take another leap forward.

The Galway woman added: "Our prices are going up, our rent is going up, and I kind of want to take back control of that, in any ways I can. I have dreamt of having my own chocolate factory since I first set up Grá Chocolates so I really was trying to think outside the box of what to do and I thought maybe there's no better time than now.

So this July, Grá Chocolates officially launched a Kickstarter campaign to build Galway's first chocolate factory.

Gráinne explained: "I think the first step was seeing how I could possibly fund it, so it was a lot of research, asking people how they have funded different projects in the past. And I ended up researching Kickstarter and thought this could be a fantastic way to back my dreams."

She explained the project is currently on its first phase, finding a site where to build or a suitable building to refurbish.

The project is expected to take two years and, once completed, it will include a State-of-the-Art Chocolate Factory, an Interactive Visitor Centre, Retail Shop, Innovator Hub, and Content Studio.

Supporter rewards include everything from having your name on a chocolate fountain, a year's supply of Grá Chocolates, to truly exclusive experiences like having your very own pop-up Grá Chocolates shop or an exclusive dinner party cooked for you in your own home by Gráinne Mullins herself.

The project has already received great support from the community as Gráinne highlighted how the project would not be possible without the love and support of her loyal customers.

The 30-year-old said: "The support that we have seen over the last few weeks and since we told people it's just growing and growing.

"The amount of people who have reached out and want to help us, we have builders reaching out saying they will help us building it, we have architects reaching out saying they will give us advice, we have so many people giving their help and their advice.

"It's so appreciated that people are going out of their way to help my dream a reality.

Gráinne added she is extremely excited to start this new project and is not afraid of the challenged ahead: "There's lots of it [concerns] because I've never done anything like this before, but at the same time I'm very excited. Any challenge that has come up on me over the past four years I've always just embraced it, and if there's a problem you always find a solution. I think when you really action on thing you can make anything happen.

"I hope that people see how well the Kickstarter model can work for certain businesses. And if your community is there, it will all work out."

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Galway businesswoman launches Kickstarter to open county's first chocolate factory

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Grá Chocolates has launched a Kickstarter campaign to build their new and permanent home, Galway's very first chocolate factory.

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19: Episode 19. Gráinne Mullins, Founder & CEO of Grá Chocolates

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Episode · Everyday Business with Aidan Donnelly · While food has always been focal to her life, stepping into a commercial kitchen as a teenager really ignited her passion about the industry, and Gráinne Mullins began working part time in the pastry section of some 5 Star hotels.

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The company has signed a 12 month contract to supply its popular products to ALDI stores

A young Cork entrepreneur's company has signed a contract worth €1 million with supermarket chain ALDI.

Founded by Ballydesmond man Matthew Collins (26) in 2018, The Sibly Food Co. has signed a 12 month contract to supply ALDI's 161 Irish stores with its popular Energy Balls product.

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Young Cork entrepreneur's food company signs €1 million ALDI deal

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A young Cork entrepreneur's company has signed a contract worth €1 million with supermarket chain ALDI.

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Matthew Collins: ‘From a small food stall in Kanturk to sponsoring my local GAA club’

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Whether you are setting a small business goal or planning a huge career change in 2024, the Cork man has a blueprint and work ethic to inspire you, writes Emily Crowley

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‎The Biztrepreneur Podcast: EP. 2 - The Sibly Food Co. - Matthew Collins on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show The Biztrepreneur Podcast, Ep EP. 2 - The Sibly Food Co. - Matthew Collins - 17 Mar 2021

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Kylie O'Donoghue Opens Up On Success Of Female Supplement FemFuelz

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Limerick-based FemFuelz named winner of Grow with ALDI 2023

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LIMERICK company FemFuelz has been chosen as one of the winners of this year's Grow with ALDI programme, landing a year-long contract that will see their products stocked in all 160 ALDI stores nationwide. FemFuelz, founded by Limerick hurler William O'Donoghue and his sister Kylie back ...

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'Work hard and your chances of success are pretty good' - Pat McDonagh on the Supermacs vision