On a sunny afternoon in North London, the eco-entrepreneur Jill Barker is
showing me how she makes compost from her puppy’s poo. “It goes in the top
tray there, where it is eaten by worms, and out of the bottom tray comes
compost for the garden,” she explains. “Look! Can you see the worms? Isn’t
it fab?”
I hover behind her waiting for the stench to hit my nostrils but, actually, it
doesn’t smell too bad. I’m impressed by her dog-waste converter. It’s only
when I look across the garden and notice her flourishing tomato and pumpkin
plants that I’m glad I haven’t come for supper.
“Don’t worry,” she says, reading my mind, “you don’t put the compost on
vegetables, only on flowerbeds.”
Given how comfortable Barker is discussing dog poo, pumpkins and her plans for
a solar panel to be installed on her roof, it is easy to forget that she is
also a successful businesswoman who spent 13 years on the trading floor of a
City bank. She calls it “her other life”; before she set up her baby
business, Green Baby, which now has four shops across London and a
successful website selling organic clothes, and eco-accessories
(www.greenbabyco.com). Green Baby is worth £3 million and has been growing
since she set it up seven years ago.
Canadian-born Barker, 42, has just co-written a book with Gilly Smith called Baby
Green: Caring for Your Baby the Eco-Friendly Way. She says she hopes
that the book will make it easier for parents to make decisions about which
products to choose. “It made sense to pull together all the stuff that
people ask me time and time again,” she says. The book draws on her
experiences as a mother and as someone who has spent the past eight years
researching the “green baby” market to guide you through the main
troublespots.
“I learnt to take risks in the City”
Barker has the endearingly straightforward manner of one who has surprised
herself by her own success. She talks nonstop and laughs often. When I admit
that I couldn’t work out whether she’d be a hard-nosed businesswoman or a
heartfelt eco-pioneer, she chuckles. “What about just a mum? Honestly, I’m a
normal mother who started asking questions about the products I was using on
my son and realised that other people wanted to know the answers too.”
Wasn’t she a highflying City banker who turned business acumen into
entrepreneurial spirit? “It depends who’s asking,” she jokes. But it’s true,
she says, it was in the City that she learnt to take risks. “I gambled my
entire redundancy package on Green Baby.”
It was frustration at being unable to find eco-friendly products for her son
Thomas, now 8, that inspired her to take the gamble. Disposable nappies were
giving him rashes, so she started to research their ingredients. “Through
websites and the Women’s Environmental Network I hit upon some scary stuff.
There were links between skin problems and the absorbency gels used in
nappies.”
On her return from a visit to Canada, where washable versions were readily
available, she realised that she had found a gap in the UK market. Soon
after she was made redundant by NatWest. And this, combined with the fact
that Thomas’s rashes cleared up as soon as she swapped to washable nappies,
provided enough reason to invest the money in a new company. Her son is the
original green baby, while her husband, Jonathan – who she met working at
NatWest – became a partner.
“My ex-colleagues thought I was mad,” she says. “They didn’t know me as the
hippy sort. They saw me go from drinking in the clubs at night to selling
nappies on the high street. They probably put it down to my brain having
gone to jelly after having a baby.” She admits that like many others she was
not green until she had a baby. “If I’m brutally honest, it was the market
potential of the company rather than lofty green ideals that motivated me,”
she says. Since then, though, she has gradually raised her commitment level
to the point where she has recently recruited a green architect and an
eco-interior designer to renovate her house.
“The big plan was for Thomas to hang out at the shop with me while I was
working. It was going to be perfect, mum and baby together. But it lasted a
day before I said, ‘This isn’t going to work, kid. Back to nursery’. ”
Putting your baby in a nursery while you nurture your business is one of the
life-balance dilemmas that parents often face. Another is whether to use
disposable nappies. In a nutshell, the folk wisdom is that washable nappies
are less convenient but far greener than disposable ones, which fill up
landfill sites at an alarming rate. But it’s not that simple: the week
before I meet Barker, the Government announced its decision to withdraw
funding from the Real Nappy Campaign. A four-year study by the Environment
Agency has found that the damage caused by burying nappies is matched by the
electricity and water used in washing and drying them.
