Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, I am extremely pleased to say is the brilliant Lemon Fuller – I’ve just called you brilliant, Lemon, we’ve only just met – CEO and founder of Lemonade Dolls, the UK lingerie brand. Having spent twelve years as a singer, songwriter and dancer travelling the world, working with artist such as, you may have heard of these, Beyonce, Avicii and Justin Bieber, Lemon had nevertheless seen many of her peers struggling with confidence. Returning to London, she created an Instagram account, Lemonade Dolls, in 2017 with the aim of helping women feel good about themselves. With a rapidly growing online community, Lemon noticed the frequent chat around a lack of inclusive lingerie. Despite having no background in lingerie, fashion or business, Lemon sought to tackle the issue and launched her Lemonade Dolls lingerie brand in 2019. The disruptor brand is now a global success, championing empowerment and inclusivity, creating innovative first to market products and selling one of their products every single minute, not bad. It’s fabulous having you here. Singer, songer, dancer and of course when you start, you walk in and you’re kind of moving, the eyes are alight and you’re a performer.
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Elliot Moss
But you are a performer, I mean that’s, that’s the truth isn’t it, it’s in your blood.
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, yeah, I popped out of the womb in the splits and jazz hands, and I’ve kind of never looked back but just kind of found different avenues to use it.
Elliot Moss
How young were you when you realised that you, you wanted to you know get into that industry?
Lemon Fuller
You know, embarrassingly, I was that child with the hairbrush in front of the mirror kind of the moment I could stand so, pretty much from day dot, you know right at the beginning.
Elliot Moss
And did you work hard at it when you were in it?
Lemon Fuller
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I was, you know growing up as a kid, I was at my local dance school in Chichester, you know every single night of the week. By the time I was nine, I was working on reception to get extra classes. I come from humble, you know, beginnings so had to kind of you know work out a way to make it happen and yeah, I just loved it, I loved it every day after school, every weekend.
Elliot Moss
And the, the names I mentioned, Beyonce, Avicii, Justin Bieber, I mean I’ve heard of some of those, I’m an old guy, but that’s impressive isn’t it, I mean working with very, very famous people, what’s that actually like?
Lemon Fuller
Er no, it’s fantastic. Most of the people that you mentioned, no sorry, all of the people that you mentioned are fabulous.
Elliot Moss
How polite you are.
Lemon Fuller
I know, there you go. No but it’s been epic. I was really lucky, I don’t usually say that but I did have a couple of lucky breaks whilst working very, very hard in my you know whole teenage years and got a scholarship to Italia Conti, moved to the Big Smoke and that kind of all started from there and I was able to just kind of climb the ladder one step at a time, whilst being a shopgirl to pay for my rent and it just, it just spiralled and I was able to get in with the BBC and get in with ITV, I worked on live shows at that point, I then did not need to be a shopgirl anymore and…
Elliot Moss
Nothing wrong with being a shopgirl.
Lemon Fuller
Oh hey, listen, I was probably had more money then than I do now.
Elliot Moss
Toffee vodka but sweet though. I can say this from bitter experience, it’s such a good idea at the time and it’s really bad about ten minutes later when you’ve had four of them.
Lemon Fuller
100% or the next morning as well.
Elliot Moss
Or the next morning, especially the next morning.
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, the next morning as well.
Elliot Moss
That goes without saying.
Lemon Fuller
100%. But yeah it was, it was a really exciting time of my life, I learned so much and I really understood about, I guess, branding and kind of like confidence and climbing that ladder and I think that was one of the key drivers in building Lemonade Dolls was that for a long time I didn’t recognise it but I was, you know, I was climbing the ladder with a lot of my incredible male friends and we did really exciting things all over the world and it took, I don’t know when I was probably about 25, 26, 27 to go “hold on, I’m not actually the best at this, why am I here?”, you know why, my other friend, you know who’s way more talented than I am, why is she not standing where I am and I really put it down to confidence and resilience, not my talent. I’m good at what I do, I’m not putting myself down, I’m great but there are people better and so what I highlighted was yeah, that lack of confidence in the females around me and it really started to irritate me and I wanted to do something about it, I wasn’t sure how I was going to do anything and that’s when I set up an Instagram account that existed purely to make women feel good about themselves and to encourage them to take over the world and believe in themselves and I called it Lemonade Dolls.
