Sitting down in January to write her plan for the year ahead at Cool Crutches, a business selling walking sticks and crutches, Amelia Peckham added a new item to the wish list. “I wanted to see them on catwalks.”
At the time it was just a pipe dream, but four months later it became a reality when Victoria Beckham, the fashion designer and former Spice Girl, chose to use one of Peckham’s crutches when she appeared on the runway of her show at Paris Fashion Week.
It happened completely by chance, said Peckham, 38, who had first spotted Beckham using one of her crutches earlier in April when the star was photographed in London shortly after breaking a bone in her foot. Peckham said she immediately searched the Cool Crutches database to find out who had placed the order for Beckham.
“Her chief of staff had emailed our customer service and said, ‘Is there any way we could get some crutches by nine o’clock tomorrow morning?’ Our lovely customer service girl replied saying, ‘Yes, but you’ve only got ten minutes, here’s the link’.” The staff member didn’t know Beckham was the intended recipient, said Peckham.
Beckham also posted pictures with her black Cool Crutch to her Instagram account, which has 33 million followers. It led to the company having its record month for both website visitors and sales outside of peak discount periods like Black Friday. Cool Crutches is targeting sales of £1.5 million this year and has just two employees — Peckham and a colleague helping customers — drawing on a wider team of up to 30 contractors depending on demand.
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Peckham started the business in 2006 with her mother, Clare Braddell, after suffering from severe hand blisters as a result of her NHS crutches, which led to delays in her physiotherapy treatment. A quad bike accident the previous year had left her with serious spinal injuries. “I smashed a vertebrae in the middle of my back. The doctor said it looked like someone had taken a hammer to a meringue,” she said.
Peckham eventually returned to her studies at Edinburgh University and when she graduated started working in public relations in London, while running Cool Crutches as a side project.
But the long hours and constant travel was too much of a physical strain, said Peckham, who today uses just one crutch and doesn’t take any prescription painkillers. She said strength training exercises have been the key to her recovery, which has surprised doctors.
She has also had two children, despite advice from doctors that “carrying [a baby], giving birth, and looking after a baby was not going to be easy, not going to be fun and would all be high risk”.
Three years ago she decided to focus on Cool Crutches full time, and has since grown it to a seven-figure business with no external investment. Her celebrity customers include Eamonn Holmes, Amanda Holden and Prue Leith.
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But there are still challenges of running a successful business when living with a disability, as Peckham recently told researchers for The Lilac Review, which reported its initial findings this week.
“I really have to watch how much travelling I do so I will do two London trips a month, max,” said Peckham, who lives in Gloucestershire. “It sounds stupid but I get the worst adrenaline panic from travelling because it never really goes to plan if you’ve got a disability. A train will be cancelled and replaced by a bus and the replacement bus is going to be an hour and a half. If it all gets delayed to a point it’s past five o’clock chances are I’ll have to stay overnight and start again the next day because of how tired and sore I get.”
The Lilac Review found that if the barriers faced by disabled entrepreneurs were removed, it could add £230 billion to the UK economy. Peckham says: “If you took the barriers away, who knows where the business would be now. Would we be turning over five million quid because we would have got an investor and I would be travelling to America?”
The report called for support services to be “radically simplified” with the needs of disabled entrepreneurs at the forefront. A seemingly small change to remove annual assessments of health and disability will make a huge difference to business owners both in terms of removing the unnecessary workload and the mental toll, said Peckham, adding that it’s an “emotional burden” to have to constantly relive the details of the accident and her subsequent injuries.
“You have to have a conversation with someone you’ve invariably never met and will never see again, explain your disability, they put it down and then they say someone needs to review this in 12 months and it’s a completely different person and you have to go through the whole thing again.
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“So to take that away would just be huge and it was there in the report, in black and white, saying we will no longer have to prove it. We will trust that once you’ve submitted your documents you will tell us if anything changes.”
Peckham said reading the report gave her “goosebumps — I don’t think there has ever been a time when disability has been on the agenda like this” — but says there is more work to be done.
“You can’t get everything straight off the bat. I’ve been involved in female founder [initiatives] too where everyone is much more like, ‘We’re owed a seat at the table. We should have been there in the first place.’ With the disabled community, we’ve had so little that we just want to be in the room.”
The Lilac Review, which will deliver its final findings and recommendations later this year, is led by Small Business Britain, a campaign group. It is jointly chaired by Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for small business, Mims Davies, the minister for disabled people, and Victoria Jenkins, the founder and chief executive of Unhidden, a fashion brand that caters to the needs of people with disabilities.
