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Jazz Shaper: Polly McMaster

Posted on 06 May 2023

Polly McMaster is a former finance professional and the founder behind The Fold, a luxury workwear brand that empowers self-belief, elevates workwear and champions ambition. 

Elliot Moss

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.

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 very pleased to say, is Polly McMaster, CEO and Founder of The Fold, a British womenswear brand creating empowering clothing for professional women.  Having taken evening dressmaking classes at school, Polly seriously considered, in her own words, ‘a fashion career’ but chose science and a PhD in Virology – as you do – before starting her career in consulting and private equity.  While in the male dominated finance sector, Polly struggled to find high quality, comfortable, tailored clothing designed with female executives in mind.  She spotted a gap in the market for a more contemporary label that made women feel powerful and feminine, professional and stylish.  In 2012, Polly launched The Fold with a capsule collection she created while studying her MBA.  The Fold now sells internationally to more than twenty countries and have partnerships with Smart Works, a charity providing clothing for women re-entering the workforce and with Manchester City Women’s Football Club.   It’s great to have you here, beamed in from wherever you’ve been.  2012, Polly, let’s go back.  Why?  Why then?  What made you do it, finally?  How long had you been thinking about creating your own business?

Polly McMaster

So, in thinking about starting The Fold, I think I probably would need to wind back a little bit further than the year 2012 because it really all started when I had my first job after leaving university and I was a little bit older because I’d done a PhD, as you mentioned, in Virology, which was quite random so, you know, mainly wearing a lab coat.  So when I got my first job, I was actually really excited about sort of the concept of being a bit of a city slicker, heading into the Big Smoke and you know dressing up and feeling a bit cool and I really love fashion, I’ve always absolutely loved fashion, so I had really sort of visions of myself sort of rocking up and feeling amazing.  And when I went shopping for my first suit for work, I was really genuinely shocked, I mean the choices were pretty terrible and quite frumpy, quite masculine and I was really surprised because I thought gosh, this is, you know a lot of people going to work every day, wearing their work clothes and at that time of course, this is way before even any concept of hybrid working or anything.

Elliot Moss

And this is around 2004, is that right?

Polly McMaster

Yeah, exactly and you know, you’re wearing your work clothes five out of seven days a week and then if they’re actually pretty dreadful, that means you’re wearing pretty dreadful clothes five out of seven days a week, which is a miserable, you know, sort of concept.  So that had actually planted a bit of a seed for me because I really noticed that the men in the office were very smart, they had a lot of choices for their smart suits and it was, you know what corporate environment so nice tie, nice look suit and the women, it was so much harder for us to figure out what on earth was going on and nobody also really wanted to say because it was a bit awkward because most of the partners were men so this sort of direction or who to look at, to look above, to go you know what direction should I follow, was quite minimal because there were only about one or two senior women anyway.  So, I then went into private equity, very much the same sort of themes arose and then when I went to Business School, it was that chance to kind of break free a bit.  So, you’re not on the treadmill of working till 2.00 or 3.00am, you’ve got far more sort of creative spirit in your mind, lots of people were talking about entrepreneurship and so on and I just had this feeling that was this something that just bothered me, this dressing for work, the lack of clothes for work or was there something that could be a bit broader and the other thing was that there was a real movement about women in business, it was really starting to become a theme, a topic, everybody was talking about it, women’s networks were cropping up, at Business School there was a Women in Business club, so these things started to merge together a little bit in the sense of ooh actually, there’s a women’s conversation here, there’s a community here that could be crying out for something and on the fashion side, there’s a real gap in the market.  So that was where it all really started to come together. 

Elliot Moss

And that choice of yours and I want to pick up on the female conversation, the women’s conversation that was beginning in a moment but that choice of yours to leave one world, which was the world of consulting, to move into private equity with Apax Partners…

Polly McMaster

That’s right, yeah.

Elliot Moss

…at the time and then to do the MBA.  What precipitated you going, ‘Do you know what, this is an interesting treadmill, I’m learning stuff but I’m going to stop and go and do this Masters’?

