Job of the Week
A-Star Sports
Location: UK Wide
Our franchise owners are passionate about the positive impact of sport on every day life, nurturing in young children a fun, positive outlook and a life-long commitment to being active through the enjoyment of the A-Star Sports programme. From fundamental movement and multi-skills through to a ...
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Company of the Year sponsored by Hilton.gif)
Open to any company who actively promotes exceptionally family-friendly and flexible working policies to it's team. The winner received a family leisure weekend at Hilton St Anne's Manor including tickets to Legoland, Windsor.
Finalists:
Winner: Hippychick
"We are absolutely thrilled to have won this award. I know first hand the difficulty with juggling home and work life so am a big advocate of flexibility in the workplace - as our 9 parents on the team will attest to! This accolade has been a huge boost to our staff and given real credence to our marketing campaigns."
Hippychick is Julia Minchin’s second baby ‘born’ shortly after her first baby Tom.
Frustrated by never being able to find the products she wanted for her new life with Tom, Julia set about creating the shop she longed to shop in! A one stop shopping destination for parents looking for the most practical, inventive solutions to making family life more simple, healthy, fun and natural.
Hippychick has grown rapidly alongside Julia’s family. She now has three children and Hippychick is a hugely successful business that:
- supplies over 1000 nursery outlets in the UK
- has won over 50 prestigious parenting awards for its innovative products
- has customers in 75 countries
- has created 15 jobs in an area of high unemployment with over half of its workforce parents who are free to structure their working week around family life with part time or flexi work options
Each year the company brings exciting new nursery products to market for families to enjoy. Julia is passionate about giving other parents the chances she has enjoyed, so at least half of these are invented by fellow’ parentpreneurs’. Using their own direct experience they create the kind of ‘must have’ products – from cool and contemporary toys, through to essential first aid guides and sleep accessories - that families soon wonder how they lived without.
Baba Me
With plans for at least two more shops in 2010, Baba Me is doing everything it can to make green parenting stylish, practical, fun and affordable.
Six years ago Maebh Collins was a high flying tax accountant with KPMG working 12 hour days that left little time to spend with her husband and three children.
Pregnant with her fourth child, Maebh decided the crunch point had come. She was no longer prepared to sacrifice family life to chase the big bucks. Three months pregnant, she returned to her native Ireland to give her children the childhood she dreamt of and to set up a business she passionately believed in.
Her mission: To bring to Northern Ireland all the natural, chemical free and environmentally friendly products she longed to use with her own family but found difficult to source locally.
Fast forward to 2010 and Baba Me (Baby, Mum, Environment) – is the place where ‘parenting comes naturally’. The team of 14 has 10 mums and two dads among it. Three of these mums work from home and the rest are free to work flexi and part time and also able to take off as much time during school holidays as they need.
Between them the team helps provide tens of thousands of parents each year with the ultimate green parenting retail experience – whether on their website, through their catalogue or in their stunning new shop in Newry (which features feeding couches, free drop in advice, free evening seminars, a free parenting book library and coffee bar and chill out area).
