WoW Woman in FemTech | Kim Palmer, Founder and CEO of Clementine

Interview by Anja Streicher

Femtech innovator and entrepreneur Kim Palmer is the CEO and founder of the hypnotherapy app Clementine, which aims to improve the emotional wellbeing of women all over the world. Born after Kim experienced a number of panic attacks whilst pregnant, Clementine has been created to make women feel calmer, more confident, and better equipped to cope with everyday life. 

The hypnotherapy sessions available on the Clementine app can be used to boost confidence or help you return to sleep by guiding you to relaxed state, similar to daydreaming, and suggests new ways to deal with everyday grievances; allowing you to kick back and continue your daily routine. Kim is listed as one of the top 100 women in Fem Tech & Health Tech and winner of the IPA Campaign Women of Tomorrow in 2018, which recognises female industry leaders of the future. While working at Wunderman Thompson as a strategy director, Kim also helped some of the world’s biggest brands with their global marketing campaigns and was able to develop her personal resilience and kick-start a women’s mentoring programme.  

We chatted with Kim about Clementine, the joys and challenges of starting and growing the business, fundraising, and much more. We hope you enjoy reading this interview.

Kim, tell us a bit more about yourself and your background. 

Well, I’m a Kiwi, mother of two small boys (6 & 2) and I think it’s fair to say that I’m quite a driven person. When I set my mind to something, that’s it, I will make sure that I do it. I’m a recovering perfectionist, people-pleaser, workaholic – when I work too much I can get very wound up and develop anxiety and my panic attacks will come on.  On the opposite extreme, I am incredibly lazy at home. My husband nags me all the time to do stuff around the house. I love to read, and this is part of my ‘checking out’ time. I love to exercise, and this is part of me keeping a clear head. From a career perspective, I’ve spent most of my career in consumer marketing roles – mostly in bigger organisations like Tesco & Lloyds Bank. I’ve always loved to work. It wasn’t until 2016 that I did a lot of deep thinking and realised that climbing the corporate ladder didn’t really make me happy and was a huge source of stress. It was back then I decided to start a business. The rest is history.

When and why did you start Clementine, what inspired you to do so and how would you describe the journey so far? 

It was back in 2016/17 that I hit on the idea of a hypnotherapy app to help women feel calmer and better equipped to cope with everyday life after suffering a series of panic attacks while juggling a high-profile job, pregnancy, and social pressures. I discovered the transformative effects of hypnotherapy after turning to it as a last resort when nothing else worked. I started to open up about my own anxieties and lack of confidence in the workplace and low and behold, had so many women tell me they shared the same feelings. I started then to have lightbulb moments and realised that the solutions in the market weren’t quite right for me and other women. I then decided to explore the area of sleep, anxiety, and stress and dreamt up Clementine.

I launched the app on the Appstore in 2017 and ran it as a side hustle up until mid-way through last year. That whole period was difficult. I had a very stressful job, had another baby and a business to try and grow, and well to be frank – realised I couldn’t’ do all of these. So I gave up my very secure job as the main breadwinner in our family to give Clementine a proper go full-time. The first big job was to fundraise because we had no more money to put into the business, having spent our entire life savings.

I would describe my journey so far as bloody hard work. But aside from my family, it’s the thing that brings me the most joy.

Could you tell our readers more about how Clementine works and how they can try it? 

Clementine provides world-leading virtual professional hypnotherapy sessions as well as a suite of wellness products to empower women to feel more confident, capable, and on top of their game. It’s like having your best friend in your pocket. When you are feeling a bit on edge, or anxious, or tired or mad you can find a session that will help pick you up.

What’s really cool about Clementine the app is that we designed it knowing that women have zero time to sit down and relax and carve out time in their days – I mean that just doesn’t happen. So our sessions vary in length and span an entire day so you could listen to a 3 min session whilst you brush your teeth – helping you to get really motivated for the day. Or you could take a power nap at lunchtime – like I did today after a very staying up with one of my sons all night. Or you could start a course to help you with anxiety that can be done at bed-time too.

Oh and we swear. If you like swearing we have sessions for this and mantras you can opt into that include swearing. It’s just a bit more grown-up.

 You can try it here for free.

What’s the difference between hypnotherapy and meditation?

Like mindful meditation, hypnotherapy lulls you into a state of relaxation and helps calm your mind and clear your head to help you get through your day in a positive, calm, and stress-free way. While both disciplines are similar there are big differences that might make one work better for you than the other.

The main difference between meditation and hypnotherapy is that meditation uses your conscious mind and by turning your awareness inwards. For some people, this practice can be really hard to access – especially when you have a busy brain or your mind is racing all over the place. Also to note that for those women who hold the strong perfectionist trait they can sometimes feel like they are failing with this practice – when they can stay on track. We try to avoid this.

