102 Jo Spolton – transcript

Interview Transcript

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Jo Spolton – Rumage  02:57

So Rumage is really simple, it aggregates all second hand websites all into one place. So essentially, we connect to all of our partner sites that we’re working with at the moment. With one search on rummage, you get one list of results from everywhere, because we discovered that actually as many people as increasingly more people are interested in buying secondhand for various reasons, but actually, there are so many places to go. In the UK, there are over 300 independent websites and retailers digitally online and resilience over three and a half 1000. Not quite because it is but a lot on bricks and mortar. And it’s very difficult to find what you need really quickly. So the idea is that you type it in once we give you one set of results. With those results, you can then filter them by location, price, you can favourite items, and you can set up alerts. And essentially what that does, the whole aim of Rumage is to make it really quick to be successful. Because if you’re successful, you will then repeat the habit. And if you repeat the habit, you’re basically building a world where we are not littering the planet with the remains of our overconsumption of new.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  04:13

That’s brilliant. And after we’d had our conversation a couple of months ago, I decided to go and try Rumage for myself and was successful in finding a Patagonia top that I’ve been after. So I can testify that it was super easy and very successful. So yeah, so let’s step back a bit. How on earth did you end up starting Rumage?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  04:37

Well, I’m not your I don’t have a conventional backstory. I don’t think at all to being an entrepreneur. So I originally started out life as an artist. I’ve always liked creating things. I went to St. Martin’s in London did a degree that tied in very discordantly. To that I also I come from the south coast of England and I sailed as a A child. And I loved sailing. And I ended up for a while racing yachts professionally. So I did a couple of round the world races. And it was there where I literally saw floating in the oceans and washed up littering up the harbours, the debris and the results of waste, which is essentially the results of all of our overconsumption and overproduction of things for everybody to buy around the world. And it was, it was that really that didn’t distil into something that I could action on until later down my journey of life. I had children. And then having children, I realised that actually, everyone was right, and I was wrong, you can’t weld with two kids under two, you have to you know, you have to look after them. First, I don’t make baby welding goggles. So I parked the art for awhile, I obviously wasn’t sailing around the world for living anymore. And I did have to confess I got a little bit bored. And it was then that I decided to make a children’s website that was very focused around keeping things in circulation and connecting those that had with those that didn’t have as much, and enabling people to find what they needed really locally and very quickly. And it was about saving people money essentially at the time. And then while we were building that product, I realised ah, be great, we can set up an alert service. And then I thought, Oh, well, why isn’t there an alert service set up for every second hand website that is really useful. So after a while, we decided to park outgrown it my first kids website, and then we pivoted and then Rumage was born.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  06:48

So yeah, a really great minimum viable product to begin with kind of keeping it keeping it simple and solving local problems. And then learning from that, and really realising how many different directions you could jump off in. So I’m interested in knowing more about the challenges of getting Rumage going. And the frustrations of of trying to start a tech startup, but also something where you needed to interact with other companies, because it’s not just a kind of solo website, is it you have to have good relations with the likes of eBay, vintage and so on.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  07:29

Ya know, it’s been a real journey, I have to say, and not having a conventional career path leading up to this moment has proved rather challenging, I have to say, but I guess the, the real, the real early part of the journey was, it still is very exciting. But essentially starting a business from literally the ground up takes an awful lot of effort. And if you’ve not done the journey before, there’s an awful lot of learning that needs to go on. So the first challenges I had, I found a co founder very early on who was everything about marketing that I I am not, which is great. And obviously that’s key to growing a business, developing brand awareness, and learning how to present and build relationships with other businesses. That was really important. But ridiculously one of the early problems we had, going out looking for money very bright at the very beginning, was that I felt I wasn’t believed. So I was a middle aged mother of two children. I lived in Dorset, I didn’t live in London, I didn’t have a tech background. It was really hard to get anyone to believe me that this was one a really great idea. Despite the fact that no one was actually really doing it yet. And I think that bizarrely was the problem. The pushback we had early on was referenceable. If it’s a great idea, why isn’t somebody doing it already. So the fact that we were bringing it to the table didn’t seem relevant at the beginning. But we push through, and eventually we did we realised we needed an MVP, so a minimum viable product. And Sam and I set off and we found our co founder, we advertised on a couple of sites and we actually interviewed people from all over Europe and America. And oddly, we ended up getting our fantastic co founder technical chap, called Steven who lives in the south coast lives in Dorset as well. And he built the very first platform himself code wrote it because it’s super complicated in the back end, as generally everything that is front end really obvious and very simple. Behind the scenes, the actual execution of this really great idea is complicated. And he is an amazing digital architect. So he built the first product with which we went to go and raise our first round of investment with brilliant yeah It’s been a it’s been an exciting journey and the learnings along the way are, you know, everything from learning how to write and present a pitch deck, financial forecasts, none of this was covered in my art degree.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  10:16

