Toks Aruoture is the founder of The Baby Cot Shop, a prestigious baby furniture brand in the heart of Chelsea, London.
Beyond creating beautiful nursery interiors, Toks is passionate about transforming minds through storytelling and writing. Toks helps people identify and overcome limiting beliefs, empowering them to propel forward confidently.
So basically, she transforms living spaces and mindsets. Additionally, she offers coaching services tailored to new business owners starting their entrepreneurial journey, and guide them to manifest their visions.
Today Africa spoke to Toks Aruoture about her entrepreneurial journey and her passion for transforming minds through storytelling and writing.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Mom to four boys. I always say I have four boys because I count my husband as my first son. So I’m a mom of four. I’m an interior designer, but I specialize in baby and children’s nursery rooms.
And I’m also the owner of a baby furniture brand in London, a luxury baby furniture brand. But in addition to that, I’m incredibly passionate about mindsets and seeing and helping people think differently so they can have a different outcome in their life, so they can live their best life, as they say.
Give us an insight into your background and how everything all started, your entrepreneurial journey, how it all started?
I grew up not wanting to go into business, had zero desire to go into the business world. I actually wanted to be a doctor. But then I didn’t study when it was time to study for my A-levels. I grew up in Nigeria, specifically in Benin city.
I schooled in the North, in Kaduna state. And I went to command secondary school, which is a military boarding school. And a lot of my resilience was birthed in school. But I grew up wanting to be a doctor.
I also had the privilege of having parents that separated their children and constantly told my brothers and I how incredibly gifted we were and we could be anything we wanted to be. And they’re like, you’re so smart. Very typical of Nigerian parents. And then I took that a little bit too literally.
And I moved to the United Kingdom to study for my A levels. But I didn’t study, I just thought I could breeze in and I could breeze back out because I’m so smart. To my surprise, I failed. I didn’t get into medical school.
I then went on to study pharmacology. The intention was to study pharmacology and either halfway through or at the end of your degree go on to do medicine. But in my second year, I fell in love and got married to my best friend and became obsessed with designing our apartment.
We had a one bedroom apartment in London. But we were broke because we were students. What I would do is go to the paint shop and buy white paints. Because white paint was the cheapest paint you could get.
So even though I wanted my bathroom to be blue and I wanted the living room to have some green and the kitchen to have some orange. I couldn’t afford that paint. And then I’d add dye to the colors and I mixed different colors up with the white paint until I got the exact shade I wanted for each of the rooms.
I spent so much time doing that, buying wallpaper, looking at decorative items, going to IKEA and looking at how they designed the rooms. And before long, I realized I had dropped out of school purely because I had stopped attending lectures and I was just spending more time in these shops.
So I got a job as a medical rep with a pharmaceutical company. And the only reason I went into that was I guess a part of me was I still had the passion for medicine in a sense and I enjoyed my course which was pharmacology. But at the same time it was the one job that paid really well without me needing to have a degree or anything like that.
They were confident in my knowledge of drug interactions and so on. I got a bit of training and off I went and it paid really well. But I hated it. I didn’t enjoy that job at all. I enjoyed a little bit of it, but the bulk of it was it just didn’t feel like it was for me.
So then fast forward a few years into it and I started having my children. I had my first three sons really close in. At one time I had three kids ages three and under, so it was a bit of a crazy time in my life and I took time off work. But then returned back to work or attempted to return to work when my employers, my former employers, wouldn’t give me suitable hours as a mum to young children.
But I was reading a book at the time where the author had said your gift is that thing you do so effortlessly that everyone thinks it’s such a big deal except you. And for me, that was interior design. Everyone loved my home and they thought it was such a big deal. I didn’t think it was a big deal. But okay, maybe that’s my gift.
So I go on and I study, I go on to a couple of design courses to learn how to be a proper interior designer and set up an interior design company where I was specializing in residential homes. At this point, it was still very, very new and really just up and coming when my husband comes back from work one day and says, why don’t we move to the United States?
And we both loved America so much. We would go there on holidays. We will visit at every drop of a hat. And every time we returned home to England, we would be miserable, like complaining about everything. Like life here is so boring, people are boring and you know, it’s just the same and the houses are tiny and American houses are big and their roads are wide and the people are warm like Nigerians.
So we decided to emigrate and we did, sold our home, sold everything we had and we moved with our three sons to Atlanta, Georgia. Having that experience is one that has really shaped who I am today.
