Trade like a tradwife | The Spectator

I love to complain about my phone. It has ruined everything, from friendships to childhood to my memory. But if I stop the bitching and think clearly for a moment, I must admit that my phone is a far more liberating bit of kit than the washing machine or the contraceptive pill.

Largely that’s because my phone allows me to work from anywhere. For many women, particularly those with children, this is a dramatic and radical change. Claire Roscoe’s story is a good example. Both she and her husband lost their City jobs in the wake of the pandemic. Pregnant with her second child, Claire needed to find work again promptly.

Just over a year ago, Claire set up Tuesday’s Child, a company selling embroidered children’s jumpers via the e-commerce platform Etsy. The jumpers are knitted in Britain and Claire then embroiders them herself. She oversees every part of the company from home. ‘I pretty much run my business through my phone,’ she says. ‘I’ll respond to messages from customers at midnight, because I can.’ When I message Claire late one evening, she replies immediately.

Last year, sellers on Etsy (which is known for its handmade or vintage items) traded $11.6 billion in goods. In Britain, 95 per cent of Etsy companies are run from home, 77 per cent of its sellers are women and 25 per cent live in rural areas. Half the sellers have financial dependents and a third have children under the age of 18.

Etsy is just one platform but there are plenty of others such as Shopify, eBay and Vinted. They combine technology, scale and global reach to create a vast marketplace ecosystem, a cottage industry industrial complex. Claire now sells thousands of jumpers, mainly to other British women. ‘I’m almost earning what I did in my old job, which is something I never thought I’d be able to do in a year,’ she says.

Cottage industries were once derided. In the 18th and 19th centuries, home working was common in what were known as ‘trading households’. Employers, employees and apprentices often lived together, running small-scale businesses. The industrial revolution then moved workers out into factories. Women’s liberation in the 20th century brought more opportunity to escape from the constraints of home life. What could be more appealing to the modern career woman than the opportunity to earn money like a man, with the freedom that affords?

But the reality is that having it all isn’t easy – or, for that matter, cheap – as even the most ruthless careerist has probably had to discover. Childcare costs in the UK are among the highest in the world. Many women at some point make a choice: career or family. The ‘motherhood gap’ describes the difference in employment rates between women with children and those without.

What appears to be happening, though, is the rise of a new approach to work. Women are eschewing traditional office jobs (or going part-time) and instead investing time and money in their own businesses, run from the home, because technology allows them to do so. Skills and hobbies are leveraged into something more lucrative. Collaborations between individuals take place from different locations, eliminating much of the need for office-based roles.

In the past five years, the number of female entrepreneurs operating British e-commerce businesses has risen by 28 per cent and is growing faster here than anywhere else in Europe. Forty-six per cent of e-commerce businesses are led by women aged 26-40, effectively the childbearing years. One woman I’ve met refers to it as ‘doing a Matisse’, given that she can, in theory, run her art business from bed.

Look at Instagram – effectively the shop-front for many small-scale businesses – and you’ll notice all sorts of products sold, largely by women to other women. The range is staggering: beauty, homeware, health and fitness, kitchen gadgets, cleaning gizmos, party supplies, pet food, children’s clothes. You name it, a ‘homefluencer’, ‘cleanfluencer’ or ‘mumfluencer’ is probably trying to convince you to buy it or ‘restock your pantry with it’. It is reminiscent of a retro Tupperware party.

Most retro of all is the ‘tradwife’, who promotes a bucolic existence to her followers. The tradwife is in many ways a deeply cynical creation. There’s nothing traditional about filming family life constantly and cultivating it for an internet audience. But the audience makes it all worthwhile. Companies hope to sell their products to these followers; the tradwife often seems all too willing to comply.