I can imagine, and it but it sounds like, you know, a fantastic bit of serendipity to find just the, just the right co founder and for him to be local as well. So something something good must be happening in the in the background to kind of bring all this together. So once you got started, how did things evolve from there?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  10:38

Well, once we built the MVP, really the next, the next challenge was to, to go and connect to businesses, ones that weren’t open, they weren’t open for business as in, they weren’t connected to an affiliate platform. You know, an early pushback we had from people right at the beginning of potential investors was, you know, why would businesses want to come and share their data with you? You know, what is it in? What’s in it for them? Why would they connect to you, you know, essentially, you are small and insignificant, and nobody knows that you’re providing a service that is going to be necessary yet, because it’s not out there. And so, that whole journey of going and connecting to and selling ourselves to partners, was a really exciting time. And it was quite hard. But over the last, certainly over the last year is we’ve accelerated our growth and really established ourselves at the table. Now, one thing I’ve noticed, which is great, and it is exciting, is that companies that originally were reluctant to talk to us understand, believe me, we’re small, brand new, very insignificant, they now we’re now having conversations with them, they want to partner you know, the world of connections and how to grow your business is very different now than it was five years ago. Because I think people understand now that sin of synergies and growing together, and building a relationship where you both can benefit, and both can grow for the benefit of the greater good, is the way to really make change in the world. And building partnerships rather than clients is ultimately what Rumage is all about. partnerships with businesses, partnerships with companies that are doing something that is also beneficial to the planet, but maybe not directly ingestible to the rummage platform, but we also want to help promote as well. So we can show users everything there is to learn about being greener in the world with your consumption choices and how to tread more lightly on the planet.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  12:50

Yeah, that’s interesting. And I do think there’s an increasing awareness of the benefits of collaboration across businesses. And organisations are starting to see that they’re part of and I don’t like using the word but part of a kind of business ecosystem, with players in in similar sectors or in opposite sectors, you know, if you’re selling coffee at a cafe, you’ve got the waste grounds, they could go into four or five different sectors. And the more connected you are and the more open you are to new ideas about who you could work with who you could get things from give things to, it just makes for a more resilient business, doesn’t it? Because now you’ve got multiple connections, partners, supporters, and so on. And I guess also, companies like eBay and and the big players can now be confident in the knowledge that even though the customer might start at your website, and still want to range across the, you know, all the resellers. If they’re providing a really good customer experience, then even though next time the customer might still start on rummage because they want to see the selection of what’s out there.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  14:08

Yeah, they don’t I mean, and the other thing to say is that actually, you know, in terms of partnering, and why would companies want to come and join something like rummage is because for the big players, obviously, they have their audience established. But actually, as the marketplace got more crowded over the last couple of years, there are more and more companies coming into this space. And it’s a really busy sector. Now. There are new companies and new brands emerging almost weekly with different business models all geared around the circular economy of stuff, and reuse, reselling and retention of value in items monetarily and physically in terms of resources. And so eBay is and other bigger sites are constantly faced with the challenge of losing users to new sites, new experiences and For a user, it’s actually exciting to think that there are loads of different opportunities where you could go and find the phone of your dreams or be it secondhand. But actually, there are literally so many places to go, where would you even know where to start. And so for the younger brands, it’s exciting because we can put them in a set of results, where they are lined up, absolutely adjacent to the eBays of this world. So everyone gets a similar, you know, an equal amount of visibility. And I think that’s important because it means that value retention can be spread around so little companies can also have some share of the economic value in our community of circulating of circulation of things, I think it’s really key to making the kind of economics of the circular economy work is going to work for everyone, not just the big players.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  15:51

