I think the best businesses of the next 20 years will be the ones that share what they build with the people who helped build it.
How Holly Tucker MBE left their lane.
Holly Tucker turned a local Christmas fair into an idea for a marketplace – then spent the next 20 years championing creative small businesses.
Holly Tucker’s first marketplace was a Christmas fair.
After starting her career in advertising, she began bringing independent makers together locally. Around 150 small businesses took part – and Tucker saw both the talent on the tables and the problem around them. These makers could find customers for a few days at a fair. What they lacked was somewhere people could discover them all year round.
The answer became notonthehighstreet.
Tucker approached Sophie Cornish, her former boss at Publicis, with the idea of putting those independent businesses together online. They launched the company in 2006, while Tucker was a new mother with a three-month-old son and very little conventional retail or technology experience.
The platform gave thousands of small creative businesses a route to customers they would have struggled to reach alone. In 2013, Tucker was appointed MBE for her contribution to small business, and two years later became one of the Prime Minister’s Business Ambassadors, representing creative industries and small creative businesses.
After leaving notonthehighstreet, she started again.
Tucker founded Holly & Co in 2017 with her sisters, initially building advice, inspiration and support around independent founders. It has since grown into a curated marketplace and wider community for UK makers and artists – and became a certified B Corp in 2022.
The same idea runs through her podcast Conversations of Inspiration, her Sunday Times bestselling book Do What You Love, Love What You Do, her campaigning and, now, her ITV series Be Your Own Boss.
Tucker spotted that independent businesses did not lack ideas.
They lacked somewhere built for them. So she built it.
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