Hypnotherapy uses the unconscious mind and is much more visual and creative. The great thing about it is that there’s no pressure, we lull you into a relaxed hypnotic state and you can let the words wash over you. Once you’re in the trance state (and this is completely natural we go in and out of trance/autopilot all the time e.g brushing your teeth) and we then help to interrupt negative thought patterns relating them with positive ones. Putting you back in control of your own behaviour. You can work on a whole range of things from reducing anxiety, feeling confident, and building better boundaries to feeling better about your body. It’s also absolutely brilliant for sleep and can help you drift off quickly.

Massive congratulations on raising £1m from Fortunis Capital to grow Clementine. We know that fundraising is a long and sometimes exhausting process. How would you describe your fundraising journey? 

First things first, I did not do this alone. I enlisted the support of an advisor whose one job was to help me secure funds for Clementine. He was like a saviour to me. I really had no clue about fundraising. It felt like a foreign world, with a foreign language and I felt like a complete outsider. I went into fundraising hoping to secure funds but with a plan b if I didn’t manage to do it. My advisor and I were very strategic about how we approached it. We spent 6 weeks developing the story, the business model, and understanding the opportunity. Then we mapped out a fundraising plan which involved looking at all the options like crowdfunding, angel investment, VC, etc. Then we hustled to get warm intro’s to people and basically had lots of chats with people. It was quite early on that I have introduced our investors - the London-based impact investors Fortunis Capital led by their investment director Emma MacRae.

With Fortunis we ended up having a conversation rather than go through the traditional pitch process. Which suited me because I was having a lot of panic attacks during the fundraising process because of the stress and ‘what was at stake’ kind of mindset I had. Of course, they wanted a robust business plan, but it was not just about the potential returns for investors, but they were genuinely interested in the positive impact their funding could make on the lives of women. It was helped of course, that the Fortunis lead was the wonderful Emma. The Fortunis support will drive a major expansion programme offering additional services – including self-help journals, socially-distanced events with transformative results, a wellness cosmetic and body care collaboration with a leading cosmetologist, and an audio series hosted by leading broadcasters. 

And how would you describe your entrepreneurial journey so far, what were the biggest challenges and how did you overcome them? 

There have been so many. Money for a long time was the thing that was on my mind and how to grow a brand and monetise it with very little cash. I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs as far as working with people along the way. I’ve learned a lot about communication and how to listen more and be really upfront with people and not assume that we are on the same page. And this will sound strange, but I realised that my husband Simon played a bigger role in my decision making than I gave him credit for. I made some decisions early on that he told me flat out were not good decisions, but I discounted his opinion. I realise now that he sees my blind spots better than anyone – so he has become one of my trusted advisors.

I’m now learning that Clementine and Kim Palmer are not the same! I need to learn to make an impact on the business, but I am not the business. I’m still getting my head around this one.

You are growing your team, you recently went through rebranding as well, a lot of things are happening which must be exciting. How are you feeling about all of this, how did the pandemic affect your business or plans? 

During the lockdown, I made the decision that we needed to also go on a bit of a lockdown with the business which meant regrouping and redefining what the product looked like and not marketing the product at all. During the early days of the pandemic, I did question if this was the time to be stepping back and rebuilding when people clearly needed our help. But this was the right thing to do as we now know that Covid-19 has had a disproportionate effect on the mental wellness of women. 

Evidence shows that during this crisis, women suffer more from stress, anxiety, and lack of sleep than men. Research by KFF shows 57% of mothers of children under 18 say their mental health has worsened during Covid-19 compared to 37% of men. So by taking a step back we have been able to take a massive step forward and have a product that will really support women better with their wellbeing. Plus it’s a much more scalable solution now so we can continue to add more transformational support.

You left your corporate job to focus completely on Clementine, what would be one piece of advice you would give for anyone who is currently thinking of doing the same, leaving their comfort zone in order to start their own business? 

I did leave my job, but it was a long transition. I started thinking about this in early 2017 and didn’t leave my job until 2019 so I had time to wean myself and our family off my salary and we readjusted our lives in all respects so that when the time came to quit my job – it wasn’t going to be a huge burden. I saved enough money for 9 months to survive with zero income. My advice would be to plan it properly. Make sure you have enough money to live and support yourself and anyone else you need to. I put a timeline on my investment journey because I had to, and this helped me to be ruthless and focussed. Some say don’t have a plan b and go all guns blazing. For me, that wouldn’t’ have worked as I had a family to support. I needed a plan B.

Who are your three inspirational women in tech and why? 

I tend to find inspiration from the women who are still earlyish on in their business venture journeys. I connect with them and am in awe of them because I know how hard it is to keep pushing.

Adele Aitchison and Sarah Vick from Grandnanny - https://grandnanny.co.uk/

Shiti Rastogi Manghani – Co-Founder & CEO, Breathe Happy - https://www.letsbreathehappy.com/  

Find out more about Clementine and try the app for free here.

And don’t forget to follow them on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter!

This interview was conducted by Anja Streicher, Chief Marketing Officer of Women of Wearables. She is passionate about women's health and supporting women in business.