Absolutely. And that’s a really interesting points that some of the specialists that might just be reselling, I don’t know, secondhand watches or something that’s really niche, who would never be found by most potential customers, suddenly, if they’re connected to Rumage they pop up alongside eBay or, you know, whatever else is, is out there already. And it allows the small companies to really get in front of the people who want that specific thing. So yeah, it’s it’s, it’s just, it’s all evolving. So fast, isn’t it? So thinking back about the big challenges? Are there any, any big ones that have taken you, you know, a long time to solve perhaps in terms of the technical aspects, or?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  16:43

Yeah, the biggest challenge really, actually, is dealing with the data. So obviously, when you start to collect and aggregate information from, I mean, we’re currently connected to 27, 28 sites. As we grow and expand the amount of items that we have in our database, obviously, is enormous. And the way that we connect, we’re trying to connect so that we have live results coming in every day, sometimes several times a day. Because our mission is to really to enable people to be successful, they have to be at the front of the queue, they’ve got to know what’s happening constantly on every site that we’re related to. So managing the data is one thing, finding and extracting relevant information is, in a timely fashion really fast, is also a big challenge as that database moves hourly, occasionally. So it’s a very difficult thing to do technically. And also onboarding. Information from sites that have a different categorization or different taxonomy of items is hard, because we obviously want to make our user journey easy. So if you want to go and find something, and it’s in a book section, you know, when you type in Ken Follett, you need to find that you don’t want to go and find a t shirt with it on. So categorization and mapping, all the different information that we have to make it simpler for our user at the front end is proven really tricky. And we are at the mercy of our partner sites, because they don’t need to inform us when they change what they do on their site. So we have to set up warning signs and alerts and things in the background of us to let us know when things just aren’t quite right. And we need to nip that in the bud and go and change it quickly. So actually, it’s it’s far more complicated than I thought when I originally started as things generally would be. But it’s great, because you know, technology is moving really fast. And machine learning is really gathering pace. Now it has been there for a while. But machine learning is totally geared towards managing huge volumes of data, which is what we’re all about. So as we move forwards leveraging that capability to use tech to improve the experience, and the sort of fluidity of movement of items through our service is going to be key.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  19:08

Yeah, that’s, that’s fascinating. And, you know, when you started explaining that I was thinking about the interviews I’ve done with Rheaply, Floow2  And Excess Materials Exchange, and they act as kind of translation engines between businesses to allow them to exchange resources, materials, buildings, whatever. Was that’s a bit simpler, isn’t it? Because you’ve kind of got collaborative partners. They’re both sharing their individual ways of cataloguing things, but now you’re a bit more in the dark. And I guess it’s a kind of a different way of using machine learning in that you want the algorithm to shout when it gets something that it’s that doesn’t quite fit, because that could alert you to the fact that somebody’s changed their categorization and now this is in there. What you don’t want it to do is just Trying to think, Oh, here’s a new thing. I’ll include that in the in the bigger bundle of, of what’s there. So even writing the coding for the machine learning to do what you need it to do is tricky.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  20:13

Yeah, Relevancy is key, obviously, to having a great search experience. Right at the very beginning, we had this funny story where no matter what Sam’s search for, she was always looking for a rocking horse. That was her test, test item to look for. And she kept getting served chickens, chickens and caravans, no idea how that works. But so we’ve been have a standing joke that if things go wrong, there’s a chicken going to walk in shortly.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  20:37

Yeah, gosh, that could set you off on a, you know, I’ll be thinking about that on my next dog walk, what’ll the connection be? So and just to unpack the commercials a bit, because obviously, if this is a collaborative enterprise, you know, and you’re trying to build up a, an ecosystem of partners, then it has to work both for the resale platforms and rummage itself as well as for the, you know, the customer buying the stuff. So how do the commercials work? On the transactions?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  21:10

Yeah, no, good question. So we, we operate, so we monetize our users from our side. And we operate a very standard affiliate relationship on a commission of a sale. So if somebody comes through us, we send them to our partner site, they’re tagged. And if they make that purchase within 30 days, then we get a percentage of the sale, which is great. We also can now monetize users who browse. And we have a subscription service coming up later this year, which is serving the younger generations, because they’re very much in favour of thrifting, and a vintage way of living. So it’s really important that that’s the generation that’s going to carry this forward to this movement and this choice of lifestyle. So it’s really key to listen to what they want and how they want to access this huge space. They’re very clearly stated in a couple of surveys, thread apps being the big one, I think three quarters of them said that the millennials, and Gen Z said that they would do more in this space, if it was made easier. So a subscription service for them is coming from us later this year. But from a partner’s point of view, we were obviously sending users not just to their site, but specifically to an item that someone has already chosen. So we’re delivering them a user very much in a state of need to very far down their sales funnel, which is great. So we’re delivering it very efficiently to their door, actually, and then it’s up to them to convert. But the goal is that we send users really swiftly to somewhere where they will be successful. So it’s a win win, essentially.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  22:52

