Noah Carlile-Swift was 14 when Tara, his mum, suggested that they start a business together as a way to boost his confidence after secondary school education left him feeling “stupid”.
Diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia at the age of 11, Noah was “bright, at the top end of learning ability, but not in the way that school teaches it. So he struggled with exams and with comprehension, which is mainly what school is about,” said Tara, 50.
Together they started Freckleface, a fragrance company selling wax melts — scented pieces of wax that release an aroma into the room when heated on top of burner. It was in November 2017, and soon after, Noah left his school in Spalding, Lincolnshire, for good.
“The school was fully supportive,” said Tara. “They agreed that he was doing stuff outside of school with the business — building the website, taking computers apart, designing logos — and was much better using his skills on something he got reward from, rather than feeling stupid every day.”
Today, both Freckleface and Noah, now 21, are thriving. Having grown from a kitchen-table business, selling wax melts at local fairs and fetes, Freckleface now has its own factory in rural Lincolnshire, and has opened five shops in York, Cambridge, Lincoln and Stamford, with more in the pipeline for 2025.
Freckleface had sales of £3.6 million and a pre-tax profit of £600,000 last year, with Tara as managing director and Noah running the retail side of the business. The plan is for him to succeed his mum as managing director in ten years’ time.
It was an unconventional route into entrepreneurship for Tara, whose “only qualification” is a Btec in sign writing. Her father died suddenly of a heart attack aged 46 when she was just six months old, and her mother remarried when she was six. Her stepfather’s job in HM Coastguard meant the family “moved every few years” including stints in the Isle of Wight and on the Gower Peninsula in Wales.
She said: “My mother will tell the stories that I cried and never wanted to leave, but within ten minutes of living at the new place it was like I had lived there all my life. I was fairly loud and gregarious and liked making friends.”
The Btec was made redundant almost as soon as she achieved it, thanks to the march of technology and “the whole signwriting world went digital”. So, she “bummed around for a couple of years” before going to do a course to become a personal assistant. Tara opted for a college in Nottingham after meeting Simon, her husband, on a night out there. “I went for the weekend, met Simon, and we moved in together two weeks later. We’ve been together ever since.”
From the PA course, she went straight into a job at Experian, the credit-checking firm, where she spent the next three years learning about business “through osmosis” as she sat in on meetings with the top team. “At the time, you don’t realise, but you’re absorbing it all, sitting with finance directors taking minutes of all the meetings.”
She and Simon were also trying for a baby, but having suffered a series of miscarriages, decided to take some time out of corporate life to go to Australia for a year.
“As we landed back in England, we found out we were pregnant with Noah.”
Tara got a job temping as a PA at Boots, the high street giant that is headquartered in Nottingham, when a chance conversation changed the course of her career.
“I was sitting in the canteen eating my sandwich and the people next to me were talking about products they were developing for pregnant people and I chipped in and said, ‘I don’t think you should do it like that, I think you should think about this,’ and they offered me a job in the marketing department.”
After a couple of years at Boots, she left as part of a restructuring and re-trained as a project manager, taking the Prince2 (Projects in Controlled Environments) project management qualification, before working as an administrator for Siemens on railway bids. The job required long hours and frequent travel, with Tara often away three nights a week, which she and Simon had to juggle alongside his shifts as an IT worker.
Tara quit her job at Siemens to support her son on his transition to secondary school and, needing an extra income, became a foster carer. “We always wanted more children and couldn’t have any,” she explains. They fostered 23 children in three and a half years.
She decided to start her own business just as the fostering was coming to an end but admits the first few months were “absolute carnage”. Tara said: “We had a baby who we had from birth and he had gastric problems so he didn’t sleep and was sick constantly, plus I had a teenager who was neurodiverse, all while I was doing the business.
“We were making the products all week and then I was putting them in the car, driving all over the country, sleeping in the car, doing whatever we needed to get the products out there.”
It was exhausting, but having the desired effect, she added. “It became obvious really quickly that we had something special. We would go to a fair, sell out, come home, make it all again. Go to another show, and sell out. And so on.”
The baby boy was adopted permanently from them by “the most super family in the world” and the Carlile-Swifts still see him every six weeks. But Tara said the initial separation was “awful” and “so much harder than I thought it would be”.
She threw herself into the business. “We decided, ‘Let’s take the business really seriously. We came up with a business plan that said we wanted to have stores on every UK high street and for the brand to be global within ten years.”
By 2019, Freckleface moved into its first industrial unit, just months before Covid hit. But while the pandemic threatened to derail production, sales were given a boost with people working from home and “everybody wanting their houses to smell great”.
Reduced rents and breaks on business rates during the pandemic led to the pair’s initial foray into retail, with the first Freckleface store opening in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in July 2020, and another in Cambridge following in 2021.
Tara and Simon built the shop interiors for the first three stores, to save money, with Noah building the last two. As well as operating its own stores, Freckleface products are also stocked in more than 800 shops nationwide, and the brand has run collaborations with the Royal Horticultural Society and Laura Ashley.
It now employs 60 staff, including Tara’s husband, who joined in 2020 to run the manufacturing side. Tara puts much of the company’s more recent success down to the initial slog at trade shows and local fairs.
“The customer you meet at a show is a super-loyal customer. They will shop from you online and will seek out your high street stores. And our product is a consumable one, so they tend to come back every month or six weeks to stock up. So the hard work of schlepping around the country at shows is why the business built so quickly.”
The family has not raised or borrowed any cash to finance the business. Tara said to begin with they struggled even to buy a kilo of wax, which would have cost “£10 or so”. While working capital is “still the biggest stresser that keeps us awake at night and stops us from growing quicker”, Tara said she’s “not interested” in raising investment. “We want to be a heritage brand that’s still going to be on the high street in 50 years and we will hand down the generations of Frecklefaces. We’re not in it to make a quick buck.”
The business is named after Tara’s nickname for Noah when he was small, because she had been taunted by playground bullies for being a “freckleface” and wanted to make sure her son considered it a term of endearment.
“We’re very freckly, we’re plastered. And we would call each other freckleface. So it was a natural decision when we were naming the business, but we never thought back then we were going to have all these shops. And now people shout Freckleface at us across the street, but in a nice way.”
HIGH FIVE
My hero… Noah. He is proof that whatever adversity is thrown at you in life, with a little bit of hard work and dedication, you can be successful.My best decision… to be a foster parent. It was so rewarding and it brought the last child we had into our life, who’s like a second son.My worst decision… It’s cheesy but I don’t think there are bad decisions. I’ve always made decisions based on the information I’ve got at the top. If they weren’t the right decision, it’s led us down a different path that we’ve learned from.Funniest moment… being recognised in the worst possible situation. I had skin cancer three years ago and had to have a big chunk cut out of my leg. I went to the doctor to get it redressed and had my trousers down and the doctor said, without looking up, “You’re Freckleface aren’t you?”Best business tip… if you’re not enjoying it, you’re not doing the right thing. You’ll never besuccessful at something you don’t enjoy.