DIGITAL MARKETING
Rachel Carrell CEO, Koru Kids
With a background in digital health, Rachel Carrell is transforming the accessibility of childcare in London for a new generation of working families. Originally hailing from New Zealand, Carrell moved to the UK as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a DPhil in Development from Oxford University. After six years at McKinsey and Company, Carrell became CEO of two healthcare companies, including the world’s largest online doctor’s service DrThom, which she built from 200,000 to 1.2 million paying patients in the UK, Ireland and Australia. After having her first baby, she realised just how stoppered the childcare industry was, with no one innovating to simplify, unite, or reduce the massive cost of the service. “I had a lot of friends, particularly women, who had carved out great careers by that stage, and we were all trying to figure out how it was going to work, maintaining our careers and also having the lives that we wanted,” explains Carrell. “At that stage I was working in digital health, which is such a vibrant sector, with tons of investment and innovation. I assumed childcare would be the same, and I was really surprised to find that there was such a huge gap in the market.” Koru Kids is a comprehensive,
multi-faceted service, that brings together families to share the services of a professional nanny, keeping costs down and giving the nanny a pay rise. After unprecedented interest, Koru Kids has expanded into after-school care, training university students as nannies for older children. These innovative ideas bring childcare up to date, catering to modern family needs and providing parents with a flexible childcare solution. Taking on the resourcing, professional vetting, payroll, and the training of student nannies, Koru Kids has taken ownership of the service to simplify what can be a
complex and stressful process. The old structures of childcare assume that parents are holding 9 to 5 jobs, and so nurseries have 6pm pickups. If you’re working in a corporate job in London, you’re not finished at 6pm, let alone able to pick the kids up by then. Not to mention that the average cost of a nanny is £37,000. New parents generally don’t have that kind of money, having taken a year out of work on low maternity pay. I saw all of this and couldn’t believe that no one was innovating in this space. That’s why I set up Koru Kids.
FD: What is the most disruptive characteristic of Koru Kids, and what are the implications of this for working parents?
RC: Our mission is to be a tech enabled innovator, to see how things can be fundamentally structured differently. I didn’t want to just do a little fragment of the service, I didn’t just want to have a website that connects parents and nannies. My experience in digital healthcare has shown me the importance of having an end to end service. The last thing a working parent needs is to have to pull together a load of disparate services. We do the payroll, the contract, and we’ve created an online community. The aim is to have a comprehensive, seamless service.
FD: How has your experience in digital health shaped your approach at Koru Kids?
RC: I was able to bring in a lot of my experience from digital health; performance marketing disciplines, content marketing teams, all of the bread and butter stuff. The processes are all quite similar, the scale of budget and target customer are completely different. But it’s about how you structure things. I’d already had the opportunity to make mistakes, and I learned a lot that I could bring into the creation of the service.”
FD: Are there any challenges in reaching an audience which are, as you’ve acknowledged, so incredibly busy and tired?
RC: It’s actually surprisingly easy to find parents, because they self-identify as a group. Mums in particular do so much online research, and join social media groups to do with being parents. In comparison to something like an asthma service, which we had in my previous role, it’s much harder to find that audience, because an asthma sufferer could be anyone, any gender, any age or earning bracket. They don’t spend every weekend going to asthma club. But parents actually do spend time in that way. So it’s a very different ball game. The challenge with marketing to
parents is that there’s a lot of really great content being produced for them already. The 'confessional mummy blogger' has taken off in the past few years, with the kind of honest, funny content that’s really popular. It’s obvious to us that we’re not going to cut through by just talking about parenting generally, so we had to be quite specific about our area of expertise. There’s a huge appetite and interest in anything to do with childcare costs. UK parents spend the second most on childcare in the OECD after Switzerland, so it’s a huge pain point, and people find our insight on that really useful. FD: As Koru Kids continues to expand, Carrell is transforming the face of childcare, a triumph both for the digitisation of a previously old- fashioned sector, and for the parents who benefit from the service. Keeping human needs and human responses at the heart of the business, Carrell has created a phenomenon which acts as a partner for families, seeing them safely through the choppy waters of childcare and securing accessible, professional care for a growing demographic of families.
korukids.co.uk
11 issue 31 spring 2018
I had the opportunity to make mistakes.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67