Yeah, so just to understand that a bit better. And to kind of clarify it. The end user doesn’t pay any more for buying through your site. It’s the affiliate links from the likes of eBay, and so on that go back to fund your business. But the user looking for the Patagonia jacket, whatever it is, pays the same buying it via image as they would do buying it via bento dB.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  23:19

Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s a really key. A key point to our purpose is to make this service free for everyone to use. There will be as we go forward, different levels, different access points, different annex sections, but ultimately, the search service, the basic tool is going to be free because we firmly believe if we don’t make it easy for people to find what they want, they’re not going to adopt this as a choice. So it really is a huge part of our motivation for banging our heads against the wall every day sometimes.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  23:54

And are you able to say a bit more about the upcoming subscription service? You know how that would work? Yeah,

Jo Spolton – Rumage  24:00

yeah, no. So the younger generation, really are time savvy when it comes to their shopping habits, and they’re becoming increasingly keen on having life delivered to their door. They really enjoy the fact that products and experiences are personalised to them. And they’re very bespoke to their choices, their actions, their desires. So we’re going to be delivering a concierge service whereby we can give people a more accurate set of results based on their previous behaviour.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  24:37

So they would kind of be able to customise their particular preference?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  24:43

Yeah, absolutely. So it becomes a more tailored service. And you know, shortening the shortening the sort of the, the search and discovery journey is what we do currently shortening the choosing is what we’re going to be looking at doing later as we go forwards. It’s it’s common in, it’s very common user experience in new, buying things new. You know, people who’ve bought this also bought that, based on your past experiences, we think you’d like a jumper in blue in this style. So you know, people have got used to that. But at the moment, the second hand environment is still feels a little bit scrappy, can feel a bit thrifty. You literally do have to rummage, excuse the pun through a lot of sites to find what you want. And so if we can literally have a personal shopper, saying, Actually, I think this suits you perfectly, and this will be great for the party, then that’s going to be that’s the experience everyone wants, and it’s what’s going to make it much more fun to do much, much, much nicer to participate in.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  25:49

Yeah, that’s, I think that could be absolutely groundbreaking. I mean, it’s one of those things, isn’t it that when you’re looking on a website, although some retailers and I’m wondering if Boden might do this kind of, for separate things that go with if you’ve chosen a certain colour top things that go with that, as opposed to look like they might go with it colour wise, but then they arrive, and it’s just not quite right. So there’s that that aspect isn’t there of being able to say, you know, these are the colours that I that I really like and maybe choose from swatches. So it’s an exact, you know, it’s this this blue, not that blue? Yeah, that would really cut down the search, and then to say, what kind of style? You know, yes, you might, you might want vintage, but it’s these, you know, these kind of designers or whatever. And for me, the bit that annoys me about my eBay searching is every single time I have to go in and say, I just want sellers, either from the UK if it’s a bulky thing, or from the Europe, the European continent, you know, I’m not interested in trying to transact and end up with air miles of something coming from the US. But every single time I have to go in and why can’t I just set that as a, as a rule? So those are things, you know, to cut down on the carbon footprint of the shipping and, and all the other stuff?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  27:11

