Building Community, Supporting Local & Growing a Brand With Purpose | Sarah O'Neill on The Cotswold Collective

In this episode of the Built By Her Podcast, Georgie sits down with Sarah O'Neill, founder of The Cotswold Collective, to talk about community, entrepreneurship, and building a business with genuine purpose.

What started as a personal desire for connection after moving back to the Cotswolds during COVID quickly grew into one of the region's most recognised local business communities. Today, The Cotswold Collective connects nearly 500 local businesses with thousands of consumers through its app, events, rewards platform, and growing corporate membership offering.

Sarah shares the story behind launching the business in just six weeks, the challenges of growing a community-led brand, and why supporting local businesses can have a much bigger impact than people realise.

We talk about:

✨ Building a business from an idea during lockdown
✨ Launching a platform with 50 businesses in just six weeks
✨ Growing The Cotswold Collective to nearly 500 local brands
✨ Why community matters more than ever
✨ Supporting local businesses in a meaningful way
✨ Creating an app that helps people discover hidden gems across the Cotswolds
✨ Building partnerships and corporate memberships
✨ The realities of entrepreneurship and wearing multiple hats
✨ Balancing business ownership with raising a young family
✨ Why community-led businesses are so powerful
✨ The importance of connection, collaboration and belonging

This episode is a brilliant listen for anyone building a business, growing a community, or looking for inspiration on how a simple idea can evolve into something that genuinely makes a difference.

Guest:
Sarah O'Neill

Founder of The Cotswold Collective

Instagram:
@cotswold.collective

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🎙️ Hosted by Georgina McDonald founder of G R Design Studio

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🎧 Produced by Richard Lannen at Nozzle Media
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📸 https://www.instagram.com/nozzlemedia

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome to the podcast, Sarah.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hello. Hello. So for those people who don't know who you are, what is your name or what do you do?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hello, everyone. I'm Sarah O'Neill. I'm the founder of Cotsworld Collective, which is a membership community dedicated to supporting local businesses throughout the Cotsworlds. And what made you start this? A number of things. So I felt a real lack of community myself during COVID. I'd recently moved back to the area, I'd had a baby, I knew no one, we weren't allowed out. It was a very bleak, miserable time. And I really felt the need to belong to like where I lived. And also I wanted to get out and enjoy and discover more about my kind of new area. So when we were allowed out again, it was really important to me to find places to go, things to do, groups of people to hang out with. And yeah, I just found I found it quite difficult to find that. So I created it myself and also just really felt the need to build something that supported local businesses and made it really easy for people to find places to go and like know what actually is local. Because I think a lot of the time people want to support local, but they don't necessarily know which cafes are or where to go. So I thought, well, how can I do this? How can I make it fun? How can I make it engaging? How can I use it as a way to bring people together? And so I've built it as a rewards platform where you're encouraged to support local because you get rewards when you do. So, and I love a discount as well. So I am guilty of that. So it was that kind of added incentive of feeling rewarded for shopping local, but also feeling special and feeling like where you go matters and that it's going to be appreciated and you're going to kind of feel part of something when you do that. So it was all of those ideas, um, bringing people together, encouraging people to shop local, getting lovely rewards, feeling part of something, and that's how it began. How did you start it? So I started to speak to businesses, local businesses, and I had about 40 or 50 just say, Yeah, I'll join that. And when I when I say join that, like I'd literally just said, it's called Cotswell Collective, it's a community to support local. We we hadn't launched it yet. We obviously therefore had no people using it. So I think people just resonated with the idea, and they all wanted to feel part of something as well because they'd just come out of this horrible time where they weren't trading, they they were losing business. So for them, I think those people who said yes just wanted to give it a go and wanted to feel part of something. So then I had 40-50 businesses that had said yes. I had to actually build the platform and build the product, which we launched within six weeks. So built the website, built the membership platform, and launched it with those 40-50 brands on there, and then it kind of just grew and snowballed from that. And we now have nearly 500 brands on the platform.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Whoa. Did you have any experience in this prior to starting this?

