Sixteen months ago, TAKE.IN existed as little more than an idea shared between Kristy and me in a voice note. The infamous idea sandwiched between a chat about a trip to Bali and where our next favourite restaurant was.
Banks was five months old. I was finding my feet as a mum of two young boys and coming to terms with just how hard it can be to split your time, energy and capacity between motherhood, your relationship, running a household, work, finances and still somehow find space for yourself.
Kristy was a solo mum of two boys. One was starting high school, the other was an active, excitable eight-year-old with all the sport, school and after-school activities that come with it. She was working full time. We were both involved in another business on the side.
There was absolutely no logical reason to add build a technology company from scratch to the list. There was absolutely no logical reason to tackle innovation that had never been done before.
Apart from the pure fact that it felt like something that could make a difference to the millions of people experiencing stress, anxiety and overwhelm on a daily basis.
It started with the breath
For years, how I navigated the world had been deeply connected to yoga, meditation, mindfulness and breathwork. I had taught breath education to hundreds of women and experienced personally how profoundly the breath could change the way we feel, respond and move through the chaos of life in the western world.
Kristy had come to it from a very different place.
She had struggled with anxiety, panic attacks and tension. She knew the feeling of being overwhelmed and dysregulated, of having very little space between something happening and reacting to it. Of feeling like the smallest challenge with the kids could send everything over the edge.
A physio giving her a breathing assessment was her ah ha moment. Her realisation that breathing was causing the physical tension and impacting so much in how she navigated the world. As she began changing the way she breathed, she noticed so much in the way she regulated her emotion.
Those two experiences became the guiding star for TAKE.IN.
What if people could actually understand their breathing,
Rather than simply count their breaths? And what if the same thing being measured could also become the mechanism for change? That distinction became incredibly important to us and eventually shaped one of the core ideas behind TAKE.IN: the breath is both the signal and the solution.
Think about sleep tracking. You go to sleep, wake up and check your data. Your sleep was shit. Cool. As a mother with a five-month-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old at the time, I didn't need a wearable to tell me I hadn't slept well. More importantly, there were huge parts of that outcome I couldn't control. I could make changes around the edges, but I couldn't necessarily change the reality of having two small children who needed me throughout the night.
Breathing felt fundamentally different. Your breath isn't only a metric to observe after the fact; it's something you can actively work with in the moment. It also isn’t something you have to be at a class or in the gym to access. We saw the potential to create a closed loop:
- Understand how you're breathing
- Recognise what those patterns might be telling you,
- Learn how to shift them
- Train a different way of breathing and then see the change
The insight and the intervention could live in the same place.
That became the idea we kept coming back to. How you breathe influences how you feel, and how you feel influences how you show up in the world. If we could help people better understand their breath and then give them the tools to work with it, we could ultimatley make them feel better about themselves. What an absolute win if we got close to that.
We weren't just interested in creating another wearable that gave you more data about yourself. We wanted to create something that could help you do something with that information and deepened your connection with the signals your body was so confident in giving.
Could we actually build it?
Alongside our idea of creating an entirely new sensing technology to measure the body (this isn’t HRV or Heart Rate or Step counting although we both somewhat wish we’d taken an easier path) was also the desire to create something in a new form factor.
We didn’t want to create another watch or another piece of obvious technology. We wanted to create something women would genuinely want to wear, in a jewellery first position. We talked a lot about earrings, a staple to the female’s wardrobe.
One of my favourite life quotes is you can never connect the dots looking forward they only ever make sense looking back and Kristy's early career dabbling in Jewelery design is one of these moments. Kris brings the creative asthetic and the knowlege of what looks good.
That principle mattered from the beginning because TAKE.IN was always going to be female-founded, female-led and built around the realities of women's lives.
So much technology seems to begin with a product and then later asks: How do we sell this to women? We wanted to begin with women. Their bodies. Their lives. Their stress. Their aesthetic. Their needs. Their rituals and realities of living.
But…
There was one fairly significant problem. We didn't know if what we wanted to build was actually possible.
Could you sense breathing from a piece of jewellery? Could you sense it from the ear? The reality of that was NO…. hence a necklace.
Could something look beautiful enough to wear every day while still housing the technology needed to capture meaningful information about the breath? Our vision quickly met reality. Balancing form and function became an ongoing challenge finding the sweet spot between something that could technically work and something that still felt beautiful enough to wear as jewellery.
The proof-of-concept stage
There were sketches. Wild ideas. Designs that looked incredible but weren't technically possible. Designs that worked technically but weren't something we'd ever want to wear. We even had a design that resembled a nipple.
We quickly discovered the ongoing tension of hardware development:
What we wanted it to look like versus what physics required it to look like.
There was a lot of back and forth, and plenty of humbling moments along the way. Eventually, though, we got our first small tick: there was something here. It wasn’t proof that we could achieve everything we had imagined, far from it, but it was enough to give us the confidence to keep going.
We worked with intellectual-property specialists to understand whether what we were developing could potentially be protected and began the provisional patent process.
Then we moved toward formal research and development. This was no longer two women with an idea and a lot of voice notes. We were attempting to develop a genuinely new sensing system, with significant technical and scientific uncertainty around whether it could actually be done.
That was when we applied for and was successful in getting the new to research and development grant, something that required scientific uncertainty as the foundation for approval. Basically, they had to believe there was genuine chance what you were seeking to develop couldn’t be done.
Getting the grant was a huge win, but it came dressed up as one of the biggest and scariest moments of the journey. Suddenly, the words “deep uncertainty” wasn’t just sitting in an R&D application they were our reality. There was no guarantee this would work, and finding out meant taking a very real financial risk.
That was the moment we both had to call on our intuition, lean hard into the mission and trust that what we were building was worth backing. Keep calm and carry on. Sell houses and jump in, mad as hell? Yes. Sensible? Debatable. But two women on a mission with enough conviction to keep putting one foot in front of the other? Pretty fucking hard to stop.
Sixteen months later
And here we are. Our current saying is one step forward, two steps back, three sideways and one full 360-degree circle and that pretty much sums up the enormous fucking circle we’re on.
There have been tears, stress, excitement, fear, high fives, hard conversations and more personal growth than either of us probably signed up for. There are moments of absolute conviction, followed remarkably quickly by moments of looking at each other and asking, what the fuck are we doing? We’ve questioned ourselves more times than I could count, because the reality of building something from zero is rarely as glamorous as the finished product makes it look.
We don’t have a profitable business sitting underneath us funding the dream. We don’t have salaries coming in or a massive capital raise giving us years of runway. And we certainly haven’t had a crowd of people standing behind us telling us this is going to work. In fact, there have been plenty of moments when it has felt like very few people could see what we could see. So, for a lot of this journey, the conviction has had to come from us.
But there’s another side to it, and it’s probably the reason we’re still here. There has been so much laughter. So much learning. So many moments where we’ve looked at something sitting in front of us that, months earlier, existed only as a slightly crazy conversation between the two of us. Slowly, piece by piece, the imaginary has started becoming tangible.
And maybe the biggest lesson of the last 16 months has been this: when you care deeply enough about something to keep moving toward it, momentum starts to build around you. Not always in the direction you expected, and definitely not in a straight line. But you meet the next person, solve the next problem, survive the next setback and somehow find yourself one step closer to the thing you couldn’t stop thinking about in the first place.
And then one day, you look back and realise how far you've come.