Elliot Moss
Tell me about that moment when you said do you know what, there’s a business idea in here. At what point did you say it’s not just about me Lemon, talking about confidence, it’s about me Lemon, building something which will give people confidence?
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, I set up the Instagram account and when it started to build a community of incredible women all over the world, I realised that I loved something as much as music and it was that, it was the power in making women connect and feel good about themselves and believe in themselves and actually, you know, realising that we all need it.
Elliot Moss
Then lingerie, where did lingerie come from within the context of that?
Lemon Fuller
Well, I knew, I knew I needed to turn into a some sort of business so I could leave music and, or take a break from music, you know and really put everything I had into this idea and it was at the time when I couldn’t find any lingerie that I liked to wear. Victoria Secrets was dominating the market which was kind of everything I was standing against at the time and then there was M&S which, we all love M&S but maybe not something that everyone wants to say around a dinner table with your girlfriends that you’re really proud of shopping at M&S for your lingerie so, so, there was kind of a big gap in the market for something really cool, something really fresh, something innovative that catered to the mass market and it goes a little bit further than that, you know I’m a thin, privileged white woman, so I can actually shop from everywhere so I’m super lucky in that way but actually I have friends that weren’t so lucky and I didn’t realise, I was super naïve so I didn’t realise that there were actually, there was more than just a gap in the market for offering, there was actually a lack of representation and offering for people completely, you know, so there were people that were a size 20 that didn’t have a lingerie or underwear brand that they could actually buy from, you know, or there was people that you know had never ever been represented, like marketing with any of these brands, so don’t feel like they’re associated with them or that they’re being catered for so, it wasn’t just me, so I had, I had you know my needs but then I realised there was a lot bigger needs that needed to be served and that then made me even more angry and even more ambitious and even more excited to provide something for all of these people.
Elliot Moss
And we’ll find exactly how she did provide it for those people because going from that idea, which is absolutely spot on, to delivering it, is quite a different thing. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper today, it’s Lemon Fuller, founder of Lemonade Dolls, she’s back in a couple of minutes but right now we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Emily Knight talks to Charlotte Yonge, a fund manager at Troy Asset Management about why women historically invest less than men and what’s being done to change that.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can catch this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Lemon Fuller, CEO and founder of Lemonade Dolls, the UK lingerie brand. We were hearing all about the absolutely excellent case, the total addressable market as they call it in the parlance Lemon, about why you should do this business but here’s the person in from of me who at that point was a, was a performer, was a singer, was a dancer, ooh the songwriter and all those things. What did you do to initially start that business? How did you get from that moment to actually starting to make stuff and sell it because that’s a big deal?
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, I wasn’t by myself at that point, you know I had a community of incredible women helping me and backing me every step of the way so, I started by just asking them what they wanted, you know, what they were missing, what they needed and that gave me a kind of a launchpad of how I was going to design it, how I was going to kind of you know take it to market, you know, and I don’t necessarily think we need to go into the fact that when I launched it, I was completely screwed over by a VC and was removed as CEO and had all my shares in the company pretty much taken, taken away because I was completely unknowledgeable and had no idea what I was doing but they liked the idea and knew that I was onto something in terms of, you know, potential growth and potential addressable market but…
Elliot Moss
You managed to get through that though.
Lemon Fuller
I did. Yes. Relaunched the business and got all my shareholders diluted and gave me growth shares back.
Elliot Moss
How did you know what to do, Lemon? Regardless of the…
Lemon Fuller
At what point? I still don’t know what I’m doing.
Elliot Moss
None of us do, obviously, but at that point of essentially protecting your thing, you know, your background is in a totally different industry and there you are managing to fight, fight the might of some experts, some experience and expertise, whoever the VC people were and we don’t need to talk about that and, but there’s legal stuff to consider there’s…
Lemon Fuller
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
…commercial stuff to consider, how did you know what to do?
Lemon Fuller
I didn’t, I just took it one step at a time, one day at a time, still learning every single day, I feel like every day I wake and I’m stepping into a day that I’ve never experienced before and I’m, you know, five and a half years in from the day we launched as a business.