Polly McMaster

So, I actually was a little bit resistant, if I’m honest because I’d already done, I felt, quite a lot of university and studying because I’d already done a PhD and I thought I really want, you know, the School of Life rather than going back into an academic environment again but on the other hand, I think what I also saw was that a lot of the senior people in the organisation at Apax were quite well rounded, they had big networks and that was where the real value I think started to be added because when you looked at those senior people, it was about tree shaking, it was about generating ideas and you’re not necessarily going to do that sitting in an office and people were… you know when you go to Business School, it’s about the networks you create, the people that you meet.  You’re rounding out your education fine but actually for me, it was really much more about what it… it is a chance to actually go out and learn from a broader network and ironically, the School of Life alternative, which was you know carrying on working, was probably a bit more insular because I would really have then been, you know you’re working all the hours, you’re on the treadmill, so it was quite freeing in a sense to then go off to Business School and be able to explore a bit more broadly.

Elliot Moss

The journey you describe and I always look at the guests I’m about to meet, I go there’s a person that went to a great school, Cambridge and then you do London Business School and all of that, I go tick, tick, tick, structured, predictable is the wrong word but just kind of blue chip academic qualifications and then Polly says, you know what, I’m going to use all that to set up my own business, that makes you different.  Where did you, how did you jump from one to the other because I get the idea that where are all the clothes for me, this doesn’t make any sense, I get that but then leaping, putting those two things together and actually saying I’m now going to take away all the structure and I’m going to go for it.  Where’s that from?

Polly McMaster

I think for me, it’s a lot less random than it looks on the outside and I think there are probably more dots to connect.  So, way back in school, I really, when I say I was obsessed with fashion, I mean it was the nineties, it was super model era, it was Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, it was, I found it super exciting.  I was so obsessed with it, I remember writing some random German school dissertation on Karl Lagerfeld.  It was just like, I loved it, absolutely loved it and so I couldn’t really afford, at the time there was sort of the high street was a lot more expensive and there wasn’t kind of fast fashion and I really wanted some nice clothes so I sort of struck a deal with my mum that she wouldn’t give me money just to go and buy some clothes with but she would help give me some money if we went to the sort of haberdashery department and I bought a pattern and I went to evening classes and I learned to sew because she viewed that as sort of educational and development, which I think was really smart of her actually because that was really sort of motivating and it also committed me to, well if I want those things, I’ll make them and that I think that was quite entrepreneurial of her actually.  So that’s exactly what I did, I went to evening classes with a friend, we learned how to sew, we learned how to sort of cut everything out and put it all together and funnily enough, I made a shift dress, was my first thing I ever made, which was kind of not dissimilar to the look and feel of The Fold in a way, so it’s interesting looking back and going ooh, some of the things I made were a little bit Fold’ish at the time but it was really sort of exploring that creativity and at school, I think the British education system is a little bit weird actually in the sense that you start to specialise maybe fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and I found that really suffocating because I loved art and creativity and doing these evening classes and things that were really sort of far more creative but on the other hand, I also really liked maths and chemistry and biology.

Elliot Moss

Well that’s what I was going to say, there’s a balancing act there because I was going to, I’m kind of thinking why didn’t Polly just do it then?  What would have happened if aged nineteen, you would have just set up your own fashion house?