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And obviously, as we become wider, and our partnerships grow, there’ll be more local opportunities as well. That’s another really important thing to consider, which you’ve brilliantly just brought up, which is that if you buy a pair of jeans, say secondhand, let’s stick with a clothing, that’s great, you’ve saved potentially 7000 litres of water from that’s what it costs in terms of resources to make a pair of jeans, then that’s amazing thing. But if you then buy it from Nottingham, and it’s got to be driven in a vehicle in postage, and packing all the way down to Dorset, then that’s not particularly green. So ultimately, there is a lot more in your local area than you would give account for then by connecting all the services into one place. People in your town might be using polio or next door, but you’re not going to be on all of those apps to know. So there is an enormous opportunity to completely reduce the carbon footprint of your second hand items as well, if you know where they all are. So you know, that whole journey of about postage and packaging, it’s expensive, quite rightly, it should be because we’re employing people and vehicles to drive around the country to deliver it. If we can make it really hyperlocal. By connecting everything, you’re not cutting anyone out of the equation, all the other businesses can still survive and thrive, users get a great choice. And they will be able to pick it up when they go and collect the kids from school or get their, you know, get their friend pick it up when she goes to work. If you know, it’s where she works, you know, those opportunities going forward, I think are really exciting because it’s about connecting communities again, where they could become slightly dispersed. The digital world of resale is fantastic because you do have a huge amount of choice. It offers up the capability to retain all sorts of items that would otherwise have been discarded from brands that have you know, got returns that are damaged, and they can’t do anything with two high end items or just stuff that needs to be given away for free. It’s not worth selling. But if you can put all that into a local a local package, then you’re really looking at making some actual impact and still having fun and being a human and shopping because everyone likes to go shopping and buy stuff and change their wardrobe. Refit out a bedroom, whatever it is, but you know you need to try and do it a little bit more impactfully

Jo Spolton – Rumage  29:45

Yeah, but the whole thing around the filtering and the kind of concierge thing sounds really exciting and could go in all sorts of different directions good net where you could have your own preferences and then you know if if you’re not getting what you want, you can change one filter to another and you You know, see what see what comes up? Yeah. Yeah, really exciting. So what about other future plans? I’m guessing from the conversation so far, and the number of things that you’ve, you know, directions that you’ve gone in and the way that it’s evolved, that there are some other exciting ideas in the pipeline.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  30:18

Yeah, we’ve got quite a lot on our roadmap, actually. But I think, in general, to take a direction rather than a specific thing. I think that connecting rental and sharing options is going to be key. And that’s very different to consuming in a normal ownership fashion. Because that does involve at its best being quite local. And this hyper localization is something that I find fascinating. And I think the number of companies that are coming to the market now with swapping, loan, and for rent and for free are huge. And I think that that is it’s an exploding sector currently, in all segments. So mobile phones, I’ve rented a mobile phone. It’s much cheaper, I rented a refurbished mobile phone. I don’t think it gets better than that, to be honest. And I think that it’s the way forward. And I think the sharing economy is going to be big, it’s starting to take a toehold. But I think it’s going to take a while. But I think that’s the way that’s the direction we’re going to be moving in. So trying to connect those opportunities together as well, is going to be really looking forwards into how we how we operate in the world as a human, how we interact with things. I think that’s fascinating watching that explode.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  31:41

And I’m really hoping it does explode because it could make such a massive difference, you know, getting more use out of underutilised objects beyond the you know, the standard examples of the power drill and the car and so on. But I think I read some research from one of the consumer marketing, you know, the kind of consumer trends organisations A while ago, and they were looking forward to 2030. And, you know, what would be important to people. And one of the elements that was really interesting was that, you know, the affordability of housing is so much more difficult not just in the UK, but worldwide. So people would be living in smaller spaces and in shared spaces. And that meant that you just didn’t have room for so much stuff. So, you know, people want to be able to borrow things when they need them not buy something, you know, I don’t know, a barbecue or whatever, and then think, where on earth am I going to put this for the rest of the year? So all those kinds of things could really take off as a way of enabling people to have, you know, fun and useful things when they need them.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  32:51

Yeah, absolutely. It’s much more, it’s a very different way to look at living in a community a bit more of a cooperative attitude to life in general. And actually having things and sharing out who owns what in a street or a community is brilliant, because it means that everyone gets to save on space, spend less, and some people might be able to monetize what they already own. And in the current cost of living crisis, renting some things out that you’ve got sitting in the back of a cupboard is brilliant. And it does genuinely give everyone a bit of a helping hand. I was going through our house the other day thinking well, could I rent I don’t know. And I’ve got a fantastic, beautiful digital camera and old cat an old fashioned camera digital SLR. And I was thinking, well, nobody uses those anymore, that are wrong. Loads of people are interested, you know, you have to be brave to rent out your favourite toy, but actually, it’s a good thing to do. And I think that I think that’s going to be embraced more as we go forward. For many reasons.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  33:53

Yeah, definitely. And obviously, the platform is the key to enabling that trust, to start to, you know, to take place in the first place and then to build based on feedback and experiences and so on.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  34:06

