What happens when the business you built is caught in a financial crisis — and you have to begin again? In this episode of Talking Tech with Creatives, I speak with Toks Aroture, founder of The Baby Cot Shop, a luxury nursery and children’s interiors brand whose journey has taken her from Atlanta to London’s King’s Road, Harrods and international clients. Toks shares how she survived the 2008 financial crisis, returned to the UK having lost almost everything, and rebuilt from the ground up — teaching herself web design and SEO, finding European craftspeople and eventually developing her own furniture collections. We also talk about luxury, expertise in business, mentorship, resilience, entrepreneurship and her belief that there are many forms of currency beyond money. And we get into technology: Toks explains how she is now using AI and digital tools across the business, from nursery design and marketing to HR, project management and productivity. A conversation about losing, rebuilding, luxury and using technology to imagine what comes next. Subscribe to Talking Tech with Creatives wherever you listen to podcasts, and visit talkingtechwithcreatives.com. Reach to Toks on social media @toksaroture W: thebabycotshop.com Showroom: 408 King’s Road, Chelsea, London SW10 0LJ Harrods, 4th Floor, Knightsbridge, London Stella Oni — Author | Speaker | Lecturer | Podcast Host 🌐 Website: StellaOni.com 🎤 Speaking: Speaking engagements 💼 LinkedIn: [Stella Oni on LinkedIn] 📸 Instagram: [@stellaoni_official] 🎵 TikTok: [@stellaoni_official] X: [@soni_official2] TRANSCRIPTION Stella Oni in Conversation with Toks Aroture, Founder of The Baby Cot Shop STELLA ONI: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech with Creatives, the podcast where we talk about the intersection of technology and creativity. I always like to have different guests on the podcast, and you’ve seen quite a few from all kinds of backgrounds. I’m quite excited about my guest today. I’ve got Toks Aroture of The Baby Cot Shop. She’s a founder working in an area that fascinates me and that I really want to delve into: the luxury nursery space. The Baby Cot Shop creates bespoke nurseries for high-end clients. I deliberately didn’t want to know too much beforehand because I wanted to come to this fresh. I got the barest minimum, so we’re going to discover Toks and what she does together. The Baby Cot Shop serves high-end customers from a beautiful part of London, has a presence in Harrods, and has also worked on the Lindo Wing at St Mary’s Hospital. For those who follow the Royal Family, the Lindo Wing is where several members of the Royal Family have had their babies. So we’re in for a treat. This is a bit of a departure from some of my filmmakers and writers, because we’re looking at luxury spaces, which I love, particularly because I’ve got my own fiction series coming that is very much about luxury. Toks, welcome to Talking Tech with Creatives. First of all, tell us about yourself and your background, and then we’ll start delving deeper. TOKS AROTURE: Amazing. Thank you so much for having me, Stella. I am super excited. It has been such a long time coming. STELLA: It has been. TOKS: Our schedules just haven’t aligned, but here we are finally. I was born in Scotland, but I didn’t grow up there. I grew up in Nigeria, specifically Benin City. STELLA: Like me. TOKS: Yes. We share that in common. I had the most wonderful childhood in Benin. Compared with somewhere like Lagos, which is more cosmopolitan, Benin is quieter even though it’s a city. I had this peaceful, beautiful, warm childhood surrounded by a lot of love, familiar faces and trust. I think that formed the foundation for who I am today because I was raised by parents who were very confident in their children. Whether they actually felt confident or not, they certainly told us they did. My dad would brag about me. He would say, “My daughter is going to win Miss Nigeria.” Then my mum would say, “Not my daughter. She’s not going to parade in anything she shouldn’t be wearing.” They’d go back and forth. But more importantly, it was always, “You’re so intelligent. You can do anything.” When you hear that often enough, you eventually believe it. So I genuinely believed I could do anything. I grew up in Benin and then went to school in northern Nigeria, in Kaduna. STELLA: How did you end up going from Benin to Kaduna? TOKS: Boarding school. It was a military school. My dad was in the military, so I didn’t really have a choice. STELLA: Secondary school? TOKS: Yes, secondary school. That’s where the discipline came from, although sometimes I think the discipline stayed within the gates of the school and didn’t follow me outside. But I learned a lot of lessons there. I remember my mum coming to see me during the middle of my first term. Benin and Kaduna are very far apart, almost