Clémentine The Pioneers

Blissful beginnings

When I started Bliss Stories it was really in response to a personal need, and also a need of women around me – like one of my sisters who was pregnant at the time and who would ask me plenty of questions around pregnancy and labour. When I would answer her sincerely, honestly and spontaneously, she responded by saying “If you hadn’t spoken to me this way, who would?” And that made me realise that even in 2018, many women that had a huge amount of information to access on so many platforms still didn’t know what went on in a labour room and knew even less about what to do when they took their baby home. The idea was to respond to this urgent need and lack of information and this invisibility of a whole part of a woman’s life.

A world of stories

At the start, people thought I would run out of content and be covering the same ground or not have enough personal stories coming through. Having been a casting director for years and knowing how hard it is to find a good story and teller, I knew instinctively that there was a rich font of stories. Bliss Stories is about women and motherhood stories – the scope is infinite. We receive around 500 requests to share stories each month, there are just so many voices out there that want to be heard. This community is my fuel and it is so organic, always communicating and it brings me so much gratitude. The feedback on how sharing stories and receiving the information has helped is my motivation every day.

The power of community

When I started, I also launched an Instagram account to draw in women and mothers that used the platform. I already knew mothers on the platform were vocal. But at that time, they would only show the attractive side of pregnancy – with beautiful, filtered photos with a really soft and lovely outlook. What I really wanted was to take away those Insta filters, to take them away from that way of communicating dictated by the perfect aesthetic and to talk about real life. It was by infiltrating this community of extremely powerful Insta mums that I was able to go on and set up my own. Connections snowballed and we now have 180K followers and we are a family – we’ve formed bonds and are like an army of women who are working together to help relay information, and that’s so powerful.

The main aim of this project was also to create an appointment. My episodes come out every Monday. Having spoken to other entrepreneurs, it is quite difficult to create a place for people to gather, like a safe space where you know there is no judgement, where we’ll listen and give tips. But I think we’ve earned this unconditional trust of our audiences. So we now have to honour this trust every Monday and via all the other products we’ve discovered via Bliss. My community pulls me up because it has high standards and I owe it to them to be my best.