Founders of Pip&Nut and Buy Women Built, Pippa Murray and Sahar Hashemi, on scaling without losing the founder spirit
Women Who Scale fireside chat at SCALE London
At SCALE London 2026, Women Who Scale brought together Pip & Nut founder Pippa Murray and Sahar Hashemi OBE, the creator of Buy Women Built, for a fireside chat on stage at the Business Design Centre.
Questions flew in both directions as they discussed how to keep the soul of a business intact as it grows. Women Who Scale co-founder Amy Knight shares what she took away from their conversation.
Both women started their businesses as frustrated customers. Both have built brands that sit on supermarket shelves next to multinationals. And both know what’s at risk of getting lost when a company grows up fast.
Hold on to being a startup
Sahar was a lawyer before she became an entrepreneur. She fell for skinny lattes in New York, couldn’t find one in London. With her brother, she built Coffee Republic from nothing to 110 stores in five years, taking it onto AIM and then the main market.
The received wisdom at the time, Sahar said, was that founders were good at starting things and should then hand over to "the grown-ups" with systems and processes. They stepped back, and the business declined over the following eight years.
"The thinking was that entrepreneurs have a sell-by date, and if you stayed too long you'd passed your expiry date. So we gave it away, and of course they ran the company into the ground," said Sahar.
She has since made scaling with founder spirit her focus, and her latest book, Start Up Forever, argues that businesses never really have to startup phase. The experimentation and scrappiness of the early days are exactly what a bigger company should hold on to.
Your purpose is your fuel
Pippa's route into entrepreneurship was also unexpected. A theatre producer and keen marathon runner, she was looking for natural food to fuel her training and started blending nuts at her kitchen table. Pip & Nut launched in 2013 and is now stocked across the major UK retailers, with a growing snacking range and an expanding international footprint. In October 2026, it was reported in The Sunday Times Business & Money that the company had begun looking at a potential sale.
Pippa disagreed firmly with the idea that founders become redundant at a certain stage, provided they still have the energy for it, and said keeping that energy depends on constantly linking the work back to why the business started.
"It is exhausting running and scaling a business. You have to make sure that you feed the fire that fuels your passion. That’s ultimately the reason why you're doing it in the first place."
This is why Pippa thinks founders should retain as much control as they can when raising investment, so the direction of the brand stays theirs.
Slow decisions can be worse than wrong ones
With a team of around 45, Pippa still runs Pip & Nut day-to-day as founder and CEO. Asked by Sahar how she stops bureaucracy creeping in, she pointed to decision-making as the biggest risk.
"The cost of a decision is not whether you made the right or the wrong one. It's normally the speed at which you took to get to it."
Months spent debating a product launch, she argued, is time that could have been spent testing it in front of real consumers.
Staying close to customers is everyone's job
Pippa still spends hours sampling new products in store, including at Whole Foods in Kensington, and the whole team turns out at events such as the Hackney Half and Royal Parks Half Marathon, which the brand sponsors. She also watches the comments on Pippa & Nut's Instagram account, which has close to 200,000 followers.
When Sahar pressed her on how she gets a busy team to buy in, Pippa said customer contact is built into objectives across the business, from finance to marketing. Everyone is expected to do in-store sampling and attend events each quarter.
"It's part of being part of a small business that you roll up your sleeves and you're not just in this silo."
The best defence against bigger budgets
Pip & Nut competes with Mars, Unilever and General Mills on the snacking shelves. For Pippa, the answer to bigger marketing budgets is a brand distinctive enough that nobody else can look or sound like it. Plus, her obsession with taste, and excellent execution on shelf.
She singled out retailer relationships as critical, because buyers are the gatekeepers to the customer. This is where Buy Women Built has made a real difference. By partnering with retailers including Tesco, Holland & Barrett and Whole Foods to flag women built brands on shelf, the movement has given female founders a stronger story to take into those buyer meetings, and a reason for shoppers to choose them once they get there.
Pippa’s advice to women building challenger brands is to be the disruptor in the room: tell the story creatively, avoid PowerPoint where possible, and be more thoughtful than the existing market leaders.
Social media and the founder story give emerging brands a community that is very hard for larger players to replicate. The Buy Women Built community has given founders like Pippa a network of peers to share buyer contacts, advice and wins with, and a growing retail presence that puts women built brands front and centre for shoppers.
Tackling the knowledge gap, not just the funding gap
Pippa asked Sahar about starting the Buy Women Built movement during the pandemic, after reading a tweet pointing out that not everyone can invest in or mentor women, but everyone can buy from them.
Sahar noted that only around 2p of every pound of investment goes to women and cited the 2019 Rose Review's finding that the UK lags other developed countries on female entrepreneurship, costing the economy hundreds of billions. The stats have barely moved since.
Sahar realised that many household brands are female founded without consumers knowing it.
"A great business grows organically through customers, and somehow we've forgotten that bit of it."
The movement began as a WhatsApp group and a coffee morning, and has grown to secure retailer presence with Tesco, Holland & Barrett, Planet Organic, QVC and Whole Foods. When Tesco highlighted reduced-sugar jam brand Fearne & Rosie as women built, Sahar said, its sales there rose by 178%.
Women built brands are customer-centric by design
According to Buy Women Built's own member questionnaire, 94% of the brands in its community started from a personal need, either the founder's own or a family member's. Sahar argued this makes them authentically customer-led at a time when consumers are looking for exactly that.
Sahar and Pippa agreed that women's instinct for sharing makes peer networks unusually powerful. Pippa described the community as a safe space where founders can talk through obsessions, frustrations, breakthroughs and breakdowns with people who understand them, and where the right connection can help an emerging brand leapfrog the next hurdle.
Leap, then be patient
Sahar said her motto has always been to leap and trust that the net will appear, rather than over-planning, because the world changes too fast.
Pippa's advice to founders in the SCALE audience was patience. Founders overestimate what they can do in one year, she said, and underestimate what they can achieve in ten.
"Brands that are hockey-sticking probably aren't going to be the ones that are going to be here in a few years' time."
Twelve years on from a kitchen table and a blender, Pippa & Nut is proof of that point.
The conversation was brought to you by Women Who Scale, SCALE's programme for female founders, investors and allies. The next stop is SCALE Manchester on 25 November at Freight Island. Get your tickets here.
SCALE London returns to the Business Design Centre on 20-21 April 2027. Register now.
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