You would ask the question, how did I get into it? Well, I really fell into it because as part of our move to the US, we purchased the business and it was in baby and children’s interiors. So I didn’t really have a desire for a baby and children’s anything. I had plenty of kids of my own. I didn’t need anything to remind me of the family. But we acquired this really lovely store.
And that was my introduction into the world of high-end furniture, craftsmanship, learning about wood, interior design, specifically for the affluent. That was how I got into that space. It was one of those lessons you learn very quickly. I was dropped in at the deep end, but I was also very passionate.
And I love a good challenge. I thought I could do this. There were times I felt I couldn’t, but my husband was really supportive. And he’s like, Toks, you can do this. I learned really quickly, got into that whole world and life was going beautifully well.
Then the recession in 2008 hit and claimed everything we owned. We lost everything, lost the business, lost our livelihood, lost our home, cars, everything. And we returned to England empty-handed, well, not quite empty-handed, I came back pregnant with our fourth son.
I call that season of my life the perfect storm because everything that could go wrong seemingly went wrong and it was a lot of pressure. Because I had nothing in terms of finances and when they say they say that once you let a genie out of the bottle, you can put it back in.
That’s how I was having that experience of running a real business. The entrepreneurship board had beaten me well and hard and I couldn’t turn back. I couldn’t simply revert back to the life I had when I was in the UK.
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So I started researching the market and found that the United Kingdom had absolutely nothing like what we sold in the US, which was absolutely beautiful, well-crafted, individual pieces, furniture, linings, artwork, decor for the high end of the market. There’s nothing like that in the UK.
I began to research suppliers, manufacturers and I set up the Pumpkin Patch Interiors and later became The Baby Cot Shop and five years after establishing The Baby Cot Shop we moved on to the Kings Road in Chelsea, which is the United Kingdom’s most vibrant most exclusive most oh amazing high street I believe.
It’s historical and it’s very well known. Such a joy to be there. So that’s generally how my entrepreneurial journey started. And the whole mindset thing came because I had to dig into my mind and find gems to help me move forward when I had nothing.
What’s the difference between Pumpkin Patch Interiors and the Baby Cot Shop?
Pumpkin Patch Interiors doesn’t exist anymore. That was my first business. That was the business I had in Atlanta. And then I also opened an arm of it in the United Kingdom. And the difference is that Pumpkin Patch was a curation of beautiful pieces from all over the world, pretty much, the United States and the whole of Europe.
So it was a bit of a mishmash of the things I fell in love with and I thought people would love. There was no real cohesion in the way that the products were presented or curated. So it looked a little bit like a mini supermarket of beautiful things.
I felt like we didn’t have enough of an identity and so transitioned into The Baby Cot Shop. Because that’s based on what people wanted, what people were buying and later designed our own in-house brand of furniture.
In the interior design space you niche down to a nursery interior design. Why niche down to that specific niche?
Because having left the US, that was my only experience. My only experience in what I call a real business was in baby and children’s furniture. And I happened to be an interior designer as well. So when I was in the United States, I was focused on designing the nursery rooms and children’s rooms of my clients, where we were only selling furniture for babies and children. That’s how I ended up without really meaning to, falling into that niche of specializing in baby and children’s interiors.
What challenges have you faced in business as a woman and how have you been able to overcome them?
The interesting thing is I was explaining to some of you not so long ago, we were talking about running a business in the UK as an African woman. And I said to them that people tend to assume that the very first challenge we would face as Africans is our skin color.
But I actually have faced more challenges based on my gender than I have on my race, which is not necessarily a reflection of how it works over here. But that’s just been my lived experience. So some of the challenges I’ve faced, I mean, I don’t know if I’d call them challenges.
It’s hard to explain because just like racism, I didn’t recognize gender bias. I didn’t recognize racism because I grew up in Nigeria and in Nigeria, everybody’s the same skin color. So you don’t go around thinking of yourself as a black person. I wasn’t called black until I came to the UK.
And even then, I didn’t necessarily take offense at it. I was taken aback, but I didn’t find it offensive. I was a little bit uneasy about it because it felt like they were giving me a label that I never knew, that I didn’t grow up with, that I didn’t have, that wasn’t me. But it was fine. It was understandable. We’re in a country with different hues and colors of people, so that was okay.
In the same way, I didn’t recognize any form of racism, only because I hadn’t had that experience before, so I didn’t know what it looked like. So when people were being mean to me or rude because of my skin color, I just thought they were badly behaved, end of story.
