After my brush with death, launching a business seemed easy

Jo Tutchener Sharp was working on the formulations for a new skincare range the day an excruciating headache started in October 2015. “It was like someone was stabbing me in the back of the eye,” she recalled.
After her GP advised Tutchener Sharp, then 39, to head to A&E immediately, she was treated for suspected meningitis. At 1am the next day, a doctor told her she had suffered a brain haemorrhage. Further investigations found a lump that, while not cancerous, would lead to further — likely fatal — bleeds without intervention. “It was a ticking time bomb,” she said.
A mother to two sons, aged just three and one at the time, she asked if she could postpone the operation to remove the lump until January, so she could have Christmas with her family. She spent the intervening weeks with her boys, Sonny and Jude, writing them letters in case she didn’t survive.
• Surviving a brain haemorrhage: ‘I had no words. I had no speech’
The treatment, though, was a success — and waking up after her ten-hour operation, she was elated. “You know the feeling on Christmas morning, or the first day you wake up on holiday? It was that, times a million. I just went, ‘Oh my God! I’m alive!’ ”
Her delight at surviving the surgery — and later getting the all-clear from her doctors — was matched only by her distress at being separated from her children for another fortnight. “I had 20 staples in the side of my head. I looked like Frankenstein’s monster.”
She was tormented by the idea of her children missing her. “I kept thinking, ‘What do I wish I could have given them to comfort them?’ ” said Tutchener Sharp, grabbing a small toy wearing a cape from the shelf near her desk. “I wished I could have said, ‘This little superhero is going to watch over you while we’re apart. It’s going to keep you safe.’ ”
It was the spark of an idea that led her to start Scamp & Dude and launch its first products, Superhero Sleep Buddies, which are made in Portugal and aimed at soothing children’s anxiety when apart from their parents. For every one sold, the company donates another to a child who has lost a parent, or who is seriously ill themselves.
The sleep buddy was the first product in a range that has gone on to include children’s and women’s clothes with the superhero theme woven into all of them. Finding a sweet spot among women aged 35 to 55 helped sales hit £15 million last year, made through the Scamp & Dude website and seven shops. And despite initiatives to give away tens of thousands of the superhero sleep buddies to children in need, as well as donating 55,000 scarves to women undergoing cancer treatment, Tutchener Sharp’s firm still made nearly £1 million in pre-tax profits.
The entrepreneur had been strongly interested in clothes as a teenager and opted to study for a degree in fashion promotion at the University of Central Lancashire. During her gap year, she moved to Camden, a hub for music and street fashion in north London — an “eye-opening” experience for Tutchener Sharp, who grew up in the small Shropshire town of Wem — and worked in fashion PR at agencies including Exposure, as well as in press offices for the fashion brands Paul Smith and Diesel. In 1998, after her final year of university, she accepted a job at Purple, a PR agency that supports London Fashion Week.
She worked her way up from fashion assistant to running Purple’s thriving beauty division, before joining Estée Lauder as communications manager in 2005. She left the cosmetics giant after two and a half years to go into business on her own with the launch of Beauty Seen, a London-based PR agency that was backed by the owners of Exposure.
“They found the office space and helped with payroll and how to navigate learning how to run a business,” said Tutchener Sharp, who owned 25 per cent of the company. By the time she left the business, just before the discovery of her brain tumour, it had a turnover of £5 million, she said.
She had already decided it was time for something fresh at Beauty Seen, with the original idea being for a new skincare range, before her brush with death inspired her to set up Scamp & Dude. She used £150,000 of the proceeds from the sale of her shares in the PR agency to fund the start-up costs, including designing a range of children’s clothing to accompany the superhero buddies.
“It was various loungewear pieces for kids — sweatshirts, T-shirts, joggers and leggings, little bags — and they all had a ‘superpower button’. So the idea was if they were going to nursery and feeling anxiety at being separated, they could press the button and know they were going to be OK.”
A buyer at the department store Liberty, whom Tutchener Sharp had known from her PR career, got wind of what she was doing and, in June 2016, asked to see the range. “She put in an order the same day and it was more than I’d even ordered [from the supplier].” Her first factory, in Portugal, remains a key supplier, with other manufacturers in Turkey, India and China.
She remembers the first few months as being a steep learning curve. “Building the website, finding stockists, writing marketing newsletters … It was completely bonkers. But when you’ve thought your life is going to be over, you come out of that not seeing any barriers. I thought I could do anything,” she said.
Tutchener Sharp launched her first womenswear product — a sweatshirt with a neon lightning motif — in November 2016, and they sold out in Liberty on the first day. Today, 95 per cent of sales are for womenswear, where lower price sensitivity makes it easier to compete than in children’s clothing.
“Our kidswear is organic cotton and it’s made ethically in Portugal, so it naturally costs more than you can buy from the likes of Zara and H&M,” said Tutchener Sharp, whose children’s sweatshirts sell on the Scamp & Dude website for £36.
She puts part of the brand’s success down to a move to diversify from a loungewear-heavy product range, into a bigger selection of dresses and occasion wear, as the country emerged from the pandemic in 2021. “I said to the team, we’ve got to pivot now … Let’s start making more dresses.”
The brand has also put rocket boosters under its retail rollout, having grown from one shop in 2022 to seven today, with plans to open three more next year. They have all been financed from cashflow — Tutchener Sharp hasn’t taken any external investment and owns the business outright — with the retail strategy being driven by her husband, Rob, who joined as operations director two years ago.
Tutchener Sharp said that the stores have become hubs for the brand’s mega-fans, known as “Duders”, who will often drive for hours to meet other enthusiasts at one of the shops. Her plan is to “be within 90 minutes of all our customers — we don’t want to be on every high street”.
While she knows she is fortunate that the company, which employs 100 people, has grown so fast, she “wants to slow down a little bit because it’s been hectic”.
She said that despite the challenges of rapid growth, she is “absolutely loving it. And it’s great for our kids to see as well; they’ve been such a part of it since they were tiny. I hope it inspires them to create their own businesses in the future.”
My heroes … from the business world include Sahar Hashemi, who is bringing female founders together with Buy Women Built; Holly Tucker, the co-founder of Not on the High Street; and Sara Davies [the crafting entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den panellist], who has been successful but is also a lovely woman with a great heart and sense of fun.
My best decision … launching our “super scarves” two years ago. For every one that is bought, we donate one to a woman undergoing cancer treatment.
My worst decision … removing our “superpower button” tags, a neon pink bolt, from our clothes. Press them and they include funny suggestions of superpowers you can get. It turned out that our customers love the tags and many collect them. They were quickly added back.
Funniest moment … opening our Marlow store [in Buckinghamshire] in July 2022 and not realising what a big deal it was going to be. I got a lift off my dad and stepped out of the car to squeals from a huge queue of customers outside the shop. I wished I’d orchestrated a more elaborate, glamorous entrance, like Bianca Jagger riding a white horse to her 27th birthday party.
Best business tip … make sure you’re clear on your “why”. What’s the purpose? What’s getting you out of bed every day? Because you’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked before when you start a business.