Elliot Moss
How many times has it almost, how many times has it almost gone south in that time?
Lemon Fuller
Too many times, all the time, you know, not all the time.
Elliot Moss
A lot though.
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, a lot, but you know the growth story really happened when I was actually able to become CEO of the business and believe in myself and yeah, that was two and a half years ago and that’s when, that’s when it’s really exploded.
Elliot Moss
And what was the moment when you started to genuinely believe in yourself versus the confidence that you had as a performer? Because that, they’re two different things. One is a kind of years and years and years of you in front of the mirror with the hairbrush, I can see it now, and the other one is oh, I’m running a business, okay why do I, why did you suddenly go “I’ve got this”?
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, we were at rock bottom, it was, you know we were nearly gonna go into administration and I had to make some really, you know, big girl decisions and it was whether I was going to take this to the end and I was going to do everything I possibly could to drive this company and you know do what I said that I was going to do for the community that we had built together or not and actually, there was only one option and it was to do what I set out and then I just had to, just had to be super brave and…
Elliot Moss
May I ask you a question? Do you talk to yourself a lot about that? As in when you’re in those moments when there is a big decision coming, do you find yourself giving you that pep talk that you need to have or has it just come naturally?
Lemon Fuller
No, it has not come naturally, like I’ve had to, you know I have to work on it every single day even now, you know we’re five and a half years in, yes we sell a product a minute, we’re a multimillion pound business now, you know it’s super exciting and it’s incredible but you know I struggle with being a CEO every single day, you know, I’m, what I am really comfortable is you know singing and being on stage, you know, not managing a team of incredible people, that is something that I have to work on and, and challenging them and pushing them every single day.
Elliot Moss
So why are you doing, out of interest? If you love the thing you were doing and now you happen to have done, there’s a mission in you going there’s just stuff that needs fixing here, I’m going to create this business and do that. How, why are you pushing yourself so hard?
Lemon Fuller
Because the mission is so important to me and actually, when I look back at, when I look back at what I was doing in music or the songs I was writing were kind of the same thing, like the narrative hasn’t changed, it’s just the direction.
Elliot Moss
Which is?
Lemon Fuller
Just female empowerment, female, you know, making people feel good about themselves and believing in themselves and just driving for what is right and what is important to them.
Elliot Moss
Is there a lyric that you often refer to, is that a bit too?
Lemon Fuller
No, I don’t.
Elliot Moss
No. But it’s, I was just checking. But do you know what I mean, if you’re a songwriter, you go there is a thing.
Lemon Fuller
“You can do it.” No, I don’t know. Like, I don’t know.
Elliot Moss
Nice voice there. Nice voice. Stay with me because I’ve got Lemon Fuller with me and she has a lovely voice but is also, more importantly in the context of this, is running a business, creating, delivering on a vision and a mission that she has set down, which is to give women power and to make them feel confident and a lot more
We were talking about mission and I’d written some notes about you as a campaigner. There’s the businesswoman and then there’s the, then there’s the campaigner and the campaigner for empowerment, the campaigner that says it’s important to vote, the campaigner that says you know what it’s not appropriate that refugees don’t have underwear to wear, that’s just not right, the campaigner that says the environment matters so I’m going to make biodegradable material, pieces of underwear even. Thinking what are we doing? We’re doing underwear, that’s what we’re doing, he’s going to say the word, he’s going to spit it out, you’re looking at me going come on Elliot…
Lemon Fuller
Come on, you’ve got this.
Elliot Moss
…you can do it, you’ve got this Elliot. Underwear.
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elliot Moss
That’s a lot of stuff to be doing and years ago I worked with the Body Shop, when Anita Roddick was alive it was exactly the same thing. Yes, it’s a business but the business needs to do the right thing. Who have been your inspirations over the years as you look towards creating what I call a campaigning brand?
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, do you know what, I feel like I’m sounding like a broken record but the community. Actually, Body Shop’s a great example that have done it, done it well and done it right but actually there’s not, there’s not a huge amount of those out there and actually I think one thing that has kind of set us apart is that we don’t really try and compare ourselves to other people, we don’t look at what everyone else is doing, we just move forward in the way that well, I think and the team thinks and the community think is the right way to do it and, you know, there is so much to do and there so much that is possible, you know, it makes, like as you list it out like that, I’m like gosh that might be why I’m so tired but you know but really…
Elliot Moss
Might be why I’ve got no time at all, ever.