In the same way, the gender side of things, I grew up an only girl, I grew up amongst two brothers. My mom and I were the only females in the house, and now I’ve ended up with a house full of five guys.
But I was never treated differently because I was a girl. I was never told, even though my mom tried desperately to make me ladylike. I prefer to climb trees and build houses with sand outside. So I played football. I was more of a tomboy than anything and I was allowed to be a tomboy.
My dad never treated me differently. So gender again, the bias that comes with being a woman wasn’t something I recognized instantly as, it’s because I’m a girl, because I was doing exactly the same thing as the boys in my home.
Wsort of challenges have I faced? Well, the assumption in many cases is that it’s a man that runs the business. Often I get people who write and they say, dear Mr. Toks, they make that assumption that I am male.
It doesn’t offend me, like I said, because I just, I grew up with guys. So I don’t find it offensive. I’m sure there may be some challenges or attacks, if you like, maybe some mild attacks.
But I’ll be honest and say that I can’t really point them out, only because whatever shows up as a challenge, my brain interprets it as an adventure and an opportunity to overcome. I haven’t really sat back to separate, hey, this is because I’m female, that’s because I’m this, that’s because I’m that.
You have been in business for more than 16 years. So what strategy have you used to attract and retain your customers?
It’s changed over the years. One, because the business itself has evolved. I’ve grown as a leader and the world has evolved. So initially I built my website myself. I learned how to do SEO. I learned from a gentleman who taught me for a small amount of money. Because I didn’t have the large amount of money to pay him to do it for me.
And so that carried us on for a short period of time. And then I started to do some PR. I hired a PR agent and used the opportunity to learn how to do it myself. Because of the nature of our company being in the fact that it was the first company that brought such high-end pieces of furniture and lighting and decor to the UK. We did enjoy a lot of PR in the beginning because media houses couldn’t believe just how expensive our things were.
Much of the vibe was, it’s very expensive, but a lot of it was also, this is so beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like this before. So PR carried us for a while. And then years later, partnered with House of Fraser, which is a department store in the UK.
We had a concession with them for a short period. And that didn’t quite work out as well as I was hoping it would because House of Fraser is known more for beauty and fashion. They did say they didn’t think it was going to work but they were very very keen on trying it out.
And then we opened our shop on the Kings Road in Chelsea which is a major and historic high street and have just continued to blend PR with our physical location. We use social media and people are very dependent on our social media pictures on Instagram and Pinterest.
And more recently as tomorrow, because I haven’t yet shared the one post I want to share with The Baby Cot Shop followers. It’s bringing myself into the picture.
So while I’m the founder and the interior designer in the company. I haven’t always allowed myself to be the face of the company. I think it’s a mindset issue I had when having lost my first business.
And I mentally separated myself from it because if anything happens to it, I want to be whole. But then what it has done is it has robbed my customers from having access to me and my personality and everything that I bring to the table, which is a lot of inspiration, motivation, and self-help.
So that’s the new change. That’s the new season that we’re in now, which is where some of a lot of the marketing is going to be just bringing myself to the table and being the face of the brand.
As someone that has been in business for a good number of years, how have you been able to do systems and processes that aid in smooth running of your business?
That’s a great question. So it’s evolved again over the years would use just the most basic way of storing information and managing orders. And it really was just me.
And as we got bigger as a company, we started to use a CRM. CRM helps us to keep track of our customers. We keep a record of as much information about our customers as possible, including their children’s birthdays.
We are able to keep track of when the children are outgrowing their cribs and their cots. So that we can move them onto or sell them the next level, which would be a bed, for example, or even a desk as they’re coming up to the age when they are ready to start school or start colouring or what have you.
It has really evolved over the years as we have grown and as the landscape itself has changed. For example, now we’re employing AI in some of our work and some of our management, but I’m looking to do even more of that. I also have a fantastic team of staff who are clearly able to keep going when I’m not there, which is why I was able to go to Nigeria for two weeks.
Even though I wasn’t supposed to be communicating with them because they really could handle everything. It’s very hard when you’re an entrepreneur to completely switch off from work. So we have those systems that have helped us to stay on top of things.
How do you market your products and your brand?
A lot of it is through word of mouth where we have happy customers tell their friends and their family. Some of our customers share their pictures on Instagram, for example, and people find it and come to meet us.
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There’s also the fact that having a physical location really does help. We’ve been there for seven, almost eight years now. We’re also conveniently located close to a hospital. We’re about eight minutes walk away from the hospital in Chelsea, Chelsea Westminster, which is just around the corner from us.
