Bridgit | Milford
“Today being a woman is a really busy job, because we are all juggling careers and doing our best to look after our children in a changing world.
We are just really busy, but the world that our children need to be ready for is a really competitive world. So doing the best for our children is really important to us and to me especially as a mother.
My job; I run my own eye-wear company, so I have my own brand which is Le Tissier, so my company is Le Tissier Eyewear, and we do sunglasses and optical frames, and they’re sold in around about 80 different places around New Zealand. I run my business from home, so when the kids are at school I’m doing as much as I can during the day, but obviously it means working at night as well, which I think is a really common thing for a lot of women. I think it’s really beneficial for children to be brought up in a home where a business is being run, so they can see what it’s like to be an entrepreneur and all the ins and outs of running a business, and dealing with people, and the pros and cons of running a business rather than being an employee.
I don’t have any times when I really think I’ve experienced sexism. I’m sure I have, but my husband actually thinks that it’s better to be a sales person as a female than a male. It’s important to relate to people and sometimes males relate better to females, because a male to male might, you know, puff up their chest and that kind of thing, so maybe it’s a benefit to be dealing with a large variety of people as a female rather than a male; I love being a female. I fit really well in the world that I live in, and the world that I choose to participate in. I don’t thoroughly enjoy large group conversations. I’m very much a person who enjoys good, deep conversation between two or three people, rather than large groups. That’s something I’ve learned about myself in recent year.
On children…
All I can really think of is how my kids scrapped in the car all the way to school this morning, and how it inspired me to just always say nice things to each other, and I was encouraging my children to just say nice things and not scrap.
On positively resolving conflict…
This morning I had a pair of shoes that were faulty so I took them back and we just communicated really nicely and positively about the situation, and I think that’s the key to whatever situation you’re in; be as pleasant as possible to people. It’s so easy to turn nasty and be unpleasant to people, but I always try to remain calm and develop as a person by just being as nice as possible. I try and keep negative communication out of my life. So I wouldn’t say that I experience it a lot.
I think one of the best things about running my own business is that I choose who I deal with, and if someone’s not pleasing to me, or treating me as I want to be treated, I actually have the choice not to deal with them, which is one of the best things about not being an employee; that I’m completely running my life the way I want to, and keeping unpleasantness out of my life, which is actually one of the coolest things about what I do.”