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Not in running a business. So my background's in marketing and events. So from that side of being able to kind of pull together the product, think about the branding, think about the marketing, how I was going to launch it, how I was going to let people know about it. That side of it, I kind of knew what I wanted to do. But luckily, my husband builds websites and we like hatched together the first website, lots of learning as we went and kind of did that together. We also had a two-year-old and a three-year-old at the time, so we weren't really sleeping anyway. So we thought we might as well like do this. And so was able to like use his expertise and kind of get the techie side of things going. But no, like no actual kind of experience of running a business. It was a very much a leap of faith into something that I really wanted to do and I was just passionate about.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Wow, that's actually quite impressive.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

I look at it now and I think, how do I do that in six weeks? But I think once you've got that kind of base and that commitment, like, and also I'd kind of put it out there. I I was like, I've got no choice now, I've got to just do it. And and then I wanted to, it just kind of gave me that boost to I want to support these businesses. And they might there might be others, you know, these are just the first people who've come back and said yes. There's probably others that want it, and so it just gave me that motivation to then build it because ultimately what I'm doing through Cotswell Collective is to support these businesses, and that still motivates me today. That's like what it's for, and seeing them come together through the community and the relationships they've built and things that have come since then, it just yeah, further kind of makes me want to do it, do more and like grow the product and grow the brand because it's all about all about them and the community.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

There's a few sides to it, yeah, really, isn't there? It isn't just they come on the app and they get to offer a discount. There's the corporate side as well, which kind of incorporates it.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah, so I guess like the product itself is for anyone, like anyone who wants to shop locally, who lives in the Crossworlds, wants to explore, wants to like know places to go, things to do, come to come along to events, that kind of consumer side of it is is now app based, which is for anyone to download. You don't even need to be a member, you can just download it, find local businesses, have a little browse, give yourself some inspiration on things to do, and then you can become a member if you want to unlock the the perks on the platform. Obviously, it there's the brands themselves, like the B2C brands that join the platform, and that's anything from hospitality, retail, services, there's a whole parenting category, wellness, fitness, beauty. There's so much variety on there. So we have different businesses joining each week all the time. And then, as you mentioned, a huge growth area for us, particularly this year, is our corporate membership, which is where we're encouraging employers to purchase memberships for their staff as a way to give them something that they can use all year to kind of help with whether it's well-being or cost of living and saving, or just, you know, something that makes them feel special and shows that you care about your team, but also it's showing if you are a kind of larger employer and brand in the Cotsworlds, that you care about community, you want, you want to encourage people to shop local, and you want to feel part of something as well. So yeah, we have quite a few different people that we work with, which is literally the point of it being a collective, is that anyone can be part of it in whichever of those ways, and there's you know, there's other ways as well through our events or other things, you know, other things we're doing as a community. So there really is something for everyone to be part of it.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Where do you see it going in the future?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

So at the moment, we're really focused on growing the membership and developing the app. So we launched the app in November, and it's been a game changer for the user experience, obviously, um, predominantly, and so people can remember to use it, use it easily when you're out and about with your digital membership card. We've got push notifications, like that's all going really well. We're currently in phase two development of the app, which will launch in August, which has just got a few new features, and we really wanting to keep that development going all the time. So when we grow, we're constantly pushing investment like through to the app to develop the product to make it really fun. Like it's not, it's more kind of how can we gamify it? How can we encourage people to use it? How can we make it kind of not just a directory of like businesses, but like actually to be out and about enjoying the Cotsworlds? So there's obviously a lot of growth there. There's new businesses joining all the time. Our event schedule is really ramping up over the next few months because that's that's really important to me. I mean, my background's in events and I love bringing people together, but I've I've not been able to focus on that as much over the last year when we've had the rebrand and the app and everything. So it's yeah, it's something that I've been really aware of that people want and people ask for, and people really value that face-to-face time with people and building connections. So yeah, I really want to grow, grow that as well. And yeah, lots of other things, but we are looking at building the platform into an offering for visitors into the Cots Worlds as well. So it's not just for locals to shop locally in your day-to-day, but when people are actually coming into the Cotsworlds, which as we know, there's a lot of them. Can we encourage them to shop local and support local businesses whilst they're here and like you know, discover like hidden gems and places that not everyone goes to because that's the Cotsworlds is diverse and there's lots of places. There's there's lots of places that need the support, not just the ones that everyone knows about. So that's gonna be, you know, hopefully something we're able to start to do from next year as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

It's also a massive area, the Cotswolds. Yeah. Like you actually think about it geographically, you could be from like Cyrencester to Gloucester to Cheltenham out to Yeah, so it covers five counties and it could be an hour in like any direction.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

And that's something I struggle with, like still struggling with in terms of like my time on the ground. But as you as you can probably imagine, like when I first launched and I had to go around knocking on doors, like, do you want to join? Do you want to join? Do you want to? It was so vast. And like the travel that that I that I was doing and still do weekly now, it's a huge area. But I think that's what attracts people to it because it's not just about where can I shop on my local high street, but if you want to go and do fun activities in the summer holidays or at the weekends, it's it gives you that kind of wider scope of places that you can discover as well. Which I think, you know, I like to see it as a bit of a, you know, you can create your bucket list of places, you know, Cotswoldy pubs or different kinds of, you know, go to your water sports or whatever it is. Like there's so many things that you could then do, which just opens it up to lots lots more people being able to use it and enjoy it.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