We employ social media for marketing. Collaborate as well with other small businesses. We used to have Instagram conversations with moms and experts in our field which we haven’t had in a while but we are looking to restart that again.
Tell us more about your broadcast, Living Inside Out
It’s a space where you come to discover your tools for navigating your life so you can live the life you were created to live. I believe that if you are going to make changes to your environment, you’ve got to start from the one side.
You can’t rearrange your environment and call it a change. It’s just been rearranged and things might appear different, but they are still the same. You still have the same components. You still have the same habits. And you still live the same life.
If you’re going to change the life that you’re living, which many people that are drawn to the podcast are people who are looking to evolve and grow, if you’re going to enjoy any level of growth at all, it has to begin on the inside.
A lot of people believe that for a change to occur around them, they just simply need to change the way they act or they need to do something different. And the focus tends to be on the external.
But real change can only occur when it starts on the inside. Because it is our thoughts that create the emotions that drive our actions. So if you’re gonna change what you’re doing, you can’t simply say, well, tomorrow I’m gonna wake up early at six o’clock and start my day instead of waking up at eight.
That’s a very nice promise to make to yourself, but it’s not going to be sustainable because what caused you to wake up at eight o’clock in the first place? It’s an internal conversation that you’re having with yourself or a belief that you hold.
And if you don’t change that belief, you will still wake up at eight o’clock, even though you say that you want to wake up earlier.
So Living Inside Out delves into topics to do with mindset, entrepreneurship, because that’s where my journey is, and the Christian faith, because that is my faith. A lot of the principles that I draw from and the examples that I use comes from my life. I don’t talk about experiences I haven’t had because I’m not a motivational speaker.
It’s easy to say all the nice things and all the inspiring things and sound very eloquent. But there is no point in me talking about something that I don’t know to be true. So I use my life as this is what I’ve been through. I share openly on LinkedIn, we connected on LinkedIn.
I share openly on LinkedIn my experiences as a business owner, as a woman, as a human, just trying to do better. And the podcast is packed with gems like that.
What role does technology play in your business and how do you intend to leverage it for future growth?
Had you asked me this question just about a year ago, I would have started telling you about our website and this, that and the other. But right now it’s all about AI. There is no day that passes by that I don’t say chat GPT is a witch.
I’m like, how does it work? I’m a hundred percent AI buff. And not just with ChatGPT with other areas. So for example, we recently redesigned my personal website, toksaruoture.com.
And I used an app called Relume, which creates the, you tell it exactly what you want the website to do, who the target audience is, what the content will be about. It creates the wire frame for your website. And not only does it create the wire frame, it also tells you what pages you should have, what should go on each page, and how to lay the pages out for the best impact.
So using a lot of AI tools at the moment and actually plan on going on a course or two to learn more about it and how to use it. So it is an integral part of the business. I had a situation with a customer that was really just being very difficult and I had just about had enough.
I wrote an email and I put it in ChatGPT and it says, well, because of the prestigious nature of The Baby Cot Shop, you shouldn’t send that email. This is a better way of wording it. So that’s definitely my thing. I can talk for hours about it.
As a mindset strategist, what do you see as the key qualities an entrepreneur must possess to succeed in their business?
You’ve got to have courage. Rather, I would say you’ve got to choose courage. Because courage is not a trait. People say, oh, he’s a very courageous person or she’s very courageous. The truth is, courage is not even a trait. Courage is a choice. It is you choosing, despite being afraid, to continue to press through. So you require courage as an entrepreneur.
You also need to be resilient. Resilience is the ability to return back to your original size after you’ve been stretched by challenges.
It is the ability to continue to hold onto the vision and not be defined by your challenge. But remain who you are as a person, despite going through a very trying period. So resilience is like a rubber band that comes right back to its original size after it’s been stretched.
You also need to be tenacious and tenacity is the ability to remain focused even when you’re going through the fire. Because the natural or default response when we go through hard times is to try and quench the fire or get out of the pathway and go find something else to do.
When I was in a boarding house, a story I love to tell is being in a boarding house. It was a military boarding school. Boarding schools in Nigeria these days are not what it was like back then. Back then, you were tortured by seniors and you were treated very harshly. That was just part of the drill. And then you had the horrible food and everything else that went with it.
