"Disruption is an absolute driver in anything we've done"
Nicole Gilliver is Co-Founder of Ewe Care and Executive Director at Ewenique Enterprises PTY LTD – a company that prides itself for the last 20 years on challenging commonly held beliefs around the manufacture and packaging of familiar products by pushing the boundaries of sustainability. Ewenique Enterprises, and Ewe Care by extension, seeks to engage consumers in alternate conversation around the beliefs of what constitutes sustainability and the next direction of its boundaries.
Nicole currently oversees Ewe Care as it launches into the beauty space as Australia’s first luxury sheep milk skin care packaged in 100% compostable packaging. Ewe Care exists to create conversation and challenge consumers to undertake a sustainable and deliberately slow approach to skin care.
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Table of Contents
Thank you for joining us, please introduce yourself to our readers.
Nicole Gilliver: My name is Nicole. I’m the Co Founder of a skincare brand called Ewe Care. We exist to challenge commonly held beliefs around the manufacture and packaging of familiar products by pushing the boundaries of sustainability. Ewenique Enterprises, and Ewe Care by extension, seeks to engage consumers in alternate conversation around the beliefs of what constitutes sustainability and the next direction of its boundaries specifically with regards to sheep milk products.
Can you tell our readers in what ways you are disrupting your industry?
Nicole Gilliver: The beauty space is fraught with prolific volumes of single use plastics and the industry hides behind ethical stances that relate specifically to animal welfare in a context that is far too narrow. It is our belief at Ewe Care that the industry requires as shake up of the ethics around the prolific volumes of petro-chemical derived plastics that invariably finds its way into landfill and our oceans making a significant contribution to the environmental hazards which ultimately pollutes land and seas and thus creates in itself animal welfare issues far beyond those already positioned as ethical trends in beauty. Whilst the pre existing standards applied to cosmetics and beauty are undoubtedly important, Ewe Care seeks to extend the conversation beyond current standards to help improve environmental and ethical outcomes in the beauty space.
Ewe Care is 100% committed to fully sustainable packaging with all of its packaging being plastic free and 100% compostable. It’s Ewe Care’s belief that whilst the argument for recycling is worthwhile it fails to address real human habits and real challenges associated with recycling hence all of our packaging is reusable and compostable. Ewe Care is also repurposing our highly functional on farm produced sheep milk in a natural skin care solution that solves not only skin problems and has done for centuries (Cleopatra bathed in it) but it also solves an on farm problem of start of season milk supply that is better suited to beauty than cheese.
Did you become a disruptor by choice or by necessity? Tell us more about the journey.
Nicole Gilliver: Disruption is an absolute driver in anything we’ve done. We created a sheep dairy in the bottom end of Tasmania some 20 years ago when Australians thought milk couldn’t possibly come from any other animal than a cow. Progressive people knew about goat milk but very few understood sheep milk. We had to fight hard to tell the message of the inherent benefits of sheep milk products over and above that of cow and goat and to do so required disruption at all levels.
So it was a choice but it was also very necessary.
We disrupted conventional farming methods by breeding the first registered Australian Dairy Sheep with a view that if we didn’t do it, then nobody would and then there’d be no ability to develop a genuinely viable sheep dairy industry in Australia. There’s still no real sheep dairy industry here but we do have a hairy milky animal that would make a fine wool farmer feel very disrupted!
Now for the main focus of this interview: Many readers may wonder what are the biggest challenges women entrepreneurs must overcome to be successful?
Nicole Gilliver: I believe the biggest challenges women entrepreneurs must overcome to be successful is fear, but it’s not a challenge that is unique to women alone. We all feel fear. Some are more fearful than others, but one thing I know is that if anyone is to be successful, whatever the degree of fear they feel, they must utilise it to propel them rather than allow it to debilitate them.
I understand very well that as a woman I face many challenges and obstacles put before me by the patriarchy, but I won’t fear it. I know all too well that if I were born the opposite sex then some of the obstacles I have faced may have presented differently or simply not been there at all, but I will not allow the fear of these thing to enter into my psyche. It’s irritatingly ever present. I know that if I was to ever have to pitch for funding to a room of Venture Capitalists that the odds are stacked against me. I’ve experienced direct and indirect assumptions about my abilities based on my gender. I also have recently been referred to as ‘the tea lady’ by some older male who missed the woke memo, or refused to read it……
As the third generation of a family of female entrepreneurs I could fill these lines with stories of my own, my mother’s and my grand mother’s gender based adversities, but I’m not, because they are my private arsenal in my war against the fear I feel whenever I feel that as a female entrepreneur I’ll never reach the heights of my male counterparts or that I’ll simply never be good enough.
Fear is both my kryptonite but also my superpower and, if women are more emotional than the opposite sex then I choose it as my superpower! But please don’t think that I don’t believe for a second that men feel this fear as deeply as I do, because I’m also a sister to a brother and a mother of a boy. A beautiful, emotional and smart little boy who feels ALL of the feels just as his sister does, just as our men folk do. The question becomes how do we harness this energetic emotional forcefield in the direction of productively arriving at a rational outcome, and that is something we all must do.
It seems to me that somehow there’s a narrative that exists out there that women are simply too emotional and that, if this is true then this should somehow limit them from entrepreneurial success? Why? Because business is business right? And surely there’s no room for emotion in business! Well how can this be compatible with humanity? Fear doesn’t discriminate based on gender. So surely the key to success whether you are a female entrepreneur or a male entrepreneur is how you harness the endless energy around emotions into rational and purposeful action? This is my key to success. This is my mantra to myself whenever I fall into the pit of self doubt. Fear needs to be your friend in order to be successful! This is a key differentiator between those who seek success and those who don’t.