It's also a really user-friendly platform. So, like we're saying, it's quite overwhelming the amount of stuff there is in the Cotswolds. Having a space is really user-friendly that you can just find stuff really quickly. It's like categorised, you can search stuff, just makes that so much better.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Oh, I'm glad you use it, George. Yeah, it's I think that was because we weren't app based for two and a bit years. We got so many people who loved it and really wanted to use it and support it. But like you say, you just kind of when you have to go to a website and go, oh, what was that offer again? Where am I going? Or where's my membership card? It was just so it was a massive blocker for people. And I think now just being able to kind of have it in your digital wallet, or even like the with the push notifications, it just reminds people, or it might even remind them of like, oh, it's Mother's Day, or I've got to buy a card, or like whatever it is that's going on. It's like you you feel more part of the community when it's like at the touch of a button. And I think I want it to be an amazing digital product, but ultimately it's about that social face-to-face being in your community, going and talking to the local shop owner or the local cafe owner rather than just walking into Costa and getting, you know, like it's just it's about that in-person experience and through the events, but I think you have to still have that that digital product, which is like top end spec for people to use it and feel part of it. So it's hopefully a good blend of the two.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Is there anything you've really like struggled with since launching?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

So, the I would say as a community organization where we're trying to bring so many different people together and support so many different groups, it that's really hard. And I think it's firstly explaining what Cottswell Collective is, because like I say, you can be part of it in so many different ways. I've got to then make that clear. It's not just like, okay, I'm a fashion brand, I sell t-shirts to this target audience, and you can be really specific on that. It's really hard to get all of those different ways to be involved across to people. So I really struggle, and I still struggle with that because I think even as we grow, that's really that's really difficult. Like when I go to networking events and you know, you hear people, oh, I'm so and so, and I'm a teacher, I'm I'm Georgie and I'm an interior designer, I'm rich and I do video production. It's like I'm from Cotts. Well, what's that? And then I have to do the whole spiel every time. What is your elevator picture? I know, it's like, how can I do it in 10 seconds? So I really struggle with that, and also just as we grow as a community, you know, now with 500 brands, what we what we can offer them is completely different now to what we could offer them in the beginning. But equally, you know, I knew every single one of those 50 businesses really, really well. And when there's 500, 1,000, you just it's a different relationship, it's a different business, but it's also a different offering in terms of you know our reach and how many people that you know we have using it. That's growing all the time. So I think it's the difficulty is the constant adjustment in what we are and how how we can develop how we work with people, and that's gonna continue to change as we grow, which isn't a bad thing, it's just you're always changing, you know, changing things and thinking of new ways to work with people, to build collaborations, and yeah, it's just it's the it's the beauty and and the beast.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Have you found as well as the business has grown what you were doing has changed?

SPEAKER_00 16:05

I'm still doing pretty much everything. No, I mean we have we have support, like you know, with people kind of helping on certain areas of the business. I I brought a business partner in nearly a year ago now, and that's just massively changed, I suppose, my role as a founder, because I have someone to bounce ideas off, I have someone obviously kind of equally committed and involved, both like emotionally, but also like to just do stuff. Like it doesn't all have to be me, like it like it was before. So that's that's obviously like a m a massive change in what I do day to day, but I think I'm still very much over everything. So I'll be at the events, I'll be doing the the the bids dev, I'll be doing this kind of stuff, I'll be doing the social media posts. It's I think that I'm still at that stage of the business at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Did you find when starting the business, obviously you had this idea, you're really excited, you had six weeks, you got it out. Did you expect did you expect it to be like difficult or did you expect it to just run? Because I feel like you can have an idea and you can understand your industry, but the actual behind-the-scenes business side of stuff can always be a bit more challenging.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