Lemon Fuller
Exactly. But actually, you know, seriously, I genuinely believe that it is all possible and it’s just choices and we make the choice to you know spend 30% extra on each garment to make it recycled fabrics because it’s, it’s either non-recycled or recycled, you know, we choose the one that we want, you know, do we donate to refugees? Yes, we do, we’ve, we’ll be at over 45,000 pairs of briefs that we’ve found in Europe in the refugee camps and to me, it’s just a no-brainer, it’s just being like bold and us deciding what the right thing to do is for us as a brand and whilst we want to grow, of course we do, but our mission, it comes back to the mission of it being the most important part of what we’re doing, you know, I love lingerie, I want to give women lingerie that can’t wear it but actually, the mission is 100% the most important part and we can’t just, you know have that mission and cater to some people, you know, and that’s why price point’s really important to me, I don’t believe you can be sustainable with a really high price point product because you’re really saying you’re just sustainable for, you know, affluent, rich people, you know, so the mission comes down to everything that we do and so all the things that you mentioned are just part of that mission.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, and the community, what I’m interested in also, people say “I’m a community brand, that’s what is important”, what’s the interaction, how do you know what the community are thinking and saying?
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, well we talk to them all the time, obviously social media is an incredible platform for that. We started as just me and the community speaking through stories, DMs, posts, sharing each other’s, sharing each other's content. Last year we did a load of focus groups where we had menopausal groups, black babes, Asian babes, LGBTQIA+ babes, we just get to understand exactly what they want because, by the way, they all want different things, right, so if you don’t do this as a brand and a lot of people don’t do it because they don’t really know how to because they think they might say the wrong thing. I’m say, I say the wrong thing all the time, you know, I get it wrong all the time, tell me, teach me, like we’re learning, you know help us cater for you and we have community shoots, we get them involved in our, in our campaigns, they’re on our website.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of the community around you as a founder and your journey to raising the money, to how you feel and you’ve mentioned, you know, you sort of feel like a bit of a, you know, an imposter, and we all do by the way, I think, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man and a woman or you know most of us just go what is, what are we actually doing here. How have you manged to navigate through the fundraising piece, through the kind of having to change the team, through kind of almost going into administration, all those other things, where are you getting your energy from and your knowledge and your advice from, where’s that coming from?
Lemon Fuller
So I think it’s been a journey, when I look back to when I raised my first round of capital, which by the way in the industry is called ‘friends and family round’ which I thought was really hilarious because you know my friends and family could probably you know, a pile of about 250 quid with my like artist friends and like struggling artists trying to get their next job. Yeah, it’s, it’s a journey, it’s a rollercoaster, you learn as you go, it’s probably one of the most common questions I get asked by other female founders and female entrepreneurs, “Lemon, how have you raised your money?”, “How have you” you know “got investors to believe in you and your product?” You’ve got to believe in it more than anyone else on this planet, you’ve got to believe in yourself more than anyone on this planet and yeah, just it does change, it gets easier once you have data points, once you have, you’ve proven yourself, you know, and I mean and we’ve got to work a lot harder, you know, as women, you know, the stats unfortunately are not changing, 98% of funding goes to, VC funding goes to men and 2% are given to women, which is shocking and it hasn’t changed and it’s, you know, I hope it does change but that’s a reality that we have to face so, we’ve got to work harder than you know anyone and you know and it’s even lower for black female founders too so, it’s just, yeah, it’s a, it’s a circus but it’s possible.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat and the last bit of the circus and I’m sure it has been, it’s Lemon Fuller, she’s my Business Shaper and we’ve also got some Jordon Rakei, he’s coming up too, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Lemon Fuller is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. I’ve read something you said, “I love a dark horse, I love the dropout, I love people that work hard.” Where’s that come from? That sense of I think it sounds like someone who wants to level the playing field a bit.
