Davinia Taylor: The Modern Female Alchemist
On International Women’s Day, we need the story of a woman transforming ore into gold.
Her story might begin in a Haribo fuelled childhood, rave through chapters of acid house, soap opera scenes, celebrity marriage, celebrity divorce and the fall out of addiction and depression, but that’s not where the real story begins or ends.
Having conquered two addictions - first alcohol, then food - Davinia Taylor could be forgiven for signing off and putting her feet up. But that’s not how she rolls. For her, that’s only Acts One and Two. To understand Davinia, you have to understand who she is now, in her Act Three: a sensemaker, a creator of new reality, a connector.
Her company, WillPowders, is the phoenix that’s arisen from the burning away of the old. Not only did Davinia set fire to her old life then walk through the flames, she set fire to the conventional ‘wisdoms’ that contributed to making her ill - Big Food, Big Pharma and the messaging from Big Health. But, then, she’s more than happy to stick two fingers up at ‘how things are done’. She’s a CEO but she doesn’t sit around in a stuffy boardroom, she’ll call out anyone who creates false or old narratives about her, her company or products and she gives hard-fought wisdoms away, for free, to a growing community finding their WillPowders Way.
Transforming miseducation to sense making
No-one gets through addiction without hard introspection and introspection happens in private. But it’s perhaps this truth that means much of the press - both tabloid and, at times, broadsheets - have frozen Davinia in time. It’s easy, but lazy, to report on the external factors of Davinia’s younger life. As part of the ‘Primrose Hill’ set (it was Belsize Park but that didn’t have the right journalistic chime about it) there are gossip column inches and countless pap photos of a hedonistic lifestyle that live in perpetuity. Anyone can cobble together a patchwork quilt of the old times from that legacy.
But conquering addiction happens in private, behind closed doors. It’s where a wincingly honest relationship with yourself begins, even if your shadow side’s showing. From there, relationships with family and friends are reformed. It’s enormously small work. It happens in a tiny crucible where the press can’t lift the lid and stick their lens in for money spinning copy. No wonder the bones the press would love to pick are missing from their version of Davinia: a woman in control of herself doesn’t make a money shot headline.
This is classic for a woman’s story. Our struggles to sift the wheat from the chaff are experienced internally. It makes it harder to share our glorious stories. But, behind the blinds, invisible to outside observers, it’s there Davinia begins to make sense of it all: Big Food’s ability to have her hooked on inflammatory, gut wrecking sweet-spot foods and Big Pharma’s desire to have her on symptom masking, not curative, drugs. She rumbles the scandal that government health messaging is built on sand or sold to the highest bidder. With her mind and body out of control, like millions of other women, she’s caught in the mix where her addiction is their cash cow. Healed, she’s a danger to them.
Wise women don’t go to battle; they form a tribe and offer choice
In this battle, there’s no gladiatorial arena fight between the giants that the crowd can feast upon while waiting for order to be restored. Restoring order would only mean the ways that didn’t serve her health would live to fight another day. Davinia could hardly emerge from her kitchen dragging a slain mega industry behind her, could she? No. Or, at least, not yet.
But, Davinia had learned what all wise women learn - the art of the silent battle cry. Let your enemy think they’ve got you prone, vulnerable and confined to barracks. Let ‘em believe there’s no power to be found there. More fool them. Because, that’s where we keep our kitchen table. And, there’s nothing more withering to an enemy than ignoring them while you get on and build a new order.
Davinia created WillPowders to flip the bird at Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Health, not by tearing them down, but by simply changing expectations and offering another way - what her tribe call The WillPowders Way.
She doesn’t walk the line of the corporate boss. In Davinia’s journey, there’s no final, table thumping showdown. And there’s no suits, because they’re totally impractical to wear up mountains as she ensures the provenance of her collagen and kombucha. Davinia is passionate that her health and the health of others can only come if health and wellness are innate in the provenance of her products. This is why she develops products with ingredients from regenerative farming.
She champions women in her industry, alongside WillPowders. She champions brands whose values she shares. There is only one way to put Food and Pharma in its place and that’s to create a groundswell of companies that, as a collective, offer clean lifestyle choices to women and their families. There’s no schmaltz, because that's not Davinia, it’s just common sense. There’s a building of a community of loyal customers and followers who walk with her while they prod each other to victory. It’s the thing she’s most proud of.
Women can spend their whole lives separated from who they are
We’re told to be smaller, thinner, quieter, nicer, until, after much exhausting effort on our part to be something we’re not, there can be little left of who we are and who we could be. Davinia went back for the woman she was meant to be, reclaiming her from the furnace: tempered, honest and not for sale.
And then she came back for the rest of us.
Happy International Women’s Day!
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