When Steph Douglas had her first baby in 2014, the flowers began to arrive, and they kept arriving until there were eight bouquets crowding a kitchen she was far too exhausted to stand up in. Everyone meant it kindly, and that was rather the problem, because what turned up at her door was one more living thing that needed tending at the precise moment she had nothing left in her to give it.
So instead of grumbling about it the way the rest of us would have, she went away and built a business out of the gap she had just fallen into.
The foundations were already there, in a blog called Sisterhood (and all that), where she had been writing with real honesty about motherhood and the parts of it that never make the highlight reel. That writing did something clever before she had anything to sell, because it told her that other women felt exactly as she did, and it gathered an audience who trusted her long before there was a product to put in front of them. By the time she surveyed her readers and found that 97% of new mothers are sent flowers despite flowers being the very last thing they actually wanted, she was no longer guessing at a market she hoped existed. She had already found it and named it.
Don't Buy Her Flowers sells care packages built around the radical little idea that a gift should give something to the person receiving it rather than ask something of them. You choose what goes inside, and it arrives as a box that looks after someone instead of adding to their list.
For its first two years the whole operation ran out of Steph's spare bedroom, the kind of proper kitchen-table beginning that has since grown into one of the most recognisable independent gifting brands in the country, without ever once losing the instinct it started with.
That instinct is the reason it sits so naturally on Women's Work. Here is a brand made by a woman who paid close attention to what other women needed at their most raw and unguarded, and then made precisely that, with not a trace of sentimentality about it.