Fearless Female Series #1 – Tracey Seymour from MaterniTea

Meet Tracey from MaterniTea

Welcome to our first Fearless Female Series interview. These interviews will be focussing on female entrepreneurs who are creating the life they want to create.

Meet Tracey

Our first one is with Tracey from MaterniTea. Tracey has been working on building MaterniTea for the past 3 years and just celebrated her third year in business. She is paving the way to support women through their journey to pregnancy, during pregnancy and beyond.

What is your business and what inspired you to start your business?

MaterniTea is the worlds only complete Pregnancy Tea Program, providing specially formulated 100% Organic and Caffeine Free Herbal Tea Blends, designed to support women at every stage of their pregnancy.

The MaterniTea blends have been designed specifically with the needs and challenges of each trimester in mind.

From Fertility, Pregnancy and Post Birth Recovery and Breastfeeding, providing the right support at exactly the right time. I am a Certified Australian Tea Master and Aussie mum who discovered a passion for the benefits of Herbal Tea during my first pregnancy.

After struggling with the common side effects of pregnancy myself, not to mention a traumatic delivery experience with my daughter, I became inspired to learn as much as I could about improving the experience of pregnancy through the use of Herbal Organic Tea (or H.O.T Mum blends as we like to call them). However, my vision for MaterniTea didn’t stop there. I wanted to ensure that women where not only supported naturally through the use of her herbal tea blends but also through expert Diet, Nutrition and Exercise Programs especially tailored for pregnancy. 

After travelling the world consulting with a team of professionals in women’s health, fertility and Naturopathy, I assembled a team of experienced professionals to bring MaterniTea to life.

I have one very clear vision for MaterniTea – To help as many women around the world have Happy, Healthy Pregnancies & Beyond.

What things did you need to do to get your business started?

Lots of research!

From researching and liaising with professionals in the fields of dietetics, naturopathy, competitor analysis, looking for gaps in the market, branding specialists, finance and getting my head stuck into numbers, such as costs for websites, CRM platforms.

Having ALL the information available helps to work out if your business is actually viable and sustainable.

Out of all the different things you put in place to promote your business. What has been the most effective in getting your business out to the market?

Definitely our trade shows, such as the pregnancy baby and children’s expos.

It’s a highly targeted niche event where we get the opportunity to interact with our exact target market and find out what their needs, challenges, wants, desires are for their pregnancy and motherhood journey whilst also getting vital feedback on the products.

This also gives us an amazing opportunity to allow visitors to actually taste our products for themselves and give us the ability to talk them through any concerns they might have; an opportunity you just don’t get over email or via online marketing ads.

It also helps us build invaluable rapport with the customers who help to further advocate and strengthen our brand in the marketplace by engaging on social media, sharing testimonials and referring our products to their friends and family.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in your business?

Being a “technically challenged” individual in a digital age.

I have found my biggest challenges to be learning, implementing and revising all things tech, such as social media advertising and algorithms, SEO, Google Ads, website maintenance – you name it, with an online business you HAVE to have it all covered and for the most part for me, this meant hiring professionals to help.

That doesn’t always mean everything was simple, many a times we have simply been promised the world and under-delivered. A challenge in itself has been learning what KPI and metrics to put in place with service providers and how to hold them accountable. Otherwise, it’s tens of thousands of dollars down the drain, and that has happened to us!

What is your biggest tip for success?

I have a motto: “where focus goes energy flows”.

I believe this to be true for all areas of life but particularly in entrepreneurship. Work out what your good at, where your strengths are and what needs to be outsourced.

Then focus on the things that are going to help you reach your goals. It can be really hard as a start-up especially when you’re wearing 8 different hats to not get caught up in activities that essentially aren’t going to make you money, or aren’t going to help you achieve your goal.

I’m very old school and still work off a daily “to-do list” which gives me great pleasure in physically taking my pen and crossing off tasks as they’re completed, but often it’s the task you really don’t want to do or avoid or push down the to-do list that’s really going to make an impact on your business, so try get to that one done first, put your focus into that task and energy and life will come to it.

Finally, if you could pass on any piece of advice to someone wanting to start a business what would it be?

Know your numbers and know your worth.

As women, we all too often undervalue our worth or time, the value of our product or service.

We’re afraid if we ask too much, that people won’t buy. So we discount what we should actually be charging. Men don’t seem to do this as much in comparison and seem to be a lot more ballsy when putting a price on their worth.

If you know your numbers and you believe you’re genuinely providing a product or service that you back 100% then don’t be afraid to price accordingly.

If you don’t know your numbers inside and out, everything from running costs, true costs of goods, marketing, insurances, wages, you can’t possibly know what margin you need to make to assess if your end price point is even viable or sustainable.

Know your numbers – know your worth.

You can find out more about Tracey and MaterniTea over at https://maternitea.com/ or you can find her on Facebook and Instagram.

 

If you wish to be featured as part of our Fearless Female Series please submit your details here.