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About me
Meet Rachel Watkyn, Managing Director of Tiny Box Company, the UK's largest online gift packaging e-commerce company.
Rachel started her company from scratch in 2007. Now, Tiny Box Company is the UK’s largest online gift packaging e-commerce company with over 700 products and over 100,000 customers - ranging from one-person start-ups to international corporations.
Trauma in her personal life prepared Rachel for the struggles of business.
Rachel spent her formative years in care after a traumatic early childhood. Whilst working in Sierra Leone during the military coup, the extreme poverty she witnessed drove her vision for a Fairtrade business. This began as a jewellery company, but her struggle to find recycled and environmentally friendly packaging sparked the idea for Tiny Box Company, supplying businesses with attractive, ethical packaging.
Against a backdrop of difficulties including cancer, fire, flooding, an IT hack, and now COVID-19, she has grown Tiny Box to a thriving company of 80 employees.
Rachel is Dragon’s Den’s most successful female entrepreneur to date. The two original investors Theo Paphitis and Peter Jones can congratulate themselves on recouping eight times their original investment in dividends.
She has been featured on BBC radio, The Daily Mail as well as many business and trade magazines and is the winner of the NatWest Everywoman Award 2020 and the Rural Business Award 2020.
Rachel is a regular commentator on women’s entrepreneurship, women’s leadership, green business and sustainability.