How did you overcome these obstacles? Who helped you during these difficult times and how did they?
Nicole Gilliver: Grit, resilience, intelligence and working smarter are the hallmarks of entrepreneurial women. This is taught to us by both our upbringing and our responses to multiple situations during our lifetime of the years in business. It is certainly better now in general than it was but my mother was the first person ( and woman) in Australia to gain a university degree in Financial Planning and was a director of an Australasian financial planning business at the age of 33.
The common inference here was that she must have slept her way to the top. My Grandmother was the founder of the biggest children’s clothing company in post war Australia. The reality here was that she (felt) she had to sleep with the decision makers in order to sell her clothing. These are generational issues that are on occasion still at play in 2022 but these stories are exactly what propel me through my dark and difficult times. What do these seriously sexist impediments do for women in business? It makes you incredibly determined to succeed and make sure any daughters or other women are encouraged to succeed and to pay it forward. I’ve been very fortunate to have strong female role models in my life and they are still the most important people in our journey.
They have taught me that fearlessness is a furphy. We are at the core of our being all human and thus fear is useful! It is far more powerful to embrace the fear you feel and harness its energy to propel you forward.
How did these lessons shaped the way you conduct business today?
Nicole Gilliver: These lessons give me profound appreciation for how far we’ve come and how far we’ve got to go. This journey has highlighted to me that at the heart of everything I do is compassion, empathy and gratitude for what I know, what I’ve experienced and what I seek to understand. There’s no greater joy, challenge and privilege in business than having the responsibility of employment and doing so in a fashion that provides empowerment, especially in those who have been marginalised. There’s no greater example of the negativity of fear than in those who have been shoved aside. I take great pride in making efforts where I can to build these people into positions in our business where they can feel supported to fear less and thus feel valued and productive.
I find myself daily applying intellect to emotion to communicate towards favourable outcomes. I embrace the energy of how I feel about what I do and disseminate it through thought and experience and a deft use of vocabulary. In order to lead one must have very sharp mental and verbal acuity so as to limit misunderstandings. These lessons have carved out in me a deep sense of both personal and business based values on which I rarely compromise.
What advice you wished you had received when you started, that you’d like to share now with aspiring women entrepreneurs?
Nicole Gilliver: Think before you speak. Allow yourself the time to filter and process what’s being asked of you and try, where possible, to see the information through as many lenses as possible.
Diversity is the key to all things. Without diversity ecosystems cannot thrive. This is true of all things including your workplace. We all need to embrace difference.
Above all else always conduct yourself with honesty, integrity and transparency. Stick rigidly to your values and always be up front with those who bring you into question and you with rarely go wrong.
Out of all of your proudest moments as an entrepreneur, is there a particular one that stands out the most?
Nicole Gilliver: I employed a young woman on gut feel who during the interview could not maintain even a remote semblance of eye contact, but I knew she really wanted to work. She dropped out of school at 14 and was barely literate but I knew she really wanted the job. She needed to work for us. I knew that employing her wouldn’t simply be a transactional undertaking of you work we pay, but the investment in her would involve building her back up again in every sense but she would repay us in more ways than money could indicate.
We trained her to a Cert Level 4 in Manufacturing over a five year period and she left us full of confidence fearing less and moved to a much higher paying position in Civil Contracting. She still drops in for the occasional chat and coffee.
What do you plan on tackling during the 2022 year? Share your goals and battles you expect to face.
Nicole Gilliver: I don’t expect to face battles. I tackle them as they arrive, should they arrive.
2022 for me is all about telling the Ewe Care story and continuing the conversation of the values of Ewe Care in the beauty space. It’s my goal that by the end of 2022 Ewe Care will be a brand that finds its way beyond the shores of Australia and into the bathrooms of people beyond our shores. Here’s hoping there’s also a little bit of travel associated with it too, finally!!
I’m sure our readers will be very thankful for the insights you have shared. What is the best book you’ve gone through lately and please share some take away lessons from it.
Nicole Gilliver: I am reading Profit First and its excellent (download it as an audiobook – its easy reading and great). The premise is that as entrepreneurs we run our businesses on accounting basis which is revenue – expenses = profit. However we never seem to get to the profit part. I think this is because part of our behaviour that makes us entrepreneurs is that we always have our eye on the next thing or believe that we need to invest back into the business to grow it. However Profit First makes the argument very succinctly that we should take x%age of all deposits weekly and put it into another bank account that is not touched.
We then have to work the expenses that much harder to keep the business going. In our business when things have been tight we have pulled out all stops and become far more efficient in our operating expenses but then when things turn around we are very good at spending too! So we never really get to the point of profit for us. With this system we can easliy start with even 1 or 2% of deposits and hide it away . Then we can increase this percentage each quarter as we learn to be more efficient .
This is a brilliant concept and gets around the “glass half full” personality traits of entrepreneurs . Pay yourself first – we have all heard that but this book gives us easy ways of making that happen without hurting the business . And this book was recommended to us by our accountant!!!
Just to balance things out I’m also reading ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ by Yvon Chouinard who is the founder of Patagonia and a somewhat ‘accidental’ entrepreneur.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, I do have one more question for you. When was the last time you did something for the first time and what was it?
Nicole Gilliver: The last time I did something for the first time ever was July last year. I launched a brand and put my face to it. Talk about FEAR!!! I have long been involved in business as an entrepreneur but until last year I had always played a supporting role for those who put their faces to our other brands. This time it was my turn and I was very fearful!
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Nicole Gilliver for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Nicole Gilliver or her company, you can do it through her – Instagram
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