Polly McMaster

I love the creative side and I have this real sort of burning passion for it in a real aesthetic sense but that is very different from having the confidence in yourself and your own actual artistic ability and I think although I really appreciate and I really love it, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to actually be the person doing it and what I felt was that I also, like I said, loved things like maths and chemistry and if I went and did science at university, I’d have far more to fall back on and to sort of build my life with and then if I wanted in the future to go back to something more creative, that felt like that would be a bit easier to do than the other way round and I genuinely did really love science I remember when is sort of discovered the degree course that I went on, Natural Sciences, and I really loved biology and loved discovering things, so I love learning, I’m a kind of polymath, I love absorbing things and being very general about it so, it was all about kind of almost taking any opportunity that could to just learn, to grow, to do something different, to do something exciting and actually, a lot of those things are creative anyway, they’re just creative in a different way because you’re problem solving, you’re thinking around something and all of that can still be very sort of gratifying and very creative.  So, I guess if I then roll that forward, for me the PhD was again, too narrow and I think I really recognised that by the time I finished that you become a real expert but you become a real expert in something very, very tiny and in my case, extremely tiny because it was literally one gene of one virus and I needed far more breadth than that.  So consulting was brilliant because you’re working with lots of different clients, lots of different projects.  Private equity was brilliant because you’re also doing that but you’ve got the added bonus of also then working with management teams and entrepreneurs and I got to work on lots of really exciting sort of venture capital type projects because I was the most junior person in the team, so I got to pick up all of that as they’ve moved onto sort of leverage buyouts.  So that spirit of meeting these entrepreneurs, meeting these Founders, doing a little bit of everything, I found so exciting and so motivating and energising and I think it was that part of it that then struck a real chord with me about oh well, maybe that’s something I could translate into something I could do on my own then.

Elliot Moss

You’ve gone and investigated this little petri dish of your own career and we’ve gone deep inside it and that’s the PhD in you, it’s the doctor in you, I assume.  Stay with me for much more from Polly McMaster.  We’ve put together the dots so we can see the full picture of why she is who she is and why she founded The Fold.  She’s coming up in a couple of minutes but right now though we are going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, which can be found on all the major podcast platforms.   Mishcon de Reya’s Victoria Pigott and Dr Rebecca Newton, Organisational Psychologist and CEO of Coach Advisor, discuss the impact of women in positions of leadership and on boards.

You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop the words ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice.  My guest today is Polly McMaster, CEO and Founder of The Fold, a British womenswear brand creating empowering clothing for professional women.  So, we’ve joined the dots a bit, Polly.  We’ve got to this point about ah ha, I now tick the box of polymathic, I tick the box of learning, I tick the box of exposure to all these different people and there you are with your insight, which is the market needs The Fold.  What happened then exactly at the beginning?  When did you sort of give birth to this thing and how did it feel at the time when that happened?

Polly McMaster

So, at Business School, myself and a friend, Cheryl Mainland, who I did my MBA with, we did the Entrepreneurship Summer School at London Business School and we started to work on this concept as an idea and that was really the beginning of it, so it was exploring contacts and asking people in the industry, doing lots of research with other women that we knew at Business School and from our previous careers and finding out whether or not there was a proper market for it and also, were we actually going to be able to meet enough people to you know make some clothes and build a business.  So we built the beginnings of a business plan while we were doing the MBA and kind of used any bit of any course that was even remotely relevant to sort of test out another bit of it and figure it out a bit more.  We came to a bit of a juncture because at the end of our MBA, Cheryl, who I’d worked so closely with on this project, her husband got a great job in New York, so she had this opportunity to move to New York and in some senses, we were like oh my gosh, this is totally fabulous because New York feels like an obvious market for what we’re trying to do so let’s go and so some testing there as well.  So, we spent quite a bit of time doing that but then we had to make a bit of a decision because we started talking to people about okay, if this really is an idea, do you think we could get funding for it, who would we talk to, how would we get it off the ground and everybody was like guys, you know, you can’t do this in two different cities, you’ve got to pick a lane, it will end up a bit of a disaster and you know, blindly, we were so sort of naive and excited, no, no, we can make it work, we could do it.  Obviously, that would have just been completely impossible, so eventually the penny dropped and we had to make a bit of a decision.  She went off actually to join another start-up in the end, which was great for her because she got to keep going with the entrepreneurial buzz but do something else and I then had to make the decision, do I crack on with it or do I use this as the opportunity and then go actually, it was great fun but no, I’m now going to go and you know take my job back. 

Elliot Moss

But you did it.  You went for it.

Polly McMaster

And I did it.

