Mary is building a business at her own pace
Mary Corrigan pictured at the Quay in Ballina where she operates Noo Chocolates. Picture: Shutter Fever Photography Mayo
Noo Chocolates has become an instantly recognisable brand. Mary Corrigan is the brains behind the artisan chocolate company, based at The Quay in Ballina. She has a unique view on her business and why she wants to remain a smaller company, despite ample opportunities to turn it into something huge.
Mary also has refreshing views on balancing a successful business and being happy in life.
We sit in her office, just off the production area at Noo Chocolates, to chat about how she got to where she is today.
Mary, thanks for talking to me. Tell me a little about yourself?
I'm from Meath originally and grew up there. My parents are from Northern Ireland. My dad had a good job in a multinational and I was brought up to go and get my education, get my degree and get a good job. There was no background in business or even a business influence. I went off to college, did microbiology in college, which was quite interesting.
Where did you do the degree?
I went to Queens University in Belfast. With the links to Northern Ireland, I was happy to go up there. I left there, moved to Sligo, and then worked in Abbott in Sligo. Then my sister emigrated to New Zealand, so I went off on a holiday to visit her and came back and said, 'Right, that's it. Off I go to New Zealand.' I packed in the job, but I just went for a year in the end with my partner at the time, who is now my husband. We came back from New Zealand to Ireland in 2010, when obviously things were pretty average.
But I was lucky. I got a job in Coca-Cola here in Ballina. I stayed there for seven years. I had a notion that I wanted to run a business but was also totally and utterly clueless about where you'd even start, to put it mildly. I held off for a long time. I just didn't think I could do it.
Then all of a sudden, completely out of the blue, my company looked for redundancies in my team. My initial reaction was just total panic because I was actually the last person in my team. So technically, I might have been the first person out. But once I got over the panic I said, 'Hang on. I'll get a bit of money from a redundancy package, and maybe it's an opportunity.' So that's what gave me the opportunity to start the business. The chocolates bit is my sister's fault.
So, tell us a bit more about that then?
I've three sisters - it's all girls in our family, and when I was turning 30, they were just a total loss of what to buy me. For some reason, I have no idea why, to tell you the truth, they bought me a chocolate-making workshop as a gift. So it was like a half-day workshop in Dublin. You go in and learn how to make truffles and really simple stuff, or what I now consider simple. I went down there, my husband Damien came with me and we just spent half a day messing with chocolate and came back pretty into it.
So what did you do with the skills you acquired?
We started making chocolates as a hobby, just for ourselves and for the family. At Christmas, we'd make loads as gifts for people, and people would be coming back and saying 'Can I buy some of them?' Or we might give them to family, and they might give them as gifts to somebody else that we didn't know. But the people we didn't know would be coming back and saying, 'Can we buy those chocolates?' We almost looked at it - around 2012 - as a business, and we just said, 'I just don't think it would work'. Then, when this redundancy thing came up, and I was just like, 'Well I'm able to make chocolates.'
Then we went having a poke around, as you do, for premises and came down to The Quay in Ballina and there's a sign on a door saying, Moy Chocolates, and we're like, 'That doesn't really look like it's in use at the moment.' Which it wasn't. It had closed down maybe six months beforehand, but all of the equipment was here. So at the same time as I was able to take a redundancy from work, there's a chocolate factory sitting in the town I already live in, in the west of Ireland. What are the odds? You couldn't say no. Sometimes you just have to listen.
So you had premises and equipment - was it still a steep learning curve?
There's a very steep learning curve. There's a massive difference making chocolates at home in a saucepan to suddenly using equipment designed for commercial production. This was all happening around November time and I had booked into three or four Christmas markets around the place, the first one being the one in Foxford, which is the first weekend every year in December.
With all the various complications of trying to get in here, I think I only got the keys maybe on November 26th So I had something like three days to learn how to use the equipment to actually turn out some chocolates that were saleable because that's a completely different finish. I had to get my approval from the HSE, the environmental health and all the rest of it.
We were here until 1am and you'd make a batch, and it wouldn't work, and you'd just be like tearing your hair out nearly crying. But we did it. We got through all the Christmas markets. The reaction was phenomenal. People really liked them. We made a bit of money. It felt good because it felt like there's definitely a market for this and people are interested. Ever since then, I would say I'm quietly pootling along in my own lane.
So where are you supplying now?
Retailer-wise, the vast majority would be in Connacht. I do have some in Cork and Dublin and, obviously, I have the website, so people can buy. But the thing is that I was never looking to build this massive business that you would see in every shop in the land. I'm really only interested in working for myself. I have one employee. I'm not looking to be too big.
I could make it big if that's what I wanted for my own life, but I just don't want to do that. When I was growing the business from day one, I've grown it really slowly just because I wasn't interested in something that was going to be a massive source of stress for me. I wanted to grow it quite small and carefully to be able to control it, because you do see occasionally businesses that take off, get big, everything implodes and then six months later it's gone.
That's a very interesting take Mary.
There's so much focus on how many employees you have, what your turnover is. It's the measure of success and I don't think it's the right measure at all. It's all about growth, but at the same time we're saying, 'We want more artisans, small producers.' And it's great to have them, but really then the focus tends to be on making them big producers, which isn't the right route for everybody. There's a place for small businesses, too, and people find it strange if you don't want to grow more, or you don't want to get into a supermarket or whatever it is. Whereas I'm saying I have no interest whatsoever in making my life any more stressful than it is. It's controllable at the moment, and that's the biggest lesson I ever learned in business.
What are your busiest times and do you have any typical days here in the factory?
Christmas is the really crazy time. A typical day depends on if it's a production day or a packing day. Production day is just getting in, get the fillings made, you're tempering your chocolate. There's processes around all of that.
It can be a long day because you're at the mercy of the chocolate in some ways. When it's ready, that's it. You're working with it, and you're working till you're done. So they can be longish days and especially if you've got a customer who has run out of chocolates - you're going to go the extra mile.
No day is a short day, really, but at the same time, I have other days where if I'm not making, and we're just packing or something and the weather is nice, we take a long lunch break because you can do that. I don't have a boss standing over me saying, 'Get back to the desk or whatever.' So it's important to do some of those things when you can do them because it just makes your week a bit easier and more enjoyable.
What keeps you driven Mary?
There's a lot of pride in having built a product and on the days when we're sending out loads of stuff, and it's all stacked up, and you're looking at that, and you're saying, 'I made all of that and that's my packaging, and it's my brand and all the rest of it.' There's loads of pride in that. That does drive me to a certain extent.
But I'd say overall, just the level of control and the general ability to be happy from it is the main thing. I think people can get sucked into a life, and they don't really stop to think if they're getting any fulfillment and enjoyment out of it. Fear stops so many people from even trying. The amount of people I know that say, 'I couldn't run a business.' That is not true. Anyone can run a business. It's not easy. You have to be prepared to go through a bit of stuff. I would say to everybody, just at least look at your life every now and then and see if you're actually happy with what you're doing because it's such a waste if you're not.
