​When it comes to entrepreneurial spirit, two East Riding sisters are doing it for themselves. From Beverley Market to international export drives, Beci Tyrrell and Sarah Cook are taking the business world by storm. Ian Midgely reports . . .

Beci has been joined by sister Sarah Cooke (left), who now has her own website, Rainbow Princess

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. Sometimes you have to take a chance. Because if you never take that step into the unknown you’ll never know if it could be the best move you’ll ever make.

Beci Tyrrell’s moment of truth came when her husband Ian arrived home after a particularly trying day at the office.

For the preceding two years the couple had been tentatively building a small business called Pink Princess, selling anything and everything – to paraphrase Henry Ford, “as long as it came in pink” – to a rapidly expanding clientele on the Internet.

Ian would spend every spare hour fine-tuning the company’s website while Beci was the front woman, wheeling, dealing, sourcing stock at trade fairs, bagging deals and selling products on to the public.

Most weekends would find Beci and her sister Sarah making the world a little more fabulous, selling their range of glammed-up, girlie, pink wares around the East Riding’s open-air markets.

The sisters had already established a workplace double act, answering the phone at their father’s Hull car dealership, and this continued when Pink Princess was born – with qualified mechanic Sarah driving the van and Beci bringing the goods.

But Beci’s early trading career didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts when she arrived for her first day on Beverley’s Saturday Market wearing glamorous, three-inch pink stiletto heels.

“I can remember the other traders looking at me and thinking ‘we’ve got a right one here, she won’t last’,” she grins, holding her head in her hands. “I think by about 2pm I’d gone and bought a nice pair of comfy pink boots.”

Things may have been ticking along nicely – but to take the business to the next level, a big and life-changing decision needed to be made. Did Beci and Ian believe in themselves enough to risk everything and pursue their dream of being their own bosses?

“It was pretty easy in the end,” smiles Beci, sitting in the lounge of her bungalow in a picturesque village outside Market Weighton and sipping at an appropriately pink cup of tea.

Everywhere you turn there are flashes of her fascination with pink – from the pink washing up bowl in the kitchen to the shocking pink utensils standing beside the cooker.

“Ian came home one night after having a particularly rubbish day at work and we thought ‘why don’t we just go for it?’

Pink products for the home have proved big business for Beci and husband Ian, who have developed export markets around the world

“We’d spoken about him packing his job in and concentrating on developing the website side of Pink Princess full-time – but I don’t think we ever really thought it would happen. It’s a bit of a comfort blanket knowing you’ve got that regular wage coming in.

“But then, that day, we just thought why not? Sometimes you have to take a risk to get to where you want to be.

“So he left his job and, quite frankly, it was the best decision we ever made.

“Within three months we’d moved from storing stock in rented stables around the corner to a proper business premises with a warehouse, in Market Weighton, and the business had really taken off.”

In the past three years, Pink Princess has grown into an international operation, with an impressive turnover, exporting everything from pink microwaves to pink plates, pink pillows, pink crockery and even pink cooking pots from its East Yorkshire base to far-flung destinations such as Australia, Canada, Japan and the USA.

The increasingly high-profile business has been featured on TV shows such as 60 Minute Makeover and The Generation Game, supplied props for pop videos and high-profile model shoots and provided products for major corporate promotions.

Beci’s entrepreneurial spirit has also been recognised by major business organisations – clinching the 29-year-old a trio of awards, including a Woman Of Achievement Award in 2007, an Entrepreneurial Accomplishment Award in 2008 and a Barclays Extraordinary Entrepreneur Award in 2009.

All this, Beci says, isn’t bad for someone “who left school without a GCSE or qualification to my name”. Indeed, the Hessle Road girl has certainly come a long way since her first job flipping burgers in a Hull McDonald’s.

“The awards have been a real boost for me because it’s a real vindication from outside that what we’ve been doing is good.

“To be honest, when my mum nominated me for the first one I didn’t think I had a hope of winning it. I thought I’d be up against loads of really clever people with these great business ideas and there I’d be, just some daft lass from Hull who’d never been to university or got any real qualifications.

More Pink products

“When I won I was just ecstatic. It was a seal of approval from people who know what they’re talking about.

“And it did help. It made me think, ‘yeah, maybe I do deserve to be here’. And hopefully, if my story helps to inspire anybody else to take a chance and follow an idea then great.”

Not content with little sister Beci cornering the pink market, big sister Sarah Cook has launched her own company, Rainbow Princess – opening up the pink concept to a whole new spectrum of possibilities.

“The idea came about because I’d have customers who’d say: ‘I really like this product – but have you got it in green’?” says Beci. “That was the Eureka moment. It made us realise that there was a whole other market out there beyond what we were doing with Pink Princess.

“Sarah has been heavily involved with Pink Princess from the start – so she knew a lot about the business and it made sense for her to start her own website.

“We’ve been on a really steep learning curve since Ian and I started our business and we’ve learned a lot from our mistakes as we’ve progressed. Hopefully, we’ll be able to use that experience to make sure Sarah doesn’t have to make the same mistakes.”

But if starting their own businesses and investing the time and energy needed to make them a success wasn’t daunting enough – both Beci and Sarah also have the added responsibilities of being full-time mums, Beci to four-year-old Jack and Sarah to daughters Hermione, two, and Violet, five months.

And managing the work/life balance between being businesswoman, mum and wife can often be like walking a tightrope, say the sisters.

Working for yourself is hugely rewarding, says Sarah, who was back at work two days after giving birth to Violet last year, but it also takes a massive amount of preparation, military-style planning and sheer hard graft.

“You do have these romantic ideas of running your own business,” says Sarah. “But the fact is, if you want it to be a success it’s a lot of hard work. You have to split yourself three ways – because you want to do a good job for your kids, run a good business and be a good wife too.

“I’m up at 5am answering e-mails, then it’s getting the kids ready, taking Hermione to nursery, home to do some more admin on the site, to the warehouse to do the packing, then more e-mails before picking Hermione up and being mum again.”

As for the future, the sisters say the overriding plan is to keep growing both Pink and Rainbow Princesses and build them into even more successful brands.

Although Beci secretly harbours dreams of being the sixth millionaire dragon on Dragons’ Den, Sarah is happier to take a less high-profile role – selling her multi-coloured range of gifts and goodies on the web.

“I won’t be happy until the Queen has got a pink microwave,” laughs Beci. “No, I really don’t know how far we can take it in the future.

“If you’d have told me five years ago that we would be where we are today, I would never have believed you. It just goes to show the future’s what you make it.”

To visit Beci and Sarah’s company websites go to www.pink-princess.co.uk and www.rainbowprincess.co.uk.