Elliot Moss

I just want to check something, there’s a brilliant thing, which I’m going to come onto, I think that you’re a huge campaigner, which we will bring out shortly as well, you launched I think earlier this year, pretty recently, the Start With One campaign, which is about encouraging women to invest and also more investment in women.  And the things you said in terms of starting up your own business, I want you to say yes or no honestly, whether you did these things, it sounds like something you did.  Did you conduct in-depth research before you launched your business?  I think the answer is yes. 

Polly McMaster

Yes, definitely.

Elliot Moss

Did you review your finances?

Polly McMaster

Yes, definitely.

Elliot Moss

Good.  Did you have a strong vision?

Polly McMaster

Absolutely.

Elliot Moss

This is going really well.  Strong support network?

Polly McMaster

Yes.

Elliot Moss

And have you stayed motivated?

Polly McMaster

Yes.

Elliot Moss

There you go.  You see, those are the five things and I think you have said, they were really important for other women thinking about setting up a business.

Polly McMaster

That’s a relief, isn’t it. 

Elliot Moss

That’s a good, that’s good news and on that note, we’re going to have some more music because we’re going to come back to how you’re bringing that to life right now, ten years in.  It’s Polly McMaster, she’s my Business Shaper here on Jazz Shapers. 

I sort of said the checklist in a slightly glib way but it’s a serious thing, there’s substance behind it.  You are now ten years in.  Before we get onto the business and the economics of it and the fundraising and so on and so forth, tell me a little bit more about the design aesthetic, I mean as a bloke, you know, I’m obviously only as ignorant as I you know, as I appear to be, which is relatively high.  But from your point of view, you mention gently that actually if you look back at the stuff you were looking at when you were much younger, it’s come through.  What else informs your own predilection as it comes to building the different capsule?

Polly McMaster

The most important starting point genuinely for our product, is our customer and I feel that because of my background, I really know that customer very well and the creative, I suppose, concept around that, really come from a sense of confidence, a sense of femininity, of celebrating how you want to feel at work and feeling quite individual and standing out for the right reasons.  It’s been quite interesting how workwear has gone on a bit of a journey over this time as well and with that, I think our clothing and our collections have become more expressive, more colourful, more engaging because some of the barriers have broken down, I’d like to think we’ve been a bit of a part of that as well, the world has changed and moved on a bit and I think women are now feeling that they can bring more of their personality into the workplace and express that through their clothes.

Elliot Moss

And culturally things have changed, apart from even the way that women’s role in the workplace, which has fundamentally shifted, that conversation you’re talking about, the Meta theme of post-Covid or even during Covid which lends you to a much more relaxed way of looking and relaxed way of living, that must inform the way that you thought about the designs of the clothes and the materials and the way they fall and so on.  Apart from the obvious, where do you get the inspirations for next season’s range, where does that come from?  Because I remember speaking to Thea Green about nail colours, which believe it or not I was really interested in, and she said, ‘Well, this is what we do’ but what’s the equivalent for you? 

Polly McMaster

At The Fold, we have a really authentic and originated sort of design process.  We have a fantastic design team led by our Design Director, Katya Maschenko, and she really takes it back to looking at cultural points of inspiration.  So, she and other people in the design team would go to galleries, they would be looking at different artist inspiration, they would be looking at colours at different parts of the season, they might go to other events like the opera, the ballet and they would be taking a little, it’s almost like you could just start with one little point and that’s the beginning of a colour palette, a beginning of a print and then they expand from there into the drops that we work into.  So, when we are working on our collections, we actually go through the season, we deliver a lot of new products, so most months we are delivering new product to our customer and then we are layering onto that the end use of the product, so where is the customer actually going to be wearing the product and that’s how we sort of frame the collection, so is this occasion wear something she’s wearing to a really formal perhaps social event that crosses over with work or is this something that she’ll deliver a Ted Talk in or go and get her MBE in?

Elliot Moss

Do you think about Polly the twenty four year old that entered the workplace?  Does that Polly come up as well?

Polly McMaster

Absolutely because I think it’s about who did she want to be and how did she want to feel?  Put together, standing out for good reasons, really elevated and just fundamentally, feeling good about yourself.