No, that's a good question. I think I thought the consumer side of it would be easier than it is, if I'm if I'm perfectly honest. So I thought that I mean, I think it's such a no-brainer. You pay £30 a year, you can get now nearly 500 perks where it's like a free glass of wine, free coffee, discounts, freebies, like there's so much on there. You use it once or twice, you've got your money back. So for me, I thought that side of things would grow quicker than the things that have grown quicker, which is the brands joining, the corporate memberships, the partnerships, all of that stuff's actually been, I would say, not easier, but it's just naturally grown quicker. And then because we had such an amazing community of local businesses who wanted to meet up and do stuff, I was then providing that, and like, you know, then you get sidetracked from other areas. So I think it's more it's not that it didn't go how I thought it would. I just think there's certain bits that kind of grew in different ways, and it started to then grow arms and legs, and you know, there's there was just loads of other things that happened, and it's really hard to to kind of be across everything and to be an ex, you know, you're not an expert in all of those things. And I kind of think you know, there could be someone's job that was who's literally doing all of those different parts of the business. So yeah, I think but I I think it's part of when you have your own business that it's like knowing that that's okay and stuff will come when it's the right time to come, and then things do snowball. So it's just giving giving it like just keep going. Yeah. And you know, I still have people say that to me like every day, like, you need to just keep going. And I think that's people, you know, you do think, why aren't more people buying this or why aren't more people doing that? But they they need probably 10 times more touch points than you think they do.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Or persuading, like you're passionate about it. So if you do it is a no-brainer, yeah. Someone who's never seen it, then yeah, I don't need that, I'll just buy a glass of wine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

And then or or it's like if you know, if you see them in person and talk to them, they're like, oh, that's a no-brainer, I'll buy that, but you can't do that with thousands of people. Well, I could, but I'd be even more tired. Um, so I think it's like kind of thinking of what do you what do you spend your time on? You know, do you do social media ads? Do you do banner banner advertising? Do you go in magazines? Do you do this? Like there's just so many options, and I think it get you need quite a long time to try different things and then to know what works, and that's never going to happen within you know the first six months, 12 months. So yeah, there's there's almost too many options these days, I think.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

And you've also got to manage a family. How did you find that? A young family.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah, well, I think in the early days, like they were two and three, and I knew that it was something that I was doing alongside them. So I didn't have childcare, you know, it was kind of as they got extra days in preschool or they started school, and then the other one started school. It's like I always knew I was gonna be building it up alongside them. That was that was why I decided to do it. So I just had to be like really gentle with myself because you're never gonna get the balance absolutely perfect. And I I still don't now, like, we know that we've got five minutes till I need to go on the school right now, and I can see you looking at me and looking at the clock because that is what it's like. So I'm gonna say, Yes, I'll come on the podcast, yes, I'll love to do this, but then I've got to go do that. And I've because I've done it since day one, I I'm you've got used to it, and I've yeah, and and I think so many people that I work with who are part of Cotswold Collective are in the same situation, which also makes it really lovely because you know that everyone's like really grafting, really juggling. And if you're sending emails at night when the kids are in bed or, you know, there's no switch off. I was camping at the weekend, yeah, and you know, there was a problem with the app, and then I was, you know, had no signal trying to speak to the developers. You know, I can't ever not look at it, but I still had a lovely time camping, and you know, I got to switch off in some ways, but you know that when you start, and I think it's all part of it. And for me, it is that passion project, and something that I just really loved doing and loved doing that I wanted. It to be just part of me and part of who I am and part of my life, and it's just yeah, it's like growing with me.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

But you're also not like in that situation with camping, it's not like it's a job that you work for, it's your business for you. Yeah, it so it you kind of think, well, it's fine, it's for me anyway. If that was a boss calling you on a Saturday, you'd be like, Oh, for God's sake.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Exactly. And I was a bit jealous, like, you know, half-term last week, and then my husband took two days off to be with the kids. He just put his out of office on, and he was like, Right, I'm off, you know, I'm with the kids until Monday. And I was like, Oh, obviously, I wouldn't I would never even put an out of office on because there's no point, because if there was something I need to reply to, I'm going to reply to it. And you do get that bit of, oh, you know, I wish I could do that, but then, like you say, equally, like you've got all the other side to it, which is it is your own thing, it's your baby, it's you know, you're building it for I'm not building it for myself, I'm building it for the community, but it's still like me, you know? So you get to, you don't know, it's like you just pros and cons, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 23:33

I feel like as well when it's your own thing, new ideas pop up, like you can't not think about it. Yeah, even if you try not to.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Oh yeah. And it's just, you know, every conversation goes back to it, even if you're uh in the pub, like having a drink with mates, like you're always going to be talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

So have you got every schoolman by the way on the app yet?

SPEAKER_00 23:52

No, should we do a shout out?