like London to Scotland. We stayed in a guest house for the weekend and she asked how school was going. I said, “Mum, it’s horrible. The seniors are wicked. This senior slapped me. The food is terrible.” I went on and on about the seniors. She asked what I wanted to do. I said, “I want to go to school in Benin or Lagos. I want to be closer to home.” She said, “The problem is, no matter what school you go to, you’re still going to face this problem. You’re going to face seniors. They’ll have different names and be in a different location, but the experience will be the same.” That lesson has served me throughout my business journey. Whenever I’ve been tempted to quit, I think: And then what? No matter what I do, I’m going to face challenges in business. I could sell second-hand clothes or spare tyres. The mindset required to run a business is the same. I naturally tend to pull lessons out of my experiences. Later my family moved to Lagos, and not long after that there was a kind of mass exodus of young Nigerians. The economy wasn’t doing so well and people were seeking better opportunities. A lot of Nigerians had been born in the diaspora but raised in Nigeria because their parents preferred that upbringing. Many of our parents weren’t immigrants in the sense of intending to settle permanently. Some had gone abroad to study and then returned. So at some point it became, “You’re British. You were born there. Just go back.” That’s how I came to England. But I took the whole “You’re so smart, you can be anything” thing a little too seriously. I came to do A-levels and really wanted to become a doctor. Everyone said, “You’d make a great doctor,” especially my dad. Then I came to England and didn’t study properly for my A-levels because I thought I was so smart I didn’t need to. I failed woefully. STELLA: And the systems are different. TOKS: They are different, but I was also trying to get away with cramming. STELLA: In Nigeria you can cram. TOKS: Exactly. And in boarding school, one advantage is that you’re almost in an incubator. You have no choice but to breathe the air that’s around you, and the air is study and success. You must come first. You mustn’t be last. You have to work. That environment helped me thrive academically. Then I came to England and it was completely different. Open-book tests. Calling lecturers by their first names. If you don’t show up to class, nobody chases you. I don’t think I handled that freedom particularly well. I thought, “I’m free as a bird.” I eventually went to university to study pharmacology. When I was a child, I used to read my father’s medical books. I’ve always had an interest in the human body and medicine, and I still do. The plan was to study pharmacology and then go into medicine afterwards. But in my second year I married my best friend. STELLA: Aw. TOKS: And I found myself spending more and more time doing up our apartment in London and less time at lectures. Eventually I had to admit to myself that I had dropped out. I said, “Madam, let’s be honest. You haven’t been to lectures in how long? You’re painting in the middle of the night. You’re spending your working days at B&Q and Homebase. You’ve dropped out.” And I was okay. Even though education is such a holy grail in Nigeria, I believed I would be all right. I got a job as a medical representative for a pharmaceutical company, which paid really well. Those jobs came with a company car, an expense account and all of that. Then the children started arriving. When I had my third son, I asked my employers for reduced hours. They said no. This was more than 20 years ago, and maternity and workplace entitlements were not what they are today. Around that time I happened to be reading a book in which the author said, “Your gift is that thing you do so effortlessly. Everyone thinks it’s a big deal except you.” And I thought, everybody loves my home. I don’t think putting it together is a big deal. It feels easy. STELLA: That’s why you dropped out of school! You were decorating and going to B&Q. That was your passion. TOKS: Exactly. When you’re gifted in something or really passionate about it, it often feels easy to you. When we were students and broke, I would go to B&Q and buy wallpaper from the bargain bucket. I’d lay it across the floor and cut it into strips to create borders. I wanted every room to be a different colour, but coloured paint was more expensive than white paint. So I bought white paint and coloured dyes and mixed my own colours until I got exactly what I wanted. STELLA: Really? I was doing that with my writing. That was what I was obsessed with. TOKS: Writing is a beautiful gift. So I decided to go to design school. I enrolled on interior design courses and then set up a small interior design business from home. I was about 27. STELLA: You were such a baby, and you already had