Elliot Moss

We’ll have our final chat with my guest today, Polly McMaster and we’ve some Stanley Turrentine, I hope I said it properly, and Shirley Scott for you too, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.

Polly McMaster is with me just for a few more minutes.  When I look at your business and I see, we’ve just talked about product, which is obviously fundamental, without the substance of what you’re actually selling and it working, you have no business but on top of that, I, and I’m thinking now back to the way you described strategically thinking about well I’ve got this degree, I need my maths and my science, I need that robust underpin but actually, I can flourish creatively, which is exactly what you’ve done.  The other things you’ve done with your business and your brand is, you’ve thought about deeper questions around funding for women, you’ve thought about collaborations which immediately bring, you know, a modernity to the brand, whether it’s with football players or whoever it might be, but you’ve also thought about the charitable side and this charity you support and Smart Works, it’s almost like you’ve got your blue print, the Polly blue print, and then you go right, how am I going to do this and does that evolve over time?  Am I giving you, am I right in the way that you’ve looked at this or have these things evolved more naturally?

Polly McMaster

I think some aspects of the partnerships and the way that we’ve built the brand up are really integral to the business from the very beginning.  So, we’ve always had this concept of The Fold Woman, so putting these incredible women in the spotlight and going wow, they should be celebrated because they’re running marathons before breakfast, then they’ve got four kids, then they’re this amazing partner at a law firm and these women are incredible, nobody’s even talking about them, we should be talking about them, we should be giving them a community and a platform and inspiring other women, who can be going ah, I can see it, so I can do that too.  So that kind of narrative around really thinking about these women and just putting them in the limelight is so much at the heart of The Fold.  I think as we’ve grown and developed new and exciting aspects of that then sort of come up, some of them quite sort of opportunistically and some of them very specifically, so the partnership for example with Smart Works was really important to us because we always wanted to find a way to do something that would connect us as a brand and then we’ve got these incredible customers with women who, they can’t, you know they can’t, if they’re going for a job interview to get back into the world of work and often they’ve had really difficult circumstances, they’re not going to realistically be able to go out and buy a new interview outfit but it’s really important for their confidence and they also get coaching for those interviews at Smart Works.  So being able to connect directly with a charity who is doing that, was really, really fundamental.  So, that type of partnership was very much strategic, really important to us and really important to sort of underpin what we’re doing and give the business a sense of purpose and really support our mission.  Something like the partnership we’ve formed with Manchester City Women’s Football Club, is very exciting and actually feels quite sparky, quite fresh.  A really different way of sort of saying in a sort of play on words but like taking the city out of one bit of the city and then putting it into a different city and going you know, let’s break free of the sort of corporate box and actually those women want to be prepared, they want to be taken seriously, we’re talking about glass ceilings, we’re talking about gender equality, it’s all very well but every single men’s club in the Premier league has a luxury partnership for the men to rock up at the derbies in their amazing suits but none of the women’s teams did.  So to be out there, sort of pioneering and looking at things differently is super exciting and I think those types of partnerships are going to be where we’ll hopefully break new ground and get women to think about things in different ways and really explore their connection with clothes, with confidence, with work, with empowerment.  It’s very exciting.

Elliot Moss

There’s a couple of things you said, Polly, and you strike me as someone who is very thoughtful about how you’ve gone about this, is these things don’t just happen, there’s a, you know you’ve been thinking about this since you were in your teens and here we are now eleven years into the business.  You talk about breaking out of the corporate box and now you’re a successful Founder, you’ve raised a bunch of money, millions of pounds over the years, have you become more comfortable being you in the last eleven years?  And if so, what does that look like in terms of leading the business today and leading the business tomorrow?

