Sian Sutherland is a business chameleon who’s pivoted to a new industry every seven years. She started her career in advertising before taking a leap and opening a restaurant in Soho – she earned her first Michelin star a year later, aged 25.
After successfully opening her own marketing agency, she saw a gap in the market for pregnancy skincare products. Her brand, Mama Mio, was stocked in Selfridges, Harrods and John Lewis, with its first product, Tummy Rub, bringing in revenues of $500,000 (£365,500) in the first year. She sold the company for £3.7m in 2015.
In her latest pivot, Sutherland’s environmental organisation A Plastic Planet uses her entrepreneurial acumen to find pro-business solutions to turning off the plastic tap. In the UK so far, they’ve been incremental in introducing the plastics tax, banning the export of plastic waste from the UK to developing countries and axing plastic takeaway cutlery.
Sutherland has won Female Marketer of the Year, the CEW Achiever Award, Entrepreneur of the Year and British Inventor of the Year.
I started my career in the heyday of advertising in the late Eighties, when you went out to lunch and never came back. It was an exciting time, but as the industry grew, I realised that I wasn’t a big company person; I like everyone to feel like they’re an important cog in the machine. So, I left and started my own restaurant, Sutherlands in Soho. I’d never even been a waitress, so it was an ambitious thing to do. But we raised the money on the enterprise initiative scheme, where people get tax relief when buying shares in a company. I found the building, hired a very good chef and a fantastic restaurant manager. We opened when I was 25 and won a Michelin star in our first year. I probably learnt more about business in five years of running that restaurant than in anything else I’ve done.
Anyone who can work with their partner, kudos to them. I married my restaurant manager and went back to my marketing roots by opening a self-funded drink and beauty design agency with my creative partner, Kathy Miller. I remember the day I sent out an invoice for many thousands – a big contrast to the bills in the restaurant for a two-figure sum. Suddenly, we were dealing with far larger multiples, and there was a sense of relief as we realised this is a very different ball game.
We were in our baby-making years when we solidified ourselves a little black book of clients. The more people we worked with, who we spoke to about pregnancy skincare products, the more people we heard say, ‘Why does this not exist? Why is this not on the shelves?’ We put a presentation together and went to the US to meet with buyers at Sephora and other big retailers, then came back to the UK to raise finance to launch Mama Mio in one of the most highly competitive markets in the world. It was the first time pregnancy and skincare had ever been put together.
Our first investor was the bank Investec. As much as they loved us, we were the first startup they’d ever invested in and working with them was challenging. I would tell them ‘we’ve got this opportunity at the Royal College of Paediatrics’ or at ‘the Royal College of Midwives’, and all they would say to me is ‘how does it convert into sales?’ At the beginning, I hated them for that, but, of course, sales are everything and the sooner the penny drops, the better. All the phrases – cash is king, distribution is your best friend – are cliches for a reason. I learned those the hard way.
It’s a very emotional thing to pass something on that’s your baby. I ran Mama Mio for 11 years before we sold the business to The Hut Group (THG) for £3.7m in 2015. People say, ‘Oh, do you miss it?’ and I had a lovely experience, but was ready for the next thing. You’ve been through the labour of selling the business and taking care of your team and ensuring everybody’s going to be safe on the other side – that’s the emotional bit for me. The world that I entered next was completely different. I couldn’t believe how easy it was.
I was asked to advise the Hong Kong board on the documentary A Plastic Ocean in 2016. It talks about recycling being the answer, which we now know is bulls***, but for me personally, it was an epiphany meeting marine biologists and scientists and realising that we were doing something toxic and indestructible every day with our addiction to plastic. I wondered if there was a way of creating a different kind of organisation. Not a charity. Not an NGO. That’s when I created A Plastic Planet. Everything we do underpins the goal of igniting and inspiring the world to turn off the plastic tap; nothing to do with consumer responsibility or beach cleans or recycling. We’re all about the tap.
As an entrepreneur, I believe in the power of business. So, at A Plastic Planet, we work in two ways. One is called ‘the cattle prod’, where we catalyse and accelerate the industry switch from plastic to human-safe materials and ensure the government creates policy change and fiscal motivations that change the industry faster. The other side is the ‘lightning rod’, which is all about innovation. So, what are the new materials of the future? We built the world’s first solutions platform, plasticfree.com, to showcase thousands of systems and material changes we’re going to see. The future of fashion, beauty, materials, food, drinks, packaging, consumption – that’s very exciting for me as an entrepreneur.
My only superpower is radical naivety. I don’t know the reasons why not to do something. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have to have an innate confidence, and I have never found that difficult. When asking to borrow money from banks, naivety was a huge strength because it gave me confidence. I think the generation growing up now suffers from a lot more anxiety for many valid reasons, but they are massive overthinkers. The most important step of any journey is the first step. If you wait until you know everything, then everyone else will know everything too. Just get going. I’ve pretty much changed my career every seven years.
Whenever I have a new idea, I put it through the ‘why bother’ test. In the consumer or even technology sector, if it’s more of the same – unless you’ve got a massive marketing budget – why bother? Somebody’s already done it. Everything an entrepreneur should be doing is answering a problem. If you’re not, then why bother, because the world does not need more stuff. There is a huge reckoning of overconsumption coming.
Sian Sutherland is a champion of FFinc Forward Faster Accelerator 100, a UK-based business accelerator programme designed to help female-founded companies scale their growth faster, which was launched in September 2025. For more information, go to
