Mother+ Meets…Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic, founders of rayro
Welcome to Mother+ Meets… our interview series spotlighting women who are building brilliant things while also building a family. These are the stories behind the headlines, from bold pivots and business launches to the quieter realities of trying to make it all work.
This week, we meet Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic — founders of playful children’s bath and body brand rayro, startup advisory DE London, and the women many will also know as Two Tired Mums on Instagram and TikTok.
After founding, scaling and exiting skincare brand BYBI, the longtime business partners found themselves back in the world of product development, this time inspired by motherhood. Frustrated by an uninspiring children’s personal care aisle, they set out to create products that children actually want to use, designed to look like toys, while still meeting the standards parents expect.
Now balancing multiple businesses, content creation and family life, they are firmly in what they call their “portfolio career era”. We spoke to them about building something from scratch (again), redefining success, and why balance often looks far messier than Instagram suggests.
Tell us a little about what you do and what led you here. We're co-founders of rayro, a bath and body brand with produtcts designed to look like toys so kids actually want to use them. We're also founders of startup advisory DE London and run @twotiredmums on IG and TT, where we've been documenting the realities of motherhood and building businesses.
Prior to rayro we founded BYBI, a skincare brand that we scaled and exited from 2017-2024. We'd define ourselves as serial entrepreneurs who are very much in our portfolio career era!
What does a typical day look like for you, if there is such a thing? As cliched as it sounds, there really isn't one! We're both based in London (Dominika's West, Elsie East) and about 80% WFH. With no permanent office base our meetings are usually in Central and could be anything from clients, suppliers, journalists or investors through to attending creator events.
We've built our current businesses around our family commitments so a typical day almost always involves the school run, and the rest is split between the core elements of our current work: building rayro, working with our consulting clients and creating content.
You successfully built and exited BYBI before launching rayro. What made you want to move from adult skincare into the often overlooked world of children’s daily care routines? Honestly, becoming mums. We'd spent years at BYBI making skincare that people genuinely loved, and then we walked into the kids' aisle and found it completely underwhelming - products no one was excited about (parents or kids).
We knew the formulation world inside out and could see a gap for product delivery that opted to communicate with the kid rather than the parent, but using ingrendients parents could still trust. Being the target audience ourselves has massivelt helped shape what we're building but we've heavily leaned into our Two Tired Mums community to validate the idea and develop exactly what parents want and need.
How has motherhood shaped how you work or how you define success? At the risk of sounding predictable - success now looks like being balanced and positive ourselves, because ultimately if we're happy, it's more likely our children will be. And happy children are the true measure of any parent's success. Practically, it means a much shorter working day, but we're 1000x more productive in those fewer hours.
What do you wish people understood about building something from scratch? That the glamorous bits are about 2% of it. The other 98% is unsexy admin, hard conversations and feeling like you haven't done enough.
Where do you find your energy, and what drains it? Energy: talking to other mums, seeing kids actually engage with the products and most importantly working with each other. We've been in business together long enough to finish each other's sentences. Drains: decision fatigue, AI slop on LinkedIn full days at the laptop.
What is one decision that changed everything? Deciding to do it all again. After BYBI we both swore we'd never build another consumer brand - it's brutal, it's all-consuming, and we knew exactly what we were signing up for. But the idea wouldn't leave us alone, and saying yes to it anyway has shaped everything that's come since.
So much of parenting revolves around repetitive daily routines. How did you approach designing products that children genuinely want to use, rather than parents having to persuade them? We designed them to look like toys, basically. The balm sticks are characters - a koala for sleep, a panda for skin, a pig for sniffles - so kids reach for them instead of resisting. Sounds so basic it's almost unbelievable that it doesn't already exist.
What does balance mean to you right now? Not much, honestly. It means knowing what matters most that week and letting the rest be a bit messy. Some weeks the kids get the best of of us, some weeks the business does - we've stopped trying to make them equal every day and that has aliviated a lot of guilt.
And finally, what would you tell other women who are trying to do both: raise a family and build a business? You don't have to do it the way it's been done before. Build the business that fits your life, not the version that looks good on LinkedIn. And find your support - be it a co-founder, mentor, righthand-person or just a great partner. It's a lonely ride and having someone that just gets it will completely change your expereince.
Quick Fire Round
Current bedside book:Butter, Asako Yuzuki
Go-to podcast or playlist for a boost:Shameless
Favourite place to eat with kids — and without: Picnic in the park with kids so they can run around, literally anywhere without the kids as it's such a rare occasion!
A mantra or reminder you come back to: Right now we're big believers that nothing happens to you, it happens because of you. Opportunities don't just appear, you make them happen and you are in total control of that!