Unfazed, Barker stands by washables and advocates the common-sense approach.
“Research goes back and forth, it shows how hard it is to prove anything,”
she says. “As with the climate-change debate, there will always be
scientists trying to swing the argument the opposite way.”
Besides, she is dubious about the research that has rubbished washable
nappies. Some of it has mentioned the negative implications of laundering
and ironing nappies, but she points out that hardly anyone irons nappies and
most people wash them at home.
Are green babies only for the rich?
She also refuses to get caught up in paranoia about our toxic lifestyles and
the myriad chemicals in the home. “You can’t live in a bubble; too many
people are worried about everything,” she says. That’s not to say that she
trusts legislation that deems certain chemicals to be safe. “The way I see
it, if there is doubt about a product after it has passed EU regulation and
there is an alternative, why not use it?”
If you can afford it, that is. In defence of the higher prices of green baby
products, Barker says that not enough people understand that when you pay a
premium for organic or Fair Trade goods, it goes to the farmer or producer,
not to the company selling them.
With the likes of Julia Roberts, Gwyneth Paltrow and Stella McCartney
frequenting Barker’s shop in Notting Hill and endorsing its products, enough
people are clearly prepared to pay more for a pea-green nipper. Having a
celeb snapped in her shop, Barker admits, is a depressingly effective way to
boost sales. “People follow the lead of a celebrity; it becomes the latest
thing to do.” Doesn’t this suggest that green babies are a luxury reserved
for yummy mummies with time and money to lavish on them? “You would think
so, but when I started the company we did some research to see if the
middle-class, educated stereotype rang true,” she tells me. “Our customers
were surprisingly mixed. A small number were serious greenies; others were
simply mothers with babies who had health problems; then there was a mixture
of everyone else.”
Eczema and skin rashes are the most common health issues that bring parents
into her shops. In her book, Barker puts the chapter entitled The Health of
the Planet before The Health of Your Baby, but isn’t it the other way round
for most people? “I hope that my customers start off buying a product for
their baby because it sounds natural, then this gives way to understanding
the bigger picture and people learn more about how it was made and why it’s
good for the environment,” she says.
The “me-first” method of eco-conversion
So the idea is that people are first swayed by the personal benefits of
choosing an organic balm over, say, a petroleum-based product; then they
think about it, and realise that it’s not the best idea to rub a petroleum-based
product on to their baby’s bottom, given that oil is a nonrenewable
resource. The dark greenie in me is doubtful whether the “me-first” method
of green conversion will lead to bigger steps such as cutting back on
flights and using the car less. But Barker has learnt to ignore what is
known in the industry as “green bashing”. She says: “Part of running an
ethical company is making your supply chain transparent, and by doing this
you expose yourself. You do your best but people will hunt down the one
example of something you’ve done wrong, perhaps the one ingredient that
isn’t organic, and come after you.”
The worst criticism for Barker came when she sold a range of products to
Tesco. “I’d get horrible letters saying, ‘How can you do this?’ I’d write
back and say I believed in opening up the mass market to organics.” Given
this stance, would she consider doing a Body Shop and selling out to a
bigger company? “To get my products out to the mass market, yes. Look at how
you can buy Green & Black chocolate in almost any local convenience
store since it sold out to Cadbury’s Schweppes.”
No doubt Barker would have to steel herself for a dose of criticism from
ultra-green circles should she decide to hand over her company to a
multinational. Mind you, by then, with a solar panel on the roof, a
wood-burning stove heating her water and a garden fertilised by her dog,
she’d be in a strong position to defend her eco-credentials.
Baby Green: Caring for Your Baby the Eco-Friendly Way (Gaia, £7.99) will be
published next month. To order a copy from Times BooksFirst for £7.50, call
0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/
booksfirstbuy
