Where Helen shares the tales her parents told her, that led her to launch a body care brand with a conscience.

He looked down upon his daughter and impressed upon her that the world was there for her; there was nothing she could not do if she poured her heart and soul into it. She looked her daughter straight in the eye and warned her that there are people in the world capable of great cruelty. With a toss of his head, he scoffed that his sister wouldn’t amount to much - why bother with university?

When Helen was 17

Eager to prove her brother wrong, spurred on by the wise words of her father and with the cautionary words of her mother tucked into a handkerchief stowed in her pocket, Helen left Bath and headed to the Midlands for a degree in European Studies and French.

The flippancy with which her brother delivered his remark were all she needed to spur her on and during the months of study and exploration in France Helen flexed her wings and came of age. It was during these formative years that Helen built the resilience she believes lies at the heart of entrepreneurship.

I’ve not known Helen for 2 years, by which I mean, I’ve known her for two years, but not really known anything about her. When we first met, I sensed we had things in common, and knew I wanted to know her better. I was right. Turns out we’re both self-motivated, quietly determined and open to learning new skills.

Before Baed Natural

I knew Helen’s body care brand first. Baed Natural Body Care is a range of natural, luxurious, handmade salt soaps & body care products that ‘nourish the body and inspire the soul’. I’d picked up the Walcot Salt Scrub at the Ubiety Store on Bath’s London Road – a lifestyle concept store selling new and pre-loved gifts and homewares in aid of palliative and end of life care. Well worth a visit if you are that side of Bath. From the olde English meaning ‘an immersing of the body in water’, Baed (pronounced BAY’d) was launched 2 years ago after Helen trained in soap making.

But first let’s retrace Helen’s steps to understand the characteristics, traits and skills she believes combine to make a good founder and how she found herself fronting a design-led body care brand with a conscience.

From academia, Helen dived headfirst in the world of print. Working alongside an experienced print production manager she pocketed packaging design skills on-the-job and travelled extensively across Europe for press checks and midnight press passes. The hours were long and unsociable hours but it was here she learned to ride roughshod through the heavily male-dominated work culture.

Returning to Bath and a role in a design agency, Helen worked on some high-profile brands helping the likes of Schweppes, Coca Cola and Pukka Tea stand out on supermarket shelves. For more than 20 years she worked as a technical artworker and packaging designer before redundancy enabled her to set-up as a freelancer and balance work with family life.

Drawing on the confidence that Helen was handed by her late father, her attitude has always been to throw herself into things because ‘it doesn’t matter if you fail, so long as you have had a go’. This is a perspective she is pouring into the cups of her teenage children. Don’t let anything hold you back. Be brave and go for it. What’s the worst that can happen?

The War on Plastic

The catalyst for Baed Natural Body Care, was the BBC serialised documentary ‘War on Plastics’ aired in 2019. Twenty-two households along a Bristol street purged their homes of single use plastic and placed15,774 pieces of plastic packaging in the street, highlighting the extent of the problem. Helen and her family took stock of the amount of plastic in their own home. Unacceptable! The solution seemed obvious to her. Helen twisted and turned an idea in her mind until the end of lockdown enabled her to jump onto a soap making course. As a kinaesthetic learner, not only did she fall in love with the process, but her natural ability led the course leader to ask her when she would be starting her business.

The alchemy of Helen’s technical creativity, commercial drive and determination to make a positive difference to the single use plastic problem led to the birth of Baed.

First she trialled the natural salt soaps on friends. They were incredibly impressed both at the quality of the products and the ease with which they could ditch the bathroom bottles. With a minimal viable product ready to go, Helen set about the packaging design and sought the help of a former colleague to help conceptualise the brand. With salt soap as the niche, Helen describes her unique selling point as the Bath-based product names and colours inspired by the local geography.

Ethical Sourcing

On reflection, I think what really sets the brand apart (aside from product efficacy) is the scrutiny with which Helen researches the product ingredients - and the quality of the packaging of course! Conscious not to include such things as Himalayan Salt (it’s a finite resource), frankincense (as it puts local lives at risk when tapped) or sandalwood (which is over-harvested) Baed stands for making a stand against non-sustainable, finite and unethical ingredients.

When asked how others would describe her, she quickly reels off honest, confident and pertinacious. Translate those into the attributes that make a good founder, and we’ll see that her professional path and family experience have laddered up to give her what she needs to make a success of business.

Drive & determination
Resilience
Inner confidence
Fearlessness

Not held back by a fear of failure, a belief in her own ability and an acute knowledge of her own limitations, Helen has all the right attributes to drive Baed forward.

She embraces doubt by ‘doing it anyway’ – proving naysayers wrong. Helen leans into problems rather than away from them. It was not until her mother passed away that she found out that she was very proud of her, despite never feeling it first-hand. Her mother’s early words of caution remain stowed in her handkerchief as she let the words of her father guide her.

Brand Building and Marketing

Helen understands that brand-building and marketing are full-time jobs – targeting, messaging, cutting through the social media algorithms, consistency of posting alongside exploring different routes to market. Until the time comes that there is enough demand that triggers the need to scale up production and a surplus in her business to pay for dedicated resource, she continues to test and learn whilst building the brand through trading at markets, selling through concessions and online.

Most of all, she is keen not want to fall out of love with her business. Past experience has taught her that falling out of love with your business is difficult. Fast forward 5 years and with a good tail wind, Helen sees herself in Baed Natural Body Care full time. Knowing her now, I believe she will make that her reality.

Thank you, Helen, for your time and company at The Good Bear Café. If you are in the neighbourhood, drop into one of Bath’s best independents coffee shops, and say hello to Mauro. Bringing a touch of Sicily to Bath’s Bear Flat, it’s a vibrant community hub that also hosts supper clubs.

Fika with Helen Sinclair