Zoë Foster Blake has revealed some inside details about why her skincare business got into trouble.
The 44-year-old author, who is married to radio star Hamish Blake, told this week’s issue of Stellar Magazine that she has to ‘get her s**t together’ after selling and then buying back her beauty brand, Go-To.
In 2021, Australian beauty company BWX bought a majority stake in Go-To for $89 million. However, two years later in 2023, Zoë and co-founder Paul Bates bought back ownership after BWX went into administration.
‘I went through a really big thing when I sold half of my business,’ Zoë reflected.
‘That world of mergers and acquisitions and selling, this business world that I hadn’t known about, was sort of thrown at me and I had to get my s**t together very quickly.
‘I learnt so much because of the brilliant people around me advising, and lawyers, my chairperson, my team, that I felt almost like it was my duty to pay that forward because I went in knowing nothing,’ she added, mentioning that this experience went into her new book, Things Will Calm Down Soon.
In the same interview, Zoe also opened up on finding time for a bustling career while raising a family can take a toll on her mental health.
‘You get into that survivor mentality when you’re super slammed, and knowing it will calm down eventually is the carrot to dangle, but most women I know say, “It’s just how we live our life; things will calm down soon.” Guess what? It doesn’t’ she said.
Zoe continued: ‘I feel like there’s a lot of awareness about the mental load – which was something we didn’t even have a name for – and the admin load, and being overstimulated. I go, “Oh, I’m not a bitch, I’m just overstimulated.”
‘My friends will text me and say, “Another book? How are you doing it all?” There’s a genuine curiosity and my genuine answer is: at great cost – to my mental health, to my time with my family, to my physical health.
‘The things that got put aside for me to be able to finish this project and do it well are quite enormous’.
Zoe recently revealed that she has taken a step back from sharing her family life online.
‘We’re very private and we’re very boring. We’re just a normal family and I think our inclination to share our life has gone down a lot,’ she told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Despite their inclination toward privacy as the kids grow older, Zoe and Hamish still post happy snaps from family holidays, strategically hiding Sonny and Rudy’s faces.
Zoe went on to say learning to raise children came with plenty of obstacles, but she and Hamish, 42, are learning to navigate them together.
‘We read a lot about [parenting], we’re doing the work, we want to raise our kids the best we can. We want to treat it not like a job, but as a project,’ she said.
With a popular comedian as their father, it seemed the author and entrepreneur risked being outnumbered by jokesters, but she insisted that was far from true.
‘Rudy is very funny, she’s got very good comedic timing,’ Zoe admitted, but revealed that wasn’t the case for her eldest.
