'We met about 10 years ago on Grindr — it’s not the most Enid Blyton-style meeting'
'There has to be mutual respect in any romantic relationship — that’s true for business too.'
We met about 10 years ago on Grindr — it’s not the most Enid Blyton style meeting. We ended up in business together because of our shared love and interest in food, it happened very naturally. We started selling food at markets and sharing our recipes online, which resulted in Penguin reaching out to us and asking us if we want to do a cookbook — it all snowballed from there.
We’re a very good combination. We have mutual interests, but different outlooks and ways of doing things. What one lacks, the other has. We both have our own distinct roles in the business so we don’t really clash. That’s the secret to working together — you have to have defined roles and be clear on what each person does. And never bring a work row home. We haven’t mastered that yet, but we’re getting there.
The key to Currabinny is that we both have the same, shared dream and we see the potential in each other to help us achieve that dream.
The hardest thing about working together is making decisions when it’s just the two of us — sometimes it can feel like it’s James versus William. We’re both stubborn, and we both always think we’re right. But we get over things quickly. We can have a blazing row about work and 20 minutes later we’re deciding what movie to watch.
One tip we have for couples who work together is to make sure you keep solo pursuits. Not everything has to be a shared pursuit, nor should it be.
We don’t feel the need to prove ourselves — we trust each other's abilities.
We met in New Zealand at a house party in Auckland. Maeve was supposed to be moving to Melbourne for a while... she stayed in Auckland. The business came from our desire to be flexible and move back and forth freely between Ireland and New Zealand — the only way to do that really was to work for ourselves.
In the early days, Maeve was still working full-time as an engineer while Aran, the creative force in the partnership, was developing the map designs. When Maeve went on maternity leave with our third child we decided it was too hard to juggle everything and it just made sense for her to come onboard.
It wasn’t a big decision to go into business together, we had done some crazy and creative projects together before — like renovating a really old house — and we knew we worked pretty well together. We both have different talents. Aran is in charge of the design, sourcing materials, the making process, while Maeve handles the business side of things, the marketing, the website. When it comes to decision-making, we trust each other to make the right decision in our own areas.
The hardest thing about working together is that the stress from one area of life can bleed in to the other.. with Covid, the kids were at home a lot and we had a lot of family stress and that had a knock-on effect on us falling behind in the business.
One of the best things about working with and for each other is, in other jobs, you can feel you have to prove yourself to clients, colleagues, bosses, but working with each other, there is a mutual level of trust in each others' abilities. And it’s also great to work with someone you get on so well with — that isn’t always the case in an office setting.
There has to be mutual respect in any romantic relationship — that’s true for business too.
The line we tell our children is that we met in UCC in 1990... we just don’t tell them it was in a nightclub after a few drinks. We had absolutely no reservations about going into business together. We worked in the same lab for our postgrads so we knew each other's working styles. We both had mutual respect for the other person's abilities, work ethic and work experience.
We play off each other's strengths in the business, and can call out each other's weaknesses too. Paula is more detail-orientated while Mark is more concerned with the big-picture — if Paula’s perfectionism is starting to get in the way of getting the job done, Mark can pull her back.
As a nutritionist and food scientist, we’re similar in our passions — and that’s been the building blocks of the business. Even before we worked together we were always talking about nutrition and science, and we’d regularly talk about something we might have read in a newspaper or a scientific paper. It sounds cliché, but we genuinely love what we do. If we were in a situation where one of us was less passionate about the work, it probably wouldn’t work long-term.
We had a conversation early on and decided that if we have a disagreement in work it stays in work. And if we have a disagreement in our personal life it stays in our personal life. We’ve been very good at keeping that resolution.
There has to be mutual respect in any romantic relationship, and that’s true for business too. We don’t agree on everything, but when we disagree, we have respect for each other's views and decisions.
The hardest thing about working together has been taking holidays. There is just the two of us in the company, so there’s nobody to pick up the pieces if we go away. With both of us self-employed, we also don’t have the insurance of a set pay cheque at the end of every month. One of the best things is there is no office politics!
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