Show Us Your Bits

Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously - with Mia DrennanDown-to-earth EY UK Winning Women Entrepreneur Of The Year Mia Drennan left school with two ‘O’ levels, but has gone on to found a business worth over a billion pounds. She tells us her fascinating story of working her way up from a temp job, through the city, to New York where she got passed over for promotion. It gave her the impetus to set up a business in the UK, where she got a taste for being an entrepreneur. After the crash in 2011, she spotted a gap in the market helping businesses get their money back. With only £6,000 of capital she knocked on a lot of doors and soon her business GLAS took off. She now has over 500 people working for her.  She says she’s a bit like Madonna and keeps re-inventing herself. She’s much more strategic these days, rather than being in the day to day running of the business. She says for her it’s about leadership and giving people the confidence to do the best they can.  Her life sounds like a movie, buzzing between Davos and Monaco, but it's lonely at the top. She's found mixing with other entrepreneurs going through the same thing a great comfort. It’s led her to launch a podcast The Lonely Female Founder Podcast to share their stories. A petrol-head since being a child, F1 and motor racing remains her hobby outside of work and she shows us her prized signed orange McClaren baseball cap. She also has a beautiful letter from Sir Kir Starmer wishing her luck for the European Entrepreneur awards. She says that being near and on water as much as possible, calms her and she loves her dogs. She says it’s important to remember that every day above ground is a good day. Find out more about Mia https://www.linkedin.com/in/miadrennan/And on Insta @mia_founder

It's Season 11 and Alice and Josie are embracing that fresh start September back-to-school feeling they both love. They have a lovely catch up after their summer breaks. Josie describes her chilled-out summer in the heat of the Spanish countryside, whilst Alice has been flat on her back after a bad back injury on holiday. She's feeling grateful to be back on her feet after a stint in a wheelchair - although being parked in a garden centre was not her favourite moment of the summer. Apart from the pain, Alice says it was good to slow down and to take stock, although her Vinted habit got a bit out of hand! Josie says that for the first time she's learnt the power of being still and 'being' rather than 'doing'. However, they're both raring to go and happy to be back in the studio. They have a season full of exciting guests and new surprises, so tune in every Friday wherever you get your podcasts and follow us @showusyourbitspodcast on Instagram. There's also extra show notes and pictures on our Show Us Your Bits Substack.

Our stylish guest, Lauren Bravo, is known for writing on fashion, food, pop culture, travel, and feminism for outlets including Sunday Times Style, Grazia, Cosmopolitan, Stylist, and The Guardian. Lauren's first book, 'What Would The Spice Girls Do?', is a pop-culture look at girl power and 90s nostalgia. She says they weren't given much credit back in the day, but were so influential for a generation of girls like her growing up. She's always been obsessed with a second hand aesthetic, which she says she inherited from her parents and iconic grandmothers. She's always rocked a flamboyant style and says she was that kid going to sixth form with a vintage pillbox hat with a veil, so it was a natural progression for her to write a book called 'How To Break Up With Fast Fashion' — after taking on a year-long shopping ban in 2019, the book was published in 2020. She shares plenty of her tips for shopping on Vinted and successful charity shop bargain hunting, including looking for natural fibres and seeking out older brands. Learning how to layer is the key, and not being afraid to wear things out of season - a little summer dress with a roll neck underneath, for example. She says she finds that the men's section can often yield better quality jeans and shirts. Her novel 'Preloved' draws on her experience volunteering in a charity shop in London, where she encountered people from all walks of life. She is fascinated with the stories behind objects and the new life they get after they are bought in a charity shop, so this was fertile turf for her characters. She says her glamorous granny and nanny lived opposite each other and were great friends, and it was why her parents met in the first place. She says both of them were style icons and bought great quality pieces from charity shops. Lauren has inherited their coats and jewellery and brought her granny's cocktail ring to show us. It's a knuckle duster of a ring, given to her by her parents and made out of her great-grandfather's tie pin. Lauren wore it on her wedding day and any time she wants to feel fancy. A small round compact mirror from the Dubarry perfume company has a local link. Her parents gifted it to her as a graduation present. Coming from Worthing to Brighton on the train to sixth form, Lauren used to pass the art deco perfumery in Hove, and used to fantasise about living there with her friends, so this thoughtful gift from her Dad, tracked down on Ebay, means a lot to her. A match-box sized little green box revealed a suffragette brooch shaped as a letter 'C'. Her daughter loves to look at it, as her name begins with a 'C' too. It's made with peridot and an amethyst on a white stone background - the colours of the Suffragettes. People used to wear them to signal to other women they were fighting on the same side. Her last piece is from her thoughtful husband, Matt. He made her a book of all of her Worthing Herald columns, which she wrote weekly from the age of fourteen to twenty-six. She says most people commit their embarrassing teenage stories to their private diaries, but hers were all out in public. Still writing as a freelance journalist, Lauren's latest novel is 'Probably Nothing', about a woman named Bryony who gets drawn into her late boyfriend's family drama while dealing with worsening physical symptoms she keeps dismissing, exploring modern wellness culture and people-pleasing. When it comes to life hacks, Lauren says she's a born people pleaser and tries to remember her friend's mantra: "Don't put your name on stupid lists." She says the best piece of advice she ever got was from her granny, which she's passed onto many friends starting their first day at a new job: "Don't be scared. All you need to know is where the toilets are and how to get out." Follow her on social media @laurenbravo and subscribe to her Substack newsletter for her chatty pieces: Nobody Wanted This.

