HOW I GOT HERE - The Long Version
As a strategy coach, educator and founder of Muse Marketing, I really love teaching women the power and implementation of marketing to support the lives they want to live.
But I didn’t know this was where my earlier entrepreneurial beginnings would lead me, and it’s taken well over two decades to get here.
It definitely hasn’t been a straight line either. More of a curious, adventurous meander!
MY STORY TIMELINE
I grew up in the UK. My first memory of having entrepreneurial dreams was reading A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford at about 10 years old. It was all about a young lady with very little but unshakable tenacity and ambition, who grew a retail empire from nothing. It made a huge impression on my young mind, which I’ve clearly never shaken off.
My initial original passion was fashion - and with a shiny new fashion knitwear and business studies degree under my belt, I began my career!
My first ‘proper’ job was as a knitwear designer for a large corporate company, mostly in Hong Kong. It was an incredible experience. But after six years, my desire to do my own thing was bubbling up.
Back home in London, I followed that dream and started a fashion & accessories label under my name - Anuk Harvey. This was a time of trial, error and deep learning. Social media didn’t really exist yet and business education wasn’t readily available. Nevertheless, I figured out how to market myself, connect with buyers & show my collections at London & Paris Fashion Week.
Having my own fashion label was a dream come true. It allowed me to travel, have amazing experiences, meet incredible people and learn a huge amount about sales, marketing and business.
But here’s the truth, at that time I hadn’t figured out how it could run without me working all the time and making it financially viable to support a family, which is what I also wanted, along with my lust for a new adventure!
After much debate, my partner and I, along with our one-year-old daughter moved to Vancouver, Canada. It’s a beautiful place but not known for its high fashion. So I chose to close my fashion label and set out to build a new business that fitted more with my season in life.
Together, my partner and I, opened a place for parents and their under-5-year-olds. It was a super cool combo of a cafe, retail store and education space. This was a unique concept in Vancouver and very loved by the community. Four years later after winning awards and serving hundreds of families, we decided to sell the business on, as by then we’d had our second daughter and both our kids were starting to age out of it.
During the early stages of those businesses, it was mainly guesswork and imposter syndrome, as I really had no idea what I was doing. The process of figuring it out is what got me hooked on marketing. I was fascinated by the mix of psychology and creativity and the possibilities it created.
I knew I wanted to help other women build businesses with more clarity and ease than I’d had.
With a freshly ignited passion and goal to support other women in business, I sought out brilliant female educators and learnt all the marketing and business strategies I could from them. They are still my mentors to this day. But learning is not implementing. I wanted to action my knowledge and get results for other people.
I intentionally returned to a corporate position as a marketing manager to deepen my understanding and ability to get results in all things online marketing. After a few years of doing just that, along with mentoring female clients with their new businesses, I was ready to put all I’d learnt from the last two+ decades into the new venture I’d been dreaming of: Muse Marketing.