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, absolutely. I always inspired by someone that has had to work their absolute butt off to get where they are today and I guess maybe that’s how I feel like how I’ve got where I am today so that’s maybe why I’m inspired by it and I try and champion it and especially now being in business more than anything, you know a lot of my peers haven’t kind of come from the background that I have come from – I had a great background by the way – but you know different to, you know different to a lot of my peers that are now running the businesses of our size and yeah, and I just think I want to support that and I want to try and mentor as many people as possible that you know are interested in and I think it was a massive gap in education as well around entrepreneurship, it seems to be you know for a long time it’s been people that have come from privilege or you know have parents that are entrepreneurs or you know have an uncles and aunties, maybe more uncles, that are entrepreneurs.
Elliot Moss
Let’s be honest, yes, it would be more uncles at this point.
Lemon Fuller
Let’s be honest, at this point, hopefully in a couple of, you know, in ten years’ time it will be really different but, and that’s just, you know, it’s important and we need to and it’s going to help the economy, you know, we have one of the lowest rates of female entrepreneurship in the world and we’re way, we’re way behind the US and Canada and Europe and you know we’ve got, we’ve got some, we’ve got some moves to make so, yeah, I just want to encourage as many women, people actually to be honest, in entrepreneurship.
Elliot Moss
And do they, do you hire in your own image? Do you hire people that are dark horses?
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, 100%. 100%, I try and hire people that have that entrepreneurial spirit. One thing I made a massive mistake on at the beginning of Lemonade Dolls is that I hired some really massive CVs, you know, and they were, you know on paper that’s probably what helped to fundraise, some of the early, early fundraisers, but actually it was a total disaster because I wanted to move forward with no red tape, I wanted to take risks, I wanted to you know listen to what some women on Instagram thought and what I thought with no, you know, education around running a business and that was, you know we were, we were butting heads. Now, some of our best hires have never, never worked in a business before, you know, never worked in marketing before or, you know it’s their first time being, you know CFO in a start-up and I think you know that resilience, that confidence and that work ethic is what drives a small business to become a disruptor.
Elliot Moss
And those people and the community and you, what kind of products are we now building? What have they all said we want to do? What does Lemonade Dolls look like now?
Lemon Fuller
Yeah, it’s, it’s inclusive, it’s fun, it’s fresh, it’s bold, we’ve innovated first to market products, so they’ve, literally the community have inspired us to create the first H cup bralette that works with support, we are creating a first to market product that’s launching on International Women’s Day next year, we’ve moved the gusset placements of all or our undies to 4cm forward because actually, they weren’t serving the right purpose for hundreds of years. So, yeah, we’ve just been, we’ve been on a really exciting journey to just improve what’s out there.
Elliot Moss
You don’t like rules, do you?
Lemon Fuller
I really, really dislike them.
Elliot Moss
And the rules, if you want to move the gusset, you go and move the gusset but actually.
Lemon Fuller
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
It’s just come, it’s all saying what essentially do people really need versus what they’ve been told they need or what they’ve been given.
Lemon Fuller
Exactly, and actually you know when you’re trained in, you know there’s some incredible training you know schools for underwear and making products but then they’re taught something, you know, whereas we were never taught, I wasn’t taught how to make underwear so, when they told me it wasn’t possible, I said why not and when they said well, it’s just not possible, I said that’s not good enough, let’s try again, you know, let’s recreate a block, let’s, and so we’ve got, you know our own unique blocks with our gussets forward with fuller cups that are serving a bigger chest size and you know it’s, it’s cool, feels like you know, the world is our oyster.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great chatting to you, Lemon.
Lemon Fuller
You too, thank you for having me.
Elliot Moss
No, absolute pleasure. Just before I let you disappear to go break some more rules, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Lemon Fuller
Lean on Me by Bill Withers. It was one of the first songs that I ever learned to sing as a kid and I sang it as a solo in Chichester, in my dance school, Arabesque, and yeah, it means a lot to me and my family.
Elliot Moss
Bill Withers there with Lean on Me, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Lemon Fuller. She was mission led, she talked all about how important it was to her that women feel confident and that’s really been the driving force of everything that she’s been doing. “You’ve got to believe in it” she said, if you’re going raise money, if you’re going to make it work, you absolutely 100% have to have more belief in your business than anybody else. And finally, that lovely point about it’s all possible, she is someone who doesn’t believe in rules, dislikes them inherently and that’s what’s defined how she’s built her business, great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.