Polly McMaster

I think I’m absolutely more comfortable me being me.  It’s really interesting to think how influential doing the business has been on me personally.  I think it would be easier to sort of make a very quick leap from oh, you’re an entrepreneur and I think when you start, you don’t feel like that at all, you feel like you’re just muddling around and frankly, it was so difficult and so draining and hard and so many sort of obstacles to overcome that I think on each step of the journey, you don’t even realise the growth that you’re going on because you’re just putting one foot in front of the other, you’re focussing on the next stage and it’s only really, we had our ten year anniversary last year and when you take these moments, these milestone moments to look back and you think gosh, yeah, actually would I have had the confidence to stand up in front of a room and talk about this, would I have had the confidence to even sort of start the business in a funny way, not really, it’s happened and I did do it but it’s not like, it’s not as, as obvious as that or as easy at that, it really is so much more of a journey and I think the people that I’ve met, the difficult times that you go through, it all shapes you and I feel, I feel very privileged to have had that experience because I think it’s enabled me to see so much, meet so many incredible women and go on that journey and hopefully then, you know do more and more exciting things with it as I sort of continue to grow and develop.  But it’s been hard. 

Elliot Moss

Thank you for your honesty and congratulations for getting this far, beyond ten years now, keep going, good luck for the next ten, I’m sure it’s going to be fabulous.  Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?

Polly McMaster

So, I’ve chosen Rose Room by Django Reinhardt, or played by Django Reinhardt.  I was introduced to him, I was trying to think back of exactly when it was and I would have been a teenager and my parents are both very musical and my mum listens to a wonderful array of music and I think there was something about the, the guitar, the lightness of it, the spirit in it that it’s almost like you can’t help but tap your feet and feel a little bit lifted and I was actually listening to it the other day, driving along near the seaside and it felt like this sort of fresh breeze coming through and I just thought, ooh, I think that’s the perfect, the perfect track. 

Elliot Moss

That was Django Reinhardt with Rose Room, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Polly McMaster.  She talked about loving learning, a constant desire to find out what’s really going on in the world.  She talked about standing out for the right reasons and the fact that that’s exactly what The Fold has done to empower the women that wear their lovely clothes and really importantly, the journey she’s been on, she talked about being able to be herself and be more herself now, eleven years into running her business.  Really great stuff.  That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.

We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers.  You’ll find hundreds of 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.

Founded in 2012, The Fold was created to meet the demand for beautiful and stylish yet work-appropriate clothing. It is known for its high-quality, timeless styles and is now a go-to for workwear and smart event dressing for today’s modern woman. Over the years, the business has morphed from a compelling concept to a high-growth brand, selling internationally to more than 20 countries.  

Polly comes from the competitive world of consulting and finance, with a Cambridge PhD in Molecular Biology and an MBA at London Business School. Polly started her career at L.E.K. Consulting, a Strategy Consulting firm based in London, and subsequently moved to Apax Partners, a global Private Equity firm.  

She then went on to complete an MBA with Distinction at London Business School. In 2022, she was selected as one of The LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders. 

Highlights

I’ve always absolutely loved fashion, and when I went shopping for my first suit for work, I was really genuinely shocked - the choices were pretty terrible. 

I got a sense that there was a gap in the market for women's fashion - that was where it all really started to come together.   

Way back in school, I was obsessed with fashion. It was the nineties, it was super model era, it was Calvin Klein, Donna Karan. I found it super exciting. 

I struck a deal with my mum that she wouldn’t give me money just to go and buy some clothes but she would help give me money for evening classes and I learned to sew - she viewed that as educational for me. 

I love learning, I’m a kind of polymath, I love absorbing things. 

I found meeting entrepreneurs and business founders so exciting and so motivating and energising - it struck a real chord with me. 

The most important starting point genuinely for our product, is our customer - and I feel that because of my background, I really know that customer very well. 

I think women now feel that they can bring more of their personality into the workplace and express that through their clothes. 

I think our clothing and our collections have become more expressive, more colourful and more engaging because some of the barriers have broken down. 

I want to get women to think about things in different ways and really explore their connection with clothes, with confidence, with work, with empowerment.   

I think I’m absolutely more comfortable with me being me.   

When I started as an entrepreneur, it was so difficult and there were so many obstacles to overcome that I think on each step of the journey, I didn’t even realise the growth I was experiencing. 

I feel very privileged to have had this experience because I think it’s enabled me to meet so many incredible women. 

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