Alison Clarke wanted to find out whether anyone in Boyle was interested in essential oils, so she did what any banker would do and tested the market. She bulk bought a load of stock and took a stand at the King House Christmas market. If it sold, there might be something in it. If it did not, she would know.

The market ran for two days. She had sold out within two hours of the first one.

Alison had not long come home at that point. She had spent the best part of a decade in wealth management and investment banking in Dublin, and walked out of it with no job lined up and a reason most of the people around her knew nothing about. In this episode she tells Florence how she got from a bank in Dublin to a market stall in King House, and what she built afterwards.

Summers in Boyle

Alison grew up in Bray, but her granddad was born in Boyle and she spent her childhood summers here. When she was a teenager the family took what she calls the big leap and moved to the town for good. She went to school in Boyle, sat her Leaving Cert, and went up to Dublin for college.

College was during the boom years. Like a lot of people then, she built up a bit of credit card debt, and when she finished she went looking for the career that would pay the most. In 2008 that was financial services.

The benchmark of what your career looks like

She went into wealth management and investment banking in the year of the crash. There were redundancies all around her, and she says that changed how she saw work for years afterwards.

“You just think that being at this high stress level is just the norm.”

She liked a lot of it. Wealth management put her in front of people who had built businesses and made money from them, and she found them interesting. That exposure to how entrepreneurs think stayed with her. But the pace did not let up.

Like going from the same to the same

When Alison and her husband decided to start a family, it did not happen. She was diagnosed with PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, which she describes as a hormonal imbalance that for many women is lifestyle induced. She started fertility treatment, and over a couple of years it did not work.

She began to look at her own life. She read about stress and the fight or flight response, about gut health, nutrition and the toxins in everyday products, and came to the view that her lifestyle was working against her. Moving to another corporate job, she felt, would have been the same thing again. Around 2015 or 2016 she walked out.

She points out that she was far from the only one. Every day, she says, women leave their jobs because of health problems, hormonal problems and fertility problems, and most of them go through it without telling anyone.

We always knew we were going to come home

Alison and her husband had always intended to come back. They were driving home most weekends anyway. Dublin had been good fun, but she wanted to be out of the traffic, closer to family and somewhere she could get out into nature. Around 2017 they made the move.

The question was what she would do here. In 2016 there was no such thing as working from home, and the jobs that existed locally were not in her line. She had, though, found something that was working for her.

Quite hippie dippy

Alison had started using doTERRA essential oils for sleep, stress and her cycle. In her own account, her cycle went from about 80 days to 30 over two months, and she credits the oils with that. Florence describes doTERRA on the episode as a multi level marketing company, based in Pleasant Grove, Utah, founded in 2008. It sells through people who use the products and build businesses around them.

Alison admits she was dismissive at first. Her only idea of aromatherapy was her granny burning an oil to make the house smell nice. But the oils were working for her, she started doing courses, and the business side gave her what she calls her permission slip to change direction. She says she would have happily worked in a smoothie bar if it felt right. This felt right.

Within two hours of the first day

The King House stand was the test. She diffused wild orange or peppermint, and in December, with coughs and colds going round, people followed their noses over. Alison says one drop of peppermint oil is the equivalent of 28 cups of peppermint tea, and that people who tried it were soon asking whether she had something for sleep, or energy, or anything else that was bothering them.

“The Christmas market goes on for two days, and within two hours of the first day, I sold out all the products.”

People left their names and numbers in case she ran a workshop. So she ran one.

An oil painting class

The first workshop was in the Boyle Family Resource Centre. For about a year she ran small local events, general introductions to essential oils, promoted by word of mouth and, she thinks, maybe a notice in the paper. Social media was not yet what it is now. Your customers were the people around you.

The classes were vague, and one booking proved it.

“She thought she was coming to an oil painting class.”

Alison took the lesson. You do not sell a product, she says, you talk to the problem the person in front of you is having. With essential oils there are so many uses that it was hard to pick one.