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Yeah, shout out to all the schoolmen. Oh sorry, I'll pin you down in five minutes' time.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

Yeah. I should stand there with a sign like download the app before you leave the school gates. But it's a great thing for parents, though.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

I mean, you've obviously got kids, so you work with it, but they can obviously if like children are expensive, you don't want to do expensive things, it's a great opportunity to find stuff locally, support locally, and cost a fortune.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Yeah, and I think you know, if you are, you know, on maternity leave or because there's so much on there from a kind of social community side, as well as like actual services, you're gonna there's so much on there that I didn't know about that I wish that I'd known. And you know, even just you know, coming into the summer holidays, like those activities, like you can't always be out doing stuff all day, every day. But if you just want to plan a f a few things in or just know where to go, or give you, there's there's always new stuff being added as well. So it's just it makes you feel like, oh, I'm in the know, I know what's happening, I you know, I know where to go, I can tell my friends about it. It's it I want people to use it as something like fun, but also like easy to like go to as a r resource to use as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, thank you so much, Sarah. I'm gonna let you go through. Have you where have you used it? Tell me, have you been using well mush to it next door, right? So you get your do you get your discount anyway? But I have we have obviously looked at it quite a bit, but it I think there's a lot of people in this building as well who use it. So it's very well known as a brand. And I do see it, like someone that gave his and go, Oh look, got some collective because they have the little stickers.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

I know. Do you know what my Nan was going into the bakery, like she came to visit me in Siren's histo, she went into the bakery and like she saw the little till sign and and sticker, and she came out like holding her like Belgian bun or whatever she'd bought, and she was just like, I saw your sticker, like I'm so proud of you. I mean, she can't even text me, but she it was the kind of just like the recognition of like the brand as well, and I was just like, Oh, that's so cute.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

I do see it quite a lot. I saw it, I saw it at Shot in the House this morning when I was there. So I do I do see it a lot, which is really nice. I'm like, oh, oh. Which makes you realise actually how many businesses are on it, yeah, and actually how many places you can go to and get the perks from it.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

And I think for the businesses themselves, like you'll know from like marketing, it's people want something to talk about, to say they're part of as well. So it's not just the kind of I'll come here and you'll get a perk, but it's we're part of this thing, we we want to spread that message. And I think when people see it, I want them to then think, oh, actually, there's a really fun way we can like support local businesses. This business is part of it, like we should be supporting them, and it's that kind of you remember that message through it. The perks is just like the extra like bonus, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

But I think the events are also a really good way of mixing people that wouldn't necessarily mix normally and creating a set a secondary community with the events because you've got the businesses mingling, yeah, and then you've got the users that come along, aren't you?

SPEAKER_00 27:15

Yeah, and then there's so many businesses that then go and do their own thing off the back of it, which is so nice. And you know, the amount of people that you wouldn't think, oh, they need to do something together, and then they'll come away like with all these ideas, and it really is that kind of like face-to-face, like in-person relationships that we don't, you know, we don't always kind of make time for or get, and with our social events as well, like we do like wellness eat and we wellness evenings and workshops, and it's so nice when people come alone, like so many people bring their mum or their sister and their friends, and that and that's obviously really lovely too. But then there's people who have met through coming along to Cottswell Collective events, and then I was at the the paddle court a few weeks ago, and these two women were like there together playing paddle, and they they'd met, you know, two years ago at our events, and now they're just you know like best mates, and I think it's just so lovely, it really is. And you just realise, like you say, the reach, like it's it's goes so far that and you're kind of making real difference, like that's friendship, that's community, that's not just you know, a discount or a customer. That it's it's like yeah, it's all the lovely fluffy stuff as well.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Oh, that's that's hearing three. That is cute. I like that. I like that a lot. So for people who maybe don't have the app already, yeah, know where you are, how do they find you?

SPEAKER_00 28:47

So yeah, download the app or so the Cotsworld Collective app on the Apple App Store or Google Play, and yeah, just have a browse and check it out. And I would just say, you know, even if you don't want to use it for the perks, just try and support, you know, or just try and like think more about like how you're shopping, where you're shopping. It only needs to be, you know, a couple of small changes and it makes a really big difference to to the community. And if you are a business and you're looking for a way to meet other businesses or put yourself out there, yeah, then consider joining the platform and being part of it because we're really good and fun. You are really good and fun.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

And I think that's the important thing. You can download the app and you don't have to pay. So if you are just curious, yeah, just download it, have a little browse, see what's on there. Yeah. But then also join as a member so you can get it.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Or follow us on Instagram because we do loads of like content on being out in the Cotsworlds, finding new places to go, you know, showcasing the businesses on there. So yeah, that that's a good place to kind of get a feel for what our community is about. Amazing. Well, thank you, Sarah, so much. Georgie.