My mom came to see me because we lived in Benin and she visited. At the time we’d moved to Lagos and she visited Kaduna to see me. I complained to my mom that senior Memuna made me her shoe polisher. And senior Mouni slapped me and named all the things that were going wrong.
And she said, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to move to command Lagos because I’ll be closer to home. She said, because my father was in the military. So my options were limited to military schools.
And she said, the problem is that if you move to another school, you’re gonna face the same problems. Command Lagos has the same wicked seniors, the food is the same, the military training is the same, the drills are the same. So all that will be different will be, you’ll be experiencing the same thing with different people in a different location.
Why don’t you stay and deal with the devil you know, rather than going to introduce yourself to new devils. And that served me till this day in business where I’ve had moments where I wanted to quit.
I will think, but if I quit, no matter what I do, I’m going to face the same trouble. It doesn’t matter whether I’m selling luxury furniture for babies and children, or I’m selling second-hand spare tires. The business troubles are going to be the same.
And the reason it’s the same is it’s not the circumstance. It’s the mindset and how we interpret our experiences that cause us to want to run away from pain or want to quit.
Outside of luxury design, what else do you do?
I train individuals on mindset. I coach people on how to navigate their own minds and how to get the best they can out of their lives using their natural gifts. I’m also a public speaker, I speak at conferences and events and schools and so on.
And I also train teams in corporate settings as well on how to leverage mindset. So I’m a mindset buff. I’m a storyteller. I love telling stories on stage. I’m pulling out lessons to help people do better in life.
How do you maintain balance in your professional and personal life?
People talk a lot about balance. I don’t know if there really is such a thing about balance, because you’ve got to do it all. There’s always going to be some days that are working. Some days don’t work. I don’t think that I actually balance anything.
Things change. Some things suffer, my children sometimes feel my absence because whether physically or mentally, I disappear to work. I travel a lot for work as well.
And when I do, then something’s given. I’m not physically present in the house. So I make the most of my time with them, make the most of my time with my husband.
I try to be very present with them. And I also bring them into my world as well. My kids help me at work sometimes. They come into work and I tell them stories about work.
And then also make sure that I’m not losing out on them as well. So it’s a very hard balancing act, I confess. And I don’t think I find balance.
What is your future plan for your business?
My intention is to continue to grow to be the premier destination for luxury baby and children’s furniture in the United Kingdom. We already are, but it’s really important that we stay ahead of the curve. I’m also looking at changing the way that we design our furniture and bringing in third parties.
Currently all the designs we have, we’re done in-house. But I’m looking at the possibility of bringing in maybe student designers and doing something different to give them an opportunity to have their name out there. While giving us the opportunity as well to have fresh new designs from younger minds. So that’s some of the plans that we have.
On the speaking front, I’m traveling more in Africa and doing a lot more speaking in Africa. Because I’m passionate about seeing us evolve into our best selves. We’re such dynamic people. Nigerians have got to be, have the most brilliant minds on the face of this earth. We are special.
We’re just so unique and so different. And I wonder what it will look like when we come close to reaching our potential. Because we’re not even scratching the surface and yet we do so well.
What advice would you give to others, especially women who are starting their business?
Get in touch with who you are as a person. It’s very important that you are in touch with your identity and your personality. Because the business landscape is undulating and it’s constantly shifting and constantly moving and along with that your emotions as well would likely be going in the same direction as the business. And you can’t have that because you’re going to be all over the place.
So get in touch with yourself, get to know who you are as a person. The focus tends to be for startup businesses on the external. What should I name the business? What should I sell? Who should I sell it to? All of those are very easy. In fact, AI can’t even help you do that now.
But what AI can never do for you is give you a sound mind. A mind that’s able to continue to hold on to the vision while being flexible about how it all comes together. A mind that is able to navigate the storms and the changing landscape of business.
For example, imagine somebody who started off their business in 2020 or 2019 at the start of it, then COVID hits and then they’re in the United Kingdom and Brexit happens. And then shortly after that, you’ve got the Ukraine war affecting prices. And things are constantly changing that affect us in business that we don’t have any control over.
So you’ve got to learn to have a hold on yourself and have control over your emotions, have control over your eyes and make sure you’re seeing the vision. You’ve got your eye fixed on the vision but at the same time be flexible enough to let the change happen.
You’ve got to learn, you’ve got to practice introspection so you can grow, because if you don’t grow, your business is not gonna grow.
Find out more about Toks Aruoture
Click here to read the part two of the interview with Toks Aruoture. Watch the interview here
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