A lot of shame and a lot of stigma

The obvious one was her own. At the time Alison was keeping her fertility struggles to herself, because of the stigma around it and because she did not want anyone’s pity. But after classes, people would come up to her privately. Teenage hormone problems, menopause, fertility. The same conversations kept coming up.

So she wrote a blog about her PCOS and put it out there. It was shared, and people started referring friends and sisters to her. Her classes began to centre on women’s health.

A Weight Watchers for lifestyle

That was how some people described the community she built. Alison took a diploma in women’s health coaching in London and developed programmes. There were monthly coffee and oils mornings and weekly masterclasses, each on a different theme, and at the time of recording a twelve week summer series was running.

The programme looks at stress, at what she calls emotional aromatherapy, at retraining thought patterns, and at what she calls low toxing. She talks about the part of the brain that has not changed since we were cave people, and how, in her view, constant low level stress pulls blood away from the gut and the reproductive system and raises cortisol at the expense of progesterone. She is also wary of synthetic fragrance, which she says can hide thousands of undisclosed chemicals, including phthalates.

The community became The Life Switch Co. Over six years it has grown to nineteen guides, covering oils for children, thyroid support, fitness and immune support, and it brings in outside experts, including a naturopath the week before this recording.

Is my lifestyle perfect? No.

What stops it all becoming overwhelming, she says, is doing it in layers. Alison works to an 80 20 rule. She admits she used to be a fragrance junkie, with a perfume for nights out and another for work, and when she learned about phthalates the whole bag went in the bin. She replaced it with essential oil blends in a diffuser, and it felt easy.

The oils are part of family life now too. Back to school means coughs, and the night before recording she was rubbing a protective blend on her three year old, who goes looking for it because she has told him it helps him run fast.

The only one outside of the States

Alison is a firm believer in the quality of doTERRA’s oils, and she explains why. Most of the essential oil industry, she says, is unregulated and sold through brokers, and she argues that what is in the bottle is often diluted or synthetic. She has visited doTERRA’s distillery in Bulgaria a couple of times and explains that lavender, for example, has to be distilled within an hour of harvest.

The oils then come to Ireland. According to Alison, doTERRA has put 10 million into a bottling, manufacturing and testing facility in Cork and Blarney, the only one outside the United States, creating 100 jobs. She was there for the opening. She also mentions that Rory McIlroy had been photographed using one of the company’s blends for a back injury at a PGA event the week before.

Women shouldn’t have to choose

The work Alison was doing with women led her somewhere else. She trained in neuroscience coaching and began working with corporate clients, and she combined that with women’s health. Mindset, she says, is an incomplete conversation unless you bring hormones into it.

She found herself working with women in high pressure jobs who were trying to get pregnant, and they kept telling her the same thing: this should be available through employers. She cites research from early 2023 suggesting that around a quarter of people who disclose fertility treatment at work feel they are treated differently afterwards.

“Women shouldn’t have to be put in that position to have to choose.”

That became Fembition, a platform that supports women through fertility challenges with workshops and an app, so they can progress in their careers and their health at the same time. She is clear that she walked away from a job she thought would set her up for life, and that nobody should have to.

A wild ride

Alison applied to Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers programme and spent nine months in the accelerator, finishing in June 2023 with a product ready to test. Fembition ran a pilot with a fertility clinic in the UK. She was featured in the Irish Examiner and invited to Leinster House. When Florence spoke to her, she was turning the material into a book due out that October.

She had also been named a 2023 National Women’s Enterprise Ambassador for Roscommon, and was due to speak on a panel at National Women’s Enterprise Day in Kilronan on 19 October, a gathering for women in business from Roscommon, Leitrim and the north west. Her pitch for it was simple. Women in business spend enough time isolated.

At the time of recording she was 29 weeks pregnant.

Seek out your people

Florence asked what she would say to anyone in the position she was in, knowing they need to make a change but without the nerve yet. Alison remembered a phrase she heard when she was struggling with her own decision: your greatest struggle is your greatest gift.

Her advice is to find the people who can support you and lean on them.

“Don’t go through it alone.”

 

The health views shared in this episode are Alison’s own, drawn from her personal experience.