Fresh from the tennis at Eastbourne, Alice and Josie are joined by bestselling author Erin Kelly for a summer special. She talks glossy-mag capers, getting drunk for free five nights a week in nineties London, and writing The Poison Tree in six months once motherhood made freelancing impossible. Plus her new novel The Night Stairs, a chilling tale of fainting, hysteria and secrets at a Yorkshire Moors convent school.And her bits: a nameplate necklace from her mum that made her cry, a silver-and-onyx ring worn smooth since the sixties, an Italian gold cross that captures her love-hate relationship with Catholicism, a bead bracelet made by her thirteen-year-old, and — for the self-confessed Tudor geek — a replica Anne Boleyn necklace, with an E instead of a B. Find Erin on Instagram @erinjelly, www.erinkelly.co.uk and on Substack @mserinkelly

The entrepreneur who solved the problem of non-biodegradable balloons, CEO and co-founder of Bioloon, Charlotte Melia joins us from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to tell the astounding story of her discovery.Her story starts with humble beginnings on the Isle of Wight. As a child she dreamed of becoming an actress, but after returning from a theatre tour pregnant, she realised she couldn't fulfil that dream and be a mum. Instead, she started a children's party company as a side hustle, dressing up as princesses at weekends. It quickly took off and, by 2018, Dazzle & Fizz had become the go-to company for ultra-high-net-worth individuals, royals and A-listers, with offices in London, New York and Saudi Arabia.She shares some hair-raising stories from parties for the ultra-rich, including transforming The Dorchester ballroom into New York City for two-year-old twins. The average spend on a three-year-old's birthday party? £55,000.Although fiercely environmentally conscious—banning single-use plastics long before it was fashionable, upcycling sets and redistributing food waste—Charlotte says party balloons remained a huge problem. With thousands being used and discarded after just a few hours, she became increasingly troubled by their environmental impact.The latex balloons she bought claimed they would biodegrade as quickly as an oak leaf. Charlotte jokes that, despite only getting a double B in science, even she knew something didn't add up. After conducting some "cowboy science" of her own, she discovered they definitely weren't biodegrading.Digging deeper, she uncovered years of greenwashing and found research proving latex balloons don't biodegrade as claimed. Instead, they contribute to microplastic pollution and are responsible for the deaths of around one million seabirds and 100,000 turtles every year.Determined to find a solution, one of Charlotte's shareholders introduced her to Professor Jason Hallett at Imperial College London, who suggested funding a PhD student to develop an alternative to vulcanised latex.With her party business losing 95 per cent of its revenue during Covid, while raising a son with special needs and going through a divorce, Charlotte risked the last of her money to fund researcher Juliana Cumming. Three years later came the call she'd been waiting for: Juliana had found the winning formula.The result is a material that is both biocompatible and biodegradable, with the potential to replace vulcanised latex across the $40 billion industry—from balloons and gloves to medical devices and condoms.Charlotte also shares the three objects that matter most to her: Rabbit, the soft toy she's slept with since birth; her well-travelled passport, which represents the freedom and purpose she finds in exploring the world; and Terrance, a small turtle attached to her backpack that reminds her every day why she's doing this work.Her life hack? Turning her stubbornness into her superpower and swapping her morning coffee for functional mushrooms.What a remarkable woman.Find out more about Bioloon at @wearebioloon on Instagram and connect with Charlotte on LinkedIn at @charlottemelia.

From Jilly Cooper to Take That what do they have in common? This week’s guest, international bestselling author, entrepreneur and inveterate traveller Tasmina Perry. Long before the bestselling novels and publishing success, Tasmina was a bored trainee lawyer, working in a hot dog caravan at Granada Studio Tours, dreaming of becoming a journalist. Then one day she spotted a group of young dancers outside — “the red shoes”, as she describes them, dancing around in cycling shorts and bright red shoes and decided to pluck up the courage to ask if she could interview them. The nearest boy said yes. His name was Rob. The band was Take That. And Rob was Robbie Williams. That very first interview helped take Tammy from trainee lawyer and hot dog seller to a writer at More magazine, launching the journalism career that would eventually lead her to becoming editor. In this episode, Tammy also takes us behind the scenes of her glamorous new novel, Seven Nights in St Tropez, the ultimate summer page-turner, and reveals why she couldn’t bear to say goodbye to one of her favourite characters, the formidable paparazzi boss Mimi. From luxury mansions to the seedy underbelly of the yacht scene on the French Riviera, she explains how her love of travel inspires her writing, and why creating a vivid sense of place is at the heart of every book she writes. Tammy shares how a honeymoon search for the perfect beach read sparked the idea for Daddy’s Girls, the novel that became her breakthrough international bestseller, and why she later took another leap of faith by leaving traditional publishing behind to launch her own independent imprint. As always, the conversation is brought to life through four treasured possessions: a dazzling brooch gifted to her by her great inspiration and guiding light, Jilly Cooper, shortly before Jilly died; framed handwritten lyrics from her teenage hero Lloyd Cole; a photograph of Sherpa Tenzing summiting Everest; and a gold swan gifted by her husband, reminding her of the magazine where their love story began. Jilly’s encouragement and belief in her had a huge impact on Tammy, inspiring her to keep writing and trust in her own voice. It’s a conversation about creativity, reinvention, friendship, entrepreneurship and the power of simply asking the question: why not you? Tasmina’s message is simple: opportunities are everywhere, most people are kinder than you think and extraordinary things can happen when you’re brave enough to ask. Find Tasmina at tasminaperry.com and @tasminaperry on Instagram.