But who can blame shrewd women for romanticising domesticity and ruthlessly cashing in on it, particularly when there is so much money to be made? As Hannah Ryan, a senior campaign director at The Goat Agency, which specialises in influencer marketing, explains, ‘sponsored content’ can be a lucrative revenue stream: ‘Influencers are paid based on their output and the amount of engagement. A typical parenting influencer might be paid between £2,000 and £5,000 per post. Brands spend big budgets on influencers but in comparison to other forms of marketing, a brand gets much better value [from an influencer] than spending, say, £1 million on a TV advert, where they don’t get such targeted messaging to an audience. If an influencer can work with enough brands, it often allows them to quit their previous job.’

Which is exactly what Laura Mountford has done. She runs the account @lauracleanaholic. Three years ago, she was a senior manager at Marks & Spencer, having worked her way up from a teenage job as a checkout girl. Today she mainly posts videos of herself cleaning her house. Brands want her to recommend their products to her almost 800,000 followers, and while she won’t say precisely how much she is paid per post, she does suggest some influencers can charge five or even six figures. What brands are really paying for is trust, she says: ‘I always think, “Would I recommend this to my mum?” If I wouldn’t, then why would I recommend it on my page?’

Two well-known millennial women who have pivoted to presenting themselves as domestic goddesses are Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and Carrie Johnson, wife of Boris Johnson. Meghan plans to sell jam, cutlery, linens and cookbooks via her company American Riviera Orchard. Carrie’s post-No. 10 Instagram page features beach holidays, babies, ducks and cakes, as well as the occasional photo of her husband. With 94,000 followers, Mrs Johnson may well be considering whether she, too, could start to capitalise on her influence.

If anything, the younger generations are even more shrewd. Last year, the BBC ran a report on why Gen Z are ‘so salary obsessed’, largely due to the economic turbulence that has been the backdrop to much of their lives. With the average salary for a 30-year-old woman in London at around £33,600, which doesn’t exactly go far, particularly once rent, a mortgage or even a family are factored in, it’s hardly surprising that so many hear the siren call of a side hustle.

This tech-savvy generation, who have never known life without smartphones, may well be the best placed to use their phones to liberate themselves from the chronic low salaries and stagnation of many traditional jobs. Why not sell lip gloss or saucepans on the side via TikTok or YouTube, when influencer fees make average salaries look like pocket money?

Even before entering the workplace, teens and younger children are accustomed to selling stuff directly to each other, from bedroom to bedroom, combining a curious mixture of entrepreneurial spirit, youthful narcissism and rampant materialism. It helps to seem relentlessly positive and hopeful – and of course to encourage anyone watching to ‘like and subscribe’. Gen Z also seem shrewd with their money: budgeting – that quaint housewife habit – has been rebranded as ‘loud budgeting’. On TikTok, ‘finfluencers’ encourage followers to be honest about their financial situation and to be unconcerned with taboos about discussing salaries.

The biggest winners of this rampant new commercial spirit are, of course, the big tech companies. They have encouraged us to see every detail of our lives as something worth selling, while they take the profits. I spoke to one mother who tells me that while she recognises why so many women at her children’s school are incentivised to sell products to their audiences, she is ‘less happy’ about another mother whose side hustle is a sexually explicit OnlyFans account. ‘It seems a step too far,’ she says. The fathers may feel differently.

Despite the pitfalls, smartphones create a form of freedom previous generations could never have envisaged. ‘There’s no point to all this technology if its effects aren’t visible from the air,’ says Rory Sutherland, The Spectator’s Wiki Man columnist. ‘The railways, the canals, the car were all important, and you can see their effects from the air in terms of where people live and how people operate. The whole purpose of the digital project is to make your location irrelevant, to make your location less of a determinant of your activities.’ Gone are the days when the only way to access technology was from the office. ‘Many people now have better tech at home than they have at work,’ Rory adds.

What this means is that we are all glued to our phones, wherever we are. One columnist in the Daily Telegraph recently argued that there is nothing worse than seeing a mother on her smartphone around her children. I’m inclined to agree, but I also know that I wouldn’t be able to juggle my work and the needs of my two children without being somewhat umbilically linked to my phone. For better or for worse, phones have allowed us to sell our souls online. As a result, home is where the grift is.