An easy pill to swallow: Meet the entrepreneur making pill boxes cool
Lucy Rout needed something stylish to keep her medication to hand. She couldn’t find it, she tells Jennifer Sieg – so she launched Tabuu herself.
Lucy Rout had one mission when on her route to entrepreneurship: to open up conversation around medication. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of 25, Rout realised she wanted to pave the way for change for people who take medication each day – and soon her business was born.
Whether it was holding an inconvenient bag of pills in her purse or sneaking away from the dinner table to take her medication in private, she found it troubling to find an easy way to take her medication in public.
“I used to feel a bit anxious getting my tablets out in social settings, I had some awkward comments, you know, it just sort of wasn’t particularly enjoyable,” Rout said. “I searched the market everywhere for something a bit stylish and discreet I could carry them in.”
Finding nothing, she launched her own: a range of stylish pill cases, which have gone down a storm with the fashion press.
“I had no experience in running a business,” Rout said. “But I did as any entrepreneur did, I got to my laptop and started googling how to design products, started googling how to design packaging,
just downloaded every single free trial in the world that I could.”
Two years later, what began as a passion project is now her full-time job. Beginning in 2021 – which she describes as a “rubbish” time to start a business – she said her biggest challenges were confidence and funding. Starting with just £2,000 she saved from a corporate job , she spent every morning, evening, and weekend googling how-tos and reaching out to build a network.
Burnout: The route to entrepreneurship
“The line between burnout and success is often impossible to navigate,” she said. But this is why she encourages others to be cautious of the route to entrepreneurship; mental health will always be important.
Working on her own can get “lonely” she said, and it can be difficult to manage everything each day of
the week. But that’s why “community and network are everything” for her and those in a similar situation, she said.
A piece of advice Rout has always held near and dear to her during her business journey is: “When you’re a solo founder, part of your job is to look after yourself.” You must be diligent with mental health, take walks, take breaks, she said, because “the moment you burn out your business ends in the bin.”
It can be easy to have support in a regular job or employment, and Rout said being on her own had taken some getting used to but it’s something she truly enjoys. “The thing I really enjoy is it’s all risk or reward,” she added. Allowing her to channel the many ideas she encounters everyday, Rout said: “Entrepreneurship for me is like a dream come true.”
Creating a community through social media
Given that Rout’s business is run completely online, building community is important for its growth.
Social media has been a favourable asset for her, as many entrepreneurs would agree, especially when it comes to showing the human side of a business, she says.
Utilising her story and experience as a driving factor for creating her business, she has found that there are many others out there who feel the same.
“I think showing that human side of the business is something that I’m finding is really resonating,” she said.
Given the goal of her business was to open up the conversation about medication, her dream is to eventually partner with different companies and organisations to host events to talk about shared experiences.