Colette Twomey – our guest this week on The Architects of Business, in partnership with EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ – is no ordinary businesswoman.
“Our business is all about the feel of the business. It’s about the backing of the town, and the enthusiasm of the people, and that’s what got us going.”
Colette Twomey, a 2010 Finalist in the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ awards, co-founded the Clonakilty Food Company with her husband Eddie in the Cork town in the 1970s.
Colette had little idea that her fabled black pudding would become as synonymous with Ireland as Tayto Crisps, Guinness and Club Orange and help her turn her business into one of the Rebel County’s most successful enterprises.
“It just felt right for people and that’s how it naturally grew over the years,” she says of the black pudding, the cornerstone of the business, which recently returned to open headquarters in the town of Clonakilty itself.
In this week’s episode of The Architects of Business, hosted by Tadhg Enright and produced in partnership with EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™, Colette reveals how she and Eddie left medical and farming backgrounds respectively in order to open a butcher’s shop in Clonakilty, and how they managed to create the perfect product at the perfect time.
She reveals how a recipe for black pudding had excited customers in the butcher’s shop that they bought for over 100 years.
“It wasn’t just any recipe?” asks Tadhg.
“No, it was a secret recipe just known to the shopkeepers alone, then it was known to Eddie and me.”
Colette reveals how they failed to recognise at the start how special the recipe was until the pudding started flying out of the shop, and when loyal customers told them it was exactly the same as it had been under the previous owners, they knew they were on to something special.
The Architects of Business, brought to you in partnership with EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ , will be available every Monday morning on iTunes, SoundCloud and YouTube.
