Biography

Julie started her career at 16 years old when she left school to work for Nat West Bank. After 5 years of invaluable experience, she left the bank to pursue her career in the big wide world of business. Her next job was with Keiper Recaro – the manufacturers of Recaro car seats. Here she continued to follow a finance based career and ran the Accounts Department at the tender age of 22 years old.

Still seeking new challenges, she entered the ruthless, male dominated world of stainless steel, again working in Accounts. She was, however, starting to realise that Accounts wasn’t really for her. She longed for a change of direction in her career, and her opportunity came when she was offered the position of Assistant to the company’s Sales Manager. It wasn’t long before her love of Sales was to shine through and she soon progressed into a full sales role selling stainless steel. Within her seven years in this industry she had progressed from Accounts Assistant to Business Development Manager and found herself being head hunted by the competition.

Soon after this, the stainless market hit an all time low and Julie decided to use the skills she had developed in Sales and following three gruelling interviews she secured a job with Yellow Pages. This was indeed a big change in industry, but always up for a challenge Julie embraced the opportunity with open arms. The next 3 years saw Julie excel in her Sales career and she won several awards with Yellow Pages including Customer Service Awards and Regional Sales Awards, as well as promotion to Account Executive.

A very courageous decision was then taken to join her husband in his business. The business was successful and growing and was ready for another member of staff to join the team. It was to be a huge challenge for them both, not only working together as a husband and wife team, but also taking the risk that running a business brings. This would be a real test of all the skills Julie had learnt in business so far and their income was completely dependent on how successful they were in business together.

Three years later the company had grown again and Julie had again made her mark by bringing in big blue chip names to the business such as Volkswagon Group, Norwich Union, Ascom Telecomunications, Karcher, Shell, Accenture, Royal Bank of Scotland, Abbey National and many more.

In 2004 Julie fell pregnant, but work was still a driving force in her life. She left work two weeks before she had her beautiful son Samuel and was back doing business meetings two weeks after the birth. The whole experience of having a child brought a new thinking to Julie’s life and her career, and only three months after having Samuel she decided she wanted to start her own baby related business. Her idea was to sell mother and baby products at home parties, and it was only when she asked her husband what he thought about the idea, that she started to realise that it could be a viable proposition – Truly Madly Baby was born.

Two months later, in May 2005, Julie did her first Truly Madly Baby party – she had created a website, chosen a selection of products, put together a lovely 64 page catalogue and had already started to gather interest from mums around the country by chatting on mums’ websites. By July she had recruited 4 consultants in Cornwall, Milton Keynes and Wales. Then it was time to enter the Dragons’ Den –

This is where the story really begins.