High Flying Design

WELCOME TO HIGH FLYING DESIGN

I grew up in Clacton-on-Sea, a town most people leave if they can. My dad was a postman. My mum did whatever brought money in, supermarket shifts, office work, school work. Steady jobs that just got us by. Nobody around me worked for themselves, and building something of your own wasn't really part of the world I knew.

But Dina was. She lived opposite us, and every morning she got into her Mini Cooper and drove off somewhere. I was in primary school when I found out where: her own hair salon. A woman, right across the road, who was her own boss. On her own path, on her own terms. I'd been told that wasn't realistic for someone like me. Dina was the only proof I had that it was.

That's the thing about role models. You can't picture a life you've never seen someone live. Dina didn't have to be chasing some grand passion. She just had to be visibly doing it her own way, and that was enough to show a girl across the road that a different path existed.

It turns out that doesn't stop when you grow up. We still need to see other women doing the thing before we'll try it ourselves. Eight out of ten young people in the UK can't name a single female entrepreneur, which is a quiet ceiling on what girls, and grown women, believe is possible for them.

So that's what High Flying Design is for. It's the proof. Honest interviews with real women building businesses right now, not the polished, already-made-it version, the real one. And once you can see it's possible, the magazine hands you the roadmap: practical advice on business, mindset and life from women a few steps ahead, so you can build it at your own pace.

I bumped into Dina recently and told her I'd love to interview her. She said she probably wasn't interesting enough, that nobody would want to read her story. She is wrong. When we sat down, she told me she'd had no idea what she'd meant to me. None. She changed the course of my life and never knew she'd done it.

You might be doing the same for someone right now, without realising it. So whatever it is you want to build, I hope you start. A business that doesn't work out is something you recover from. The one thing that's harder to live with is never finding out what you could have built, and who you might have become along the way.

— Shannon Kate Murray, founder & editor

WELCOME TO HIGH FLYING DESIGN

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High Flying Design is for the woman carrying the weight of building something on her own. Real stories and honest advice, from founders who are already a few steps ahead.