26 entrepreneurs Saying yes, yes, yes to a stellar business
Yes Yes Yes – for some it‘s a Meg Ryan moment, for others it‘s from the final climax of James Joyce‘s novel, Ulysses. For Susi Lennox and her business partner Sarah Brooks, it‘s also the title of their very successful Petersfield-based company, which manufactures natural intimate lubricant products. The award-winning business, founded in 2003, turned over £1.2 million in 2014 and now employs a dozen people full time. The Yes range has over 20 international distributors, and is sold online to 92 countries worldwide. Its water- based and oil-based products are available in high-street health food stores and pharmacies throughout the UK. Alison Dewar talked to Lennox about their inspiration for this very intimate business
As the eldest of five children growing up in an Irish/Scottish Catholic family in Glasgow, Lennox credits her family with providing an encouraging and creative environment where inspiring and sometimes wild thinking was allowed. The twin influences of her father‘s family‘s hunger for academic attainment blended with the entrepreneurial spirit of her mother‘s retail-minded family, equipped her with ambitions for achievement and happiness and gave birth to her pioneering spirit. With a degree in English, and a post grad in education, her first job was teaching international students at St Clare‘s College in Oxford during the swinging sixties. Marriage and a move to Winchester followed where, having given up full- time teaching to bring up the couple‘s three daughters, she was able to cultivate her interest in the new psychologies, quantum physics, and holistic health, out of which studies she began running personal development workshops. This eventually led her into the corporate world working with such major clients as Shell, IBM, BP and Exxon Chemicals, where she met friend and future Yes co-founder Sarah Brooks.
were rediscovering their sex drive, their wives were often finding intercourse painful and they simply couldn‘t keep up. The net effect was that some husbands were finding younger partners with predictable consequences for their marriages.
That inspired us to investigate what products there were for women which would enable them to enjoy an equally active sex life just as comfortably. What we discovered was a gap in the market for a pure and natural personal lubricant.
Tell us more about your early career
In the early ‘70s I trained as a yoga teacher and studied meditation and complementary therapies, which was quite unusual in those days, especially as I was married to a practising GP. It certainly created some interesting dynamics. The personal development workshops opened a door into management consultancy, where I worked for a number of world-class organisations, travelling extensively. I loved the role of independent change agent, giving me as it did permission to work with new ideas into global businesses, which tend by their nature to become entrenched. Often the larger the business, the more difficult it is for individuals to flourish and bring all of themselves to work, because their values don‘t always fit.
How was the idea for Yes Yes Yes born?
Sarah, with a degree in chemistry, was a senior consultant creating global reporting processes for Pharmacovigilance and together we had worked in the drug safety divisions of major pharmaceutical companies. She had been at Pfizer when Viagra was launched, and became acutely aware of some of the unintended side- effects of this sexual revolution. While husbands
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Sarah and I had both simultaneously reached a point where we felt it would be good to apply what we had learned from working in other organisations to launching our own business. So we set out to ”change the world from the inside” by creating a new concept: a certified organic, plant-based natural range of intimacy products.
Why was it so important to take the ethical, organic route?
Having been immersed in corporate environments, we had seen the compromises people had to make to allow market presence. We challenged ourselves to create a business where ethical compromises didn‘t need to be made.
On the organic side, our research into the category revealed serious concerns about the ingredients of other personal intimacy care products. Their chemical formulations rely on a glycerin or silicone base, and disquieting ingredients such as paraben preservatives and propylene glycol, all of which have been shown to have potentially harmful effects on the body, and particularly the more vulnerable and highly-sensitive intimate tissues. This made us determined to offer pure and high-performing alternatives, which would enhance, rather than compromise, intimate health without side
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – SOLENT & SOUTH CENTRAL – JUNE 2015
effects or skin irritants. The only way we could demonstrate the purity of the ingredients we used in the Yes range, was to go down the certified organic route with the Soil Association, widely recognised as the gold standard. This gives customers the guarantee of our products‘ purity.
How did you achieve that?
We set up our own product development laboratory, and devoted three and a half years to intensive research, creating and testing new paradigm formulations. After working through myriad prototypes we were able to patent our breakthrough water-based product, confirming its true originality.
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