“No one interferes when the graphs are going up… And it's when it starts to flatten that the interference happens.”
James Reed: all about business · October 2026
James Reed asked whether she knew that bringing in investors would change the culture of her company. Kidston says she did, but her first backers left her alone while growth was strong. The trouble, in her telling, came once growth slowed.
Transcript
…chains that came in? But it was just that idea. I think it was more profitable because of the discount if I'd run the numbers and I should have asked him to, but, you know, well, difficult to gauge. But it's just that feeling of always the connection between whatever one's doing and the customer.
…you invited investment into the business to grow it further, I mean, you obviously had ambitions to build the business into something much larger. Were you aware at the time that that would change the culture of the company perhaps as much as it did or the approach in the way you've just described?
I knew it would, but I had an amazing bunch of people first time around, which a lot of individuals put money in, private individuals. And because the business was on this very upward trajectory, what I can't say, no one interferes when the graphs are going to be. Things are going well, yeah. Yeah. And it's when it starts to flatten that the interference happens. But I didn't feel I had a choice because I knew that I couldn't manage a business. I'm really bad at running things like, how do you set up a schedule for this or that? Or how do you work out all the stuff, reviews? You know, all the detail of the business, I cloud over. You can
find someone. I'm really bad at
doing that. I want it to happen, but I can't do it. So
how do you deal with that yourself? So I have an ops person. I always have an ops person. I've got an amazing
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