Yeah, so yeah, I mean, people who go away on holidays trust is something is a is a part of being human that is very easy to to remove. With current experiences of sort of digital nightmares and bank accounts being hacked into and things we get rid of our trust quite quickly. But actually, oddly, we are quite good at returning it because trusted house sitters for example, people give their house to almost a perfect stranger and go on holiday. Now if you can do that, you can definitely rent out your camera.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  34:41

Yeah, good point. That’s a really good analogy. Thank you. So Jo, over the course of building the business, what surprised you the most?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  34:55

What surprised me that what surprised me is just how, how hard it’s been to get going, how hard is been talking of trust to get people to trust me, that I can make this happen, that we can get this to work and it will work that we can build the business. I think that’s been a really interesting learning curve. From my point of view. Technically, there are always, you know, lots of surprising challenges along the way. But on a personal note, I think that’s, that’s been fascinating. And then how you how you learn from these, how you learn from what’s happening, how you learn from the feedback that you get, the strengths, the weaknesses that you identify, and how you build on those and build your team to take it forwards. You know, ultimately, it’s a team effort in, you know, very much a team effort. And recognising quite quickly that you need many talents, and how many hats you have to wear as a founder is huge. To be honest, I’m looking forward to growing into the next stage where I can hand some of my hats on. I like to wear fewer less hats over the next year.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  36:08

But at least you know, you’ll be able to put them all on display on rummage and

Jo Spolton – Rumage  36:13

I can rent them out.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  36:16

Yeah. So when you talk to other entrepreneurs, particularly those that want to start something circular, what bit of advice do you tend to give them

Jo Spolton – Rumage  36:29

be prepared to tread the fine line between listening to advice and feedback of which you will have absolutely matters. But also staying true to your dream and your vision. There is a point where you have to onboard and listen very carefully and distil what people are telling you but try not to get too knocked off course. It’s a it’s a fine line to learn to learn and iterate on your product and tweak it. Learn from other people’s journeys definitely learn from other people’s journeys. So as many webinars and podcasts and interviews that you can read about mistakes that other people have made, do it because it’s a lot quicker than it is learning yourself the hard way.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  37:17

Yeah, there’s there’s a good quote from I think he’s in education, but that the you know, the most successful in the next century will be those who can learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  37:28

Yes, that’s perfect. That just about sums it up.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  37:31

Alvin, Alvin Toffler, I can send you the link afterwards if you want to use it. And Jo, if you could wave, a magic wand and change one thing to help create a better world? What would that be?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  37:46

I’d like to remove the need for everything to have a monetary value is that would be my magic wand wave. I think that you know, everything that’s considered worthwhile and valuable, is all based on money. And we need to find a different way of defining wealth, what it is and disconnect it from the manufacturing and global movement of things around the planet. I don’t know how we do it, but that would be my wand.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  38:12

Yeah. I like the sound of that. That could be a good thought experiment. And is there someone you would recommend as a future guests for the programme?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  38:20

Yes, there is. She’s fantastic. She’s called Jennifer Mathison. And her site is called Kidsie. And it’s very much where I started my circular journey in the children sector. And it’s somewhere that I really believe needs to be a needle the attention it could get, because having children, for some people is almost a rite of passage. But it is hard. It’s it’s expensive, potentially. And I think anything that can ease the journey of those early years when they’re, you know, constantly growing out of stuff and everything changes regularly is a brilliant is a brilliant thing to do. And she is she’s great. She’s got a different view on it. So yes, talk to Jennifer.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  39:01

Excellent. Thank you. I’ll look her up afterwards. And lastly, how can people find out more and get in touch with you and the Rumage team?

Jo Spolton – Rumage  39:10

where you can have a look on our website rumage.com One M so Rumage, if you wanted to sound French, and our Twitter and Instagram handles are at GoRumage, very simple,

Catherine Weetman  39:22

excellent. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what what comes next. And I think the subscription service and the idea of the concierge sounds fascinating. So I’m keen to see what happens with that. And very impressed with the journey so far. Thank you. I think it’s amazing. You know, what you’ve done and how many sites you’ve managed to connect to, and it really feels like a game changing business of the future. So thanks very much, Jo, for taking the time to talk us through it.

Jo Spolton – Rumage  39:51

Thanks very much for having me. It’s been great