Episode Details

What happens when an agriculture graduate decides she doesn’t want to be a farmer, dreams up a fabric business, gets turned down for funding… and ends up becoming a full-time artist instead?

Well, you get Tilly Lock Art.

This week on the Countrywoman’s Guide podcast, Emma sits down with Tilly Lock to talk about the rather unexpected route that took her from studying agriculture and working in interior design to building a creative business of her own.

Tilly had always loved art and design, but it wasn’t initially the plan. After university, she started working for an interior designer and began developing an idea for a fabric business, combining UK-made fabrics with sourced and repurposed antiques.

The problem? Getting fabric made in the UK required a much bigger initial investment than the funding available to her.

So, while trying to bridge that gap, Tilly started selling a few art prints she had originally made for friends. One thing led to another, her Instagram took off, and the art prints gradually became the business.

Just a year and a half later, she has gone from selling prints at £20 village fairs to exhibiting at Badminton and preparing for some of the biggest Christmas shows in the country.

But, as we talk about in the episode, that growth hasn’t exactly been a straight line.

Tilly talks honestly about the reality of building a business while working part-time, training for a marathon and trying to keep everything moving. We talk about burnout, learning to say no, knowing when to invest in the next stage of growth and the slightly daunting realisation that your business has outgrown your parents’ living room.

We also get into one of the less talked-about challenges for creative businesses: copying. Tilly shares what it feels like to see your work reproduced by someone else, the difficulty of protecting creative work and why, ultimately, she has had to learn to stay in her own lane and keep creating.

There’s plenty of practical wisdom in the conversation too, from the value of having a mentor to learning how to do things yourself before handing them over to someone else.

And perhaps one of the biggest takeaways is that you don’t need to have the whole thing figured out before you begin. Tilly certainly didn’t. She followed an opportunity, tested an idea, learned as she went and built something that now looks very different from where she thought she was heading.

It’s an honest conversation about building something of your own, learning as you go and having the confidence to keep moving forward when the path changes underneath you.

Listen to the full episode with Tilly Lock here. 💚

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