Holly Tucker

Why organisations work with Holly Tucker

• She built a marketplace that gave more than 5,000 independent businesses a commercial route they could not otherwise access, and can speak directly to what scaled that community and what broke it.
• Her second act, Holly and Co, is a certified B Corp built around purpose-led small business advice, giving her a live view of what founders are wrestling with now, not a decade ago.
• As host of Conversations of Inspiration, she has interviewed several hundred founders in long form, which makes her one of the few speakers in the UK with a continuously refreshed sense of what early-stage builders are learning.
• Her MBE and appointment as a UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador give her credibility on the policy side of small business, not only the operator side.
• She translates founder thinking into language corporate audiences can use: retail teams, marketing teams and transformation teams leave with a sharper sense of what independent brands do that scale players do not.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder of notonthehighstreet.com (2006), the UK marketplace for independent makers.
• Founder of Holly and Co (2017), a certified B Corporation supporting small businesses.
• MBE, 2013, for services to small businesses.
• UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador for creative small businesses, 2015.
• Author of Do What You Love, Love What You Do (Virgin Books, 2021), a Sunday Times bestseller; earlier titles with Simon and Schuster.
• Presenter of ITV’s Be Your Own Boss and host of the Conversations of Inspiration podcast.

Biography

Notonthehighstreet.com began as a frustration with nowhere to sell handmade Christmas wreaths. Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish turned that frustration into the UK’s defining marketplace for independent brands, and over thirteen years it gave more than five thousand small businesses a route to customers they would not otherwise have reached. That is the operator credential Tucker brings into a room.

Holly and Co, founded in 2017 and a certified B Corporation since 2022, is where the second chapter sits. It is a platform, a shop and an advice engine for independent founders, and it is the evidence base for most of what Tucker says publicly about small business. The weekly Conversations of Inspiration podcast now runs into the hundreds of episodes, which gives her a continuously updated read on what founders are actually doing, not what commentators think they are doing.

Her public role has extended beyond business. An MBE in 2013 for services to small businesses, and appointment as a UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador in 2015, placed her inside the conversation about how policy shapes independent enterprise. Three books, including Sunday Times bestseller Do What You Love, Love What You Do, turned that experience into written form for founders at earlier stages.

Where Tucker is most useful to a corporate audience is on the question larger companies rarely answer well: what exactly do independent brands do that scale players find hard to replicate, and how should a big business think about that when it partners with them, buys from them, or tries to build its own version. She speaks to that from both sides of the relationship.

Key speaking topics

• Entrepreneurship and the founder mindset
• Building and scaling marketplaces
• Independent retail and the creative economy
• Purpose-led business and B Corp practice
• Small business advocacy and policy
• Female founders and enterprise
• Brand, storytelling and community for consumer businesses

Ideal for

• Retail, consumer and marketplace leadership teams thinking about independent brand partnerships.
• Marketing and brand leaders who want a grounded view of what small and founder-led brands do that larger ones cannot.
• Conferences and internal events focused on entrepreneurship, purpose-led growth or the creative economy.
• Female founder communities and enterprise networks within larger organisations.

Audience outcomes

• A clearer picture of what independent founders actually do differently, drawn from a marketplace of more than five thousand small businesses.
• A practical read on what purpose-led and B Corp businesses look like in operation, not in theory.
• Fresh founder stories from a podcast library that now spans several hundred interviews.
• Language for corporate teams to use when they talk about supporting, partnering with or learning from small businesses.
• A sharper sense of how policy, platform and community interact in the creative economy.