Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.
Dragons’ Den star Sara Davies has today warned consumers that diet pill scammers are using her name to sell their products.
The businesswoman, who recently revealed she was stepping back from the Den, said she had been having a “nightmare” with some brands using her name to sell their products.
Davies, who joined the show in 2019 aged 35, has recently dropped two dress sizes by cutting sugar, chocolate and alcohol. She has also upped her exercise after being warned she was in danger of developing diabetes.
“I’ve had a nightmare with that recently,” said the entrepreneur and crafting queen.
“Those b***** diet pill (scammers) that keep using my face on Facebook and Instagram adverts, of people saying, ‘Sara invested in us in the den and this is how she’s lost all the weight’ – that is awful.
“What frightens me is the amount of people who’ve got in touch because they’ve bought them, thinking that is actually how I lost weight. It’s just scammers. It’s like ‘whack-a-mole’. As soon as you knock one down, another one pops up.
“One of my friends told me her mam had seen this and thought, ‘Oh well, if Sara’s invested in it, it must be right’. She had paid the £99 or whatever and was thinking she was getting sent some pills from China.
“It terrifies me that people are losing a lot of money and that these pills might come in the post. They might take them. God knows what they’re taking. But I know what it’s like to feel so desperate to want to lose weight.”
Perhaps that’s the price of fame for the business entrepreneur, who is stepping back from Dragons’ Den to focus on her recently resumed role as CEO of Crafter’s Companion, after rescuing the company earlier this year when it was put into administration.
“It’s been really difficult. For the last 12 to 18 months, the investors who had the majority share of the business had a different direction. It was really difficult for me to sit and watch that from the sidelines.”
Calling in the administrators was just a business decision for the investors, she says.
“But for me, it’s not just a business. It’s my life, it’s hundreds of staff who have given their life, their careers for me over the last decade or two. It’s more than just a business to me. I really passionately believed in what we were doing. They were just lacking in direction, leadership, and a strategy aligned with where we had a right to win in the market.”
She says she is working many hours a week to turn around the business.
“Happily it’s at a time in my life when I’m able to do that. I’ve got no filming commitments at the moment so I was able to run at this hard. As soon as we get a few months into the year I’ll have more filming commitments.
“Crafter’s Companion is just one part of my life. Now, it’s a very big part of my life but over the course of the year it needs to balance in with all of the other commitments I have.”
Today, as well as her business ventures, Davies, 40, who became the youngest ever female investor on BBC One’s Dragons’ Den in 2019, has a thriving TV career.
She recently hosted BBC One’s The Big Idea Works, made in her beloved North East, bringing together people with great concepts and the makers who can turn them into reality, and will be hosting a new ITV quiz show Time Is Money later in the year.
She has also found time to squeeze in a new book, The Six-Minute Entrepreneur.
It takes you through 52 chapters offering ideas, tools and strategies to infuse passion, vision and drive, through her own life lessons and stories, along with key messages and tasks. It’s a dip-in book, hence the six minutes she says it takes to learn each valuable lesson, and suggests people absorb bite-size chunks rather than ploughing through all the life lessons in one hit.
There’s a chapter on self-care, which is something she takes more notice of than she once did.
Having had gestational diabetes during her two pregnancies, and being told she was on the verge of being pre-diabetic, she cut out sugar completely for a few months around 18 months ago, she recalls.
“Once I’d lost a bit of the weight, then I was in a better position to do more exercise. And actually I’ve lost no weight in the last 12 months. I’m a couple of pounds heavier now than I was 12 months ago, yet my body is completely transformed because I’ve been doing all this running and training, so my muscle weighs a lot more but I’ve dropped a couple of dress sizes.
“I wasn’t bothered about what the scale said,” she adds, saying the driver for her was how close she had become to being pre-diabetic.
She says she is now not completely off sugar but tries to find a balance. “And there’s not a b***** diet pill in sight,” she sighs.
She’s forever striving to balance work with family life and her own self-care.
“I think we’re all guilty of not putting the self-care first. So as soon as you’re busy it’s the first thing that goes. But I also know how much better I am when I do look after myself physically, emotionally and mentally.
“For example, I like to run because it gives me mental head space. If I get up and run in the morning, I’m less likely to eat the chocolate bar because I feel like I’m in a good place.”
Sometimes, Davies, who lives with her family in Teesside, says she gets the self-care she needs by doing mentoring sessions or other fulfilling tasks which “fill my cup up”.
“People often think of self-care as taking a day off to go to a spa, but that’s not what I need. Others say, you get home from work and you want to put your feet up for an hour, but that doesn’t recharge my battery.”
She and her husband Simon and two children Oliver, 11 and Charlie, eight, escape to their house in Spain to switch off.
“It’s my happy place. We sometimes just go for the weekend, or try to get away in the school holidays with the kids for a week. It’s the only place I’ll take my Kindle and read some trashy romance novel – and do loads of Lego with the kids.”
She also talks about imposter syndrome in the book and how at one point she felt like an imposter in her own company.
“I spent a lot of my 20s trying to be who I felt I needed to be in whatever room I sat in, whether it was the top dog at Crafter’s Companion, sitting on the board of directors for the Craft And Hobby Association or in the den as a dragon, instead of being myself I would over-analyse the situation and think, ‘Oh my God, I’m so lucky to be here’.
“In the last five or six years, through my late 30s, I’ve changed my mindset and now I work on the basis that I know what I can bring to any situation. I’ll make that valuable contribution and if they don’t think it’s valuable they just won’t ask me back.”
She has no desire to do more reality TV after appearing on Strictly in 2021 and to this day remains good friends with her dance partner Aljaž Škorjanec and his wife, Janette Manrara. She also loved crossing the Arctic Circle for Comic Relief last year.
“I get asked to do a lot of other TV but if it doesn’t fulfil a purpose in my life, there’s no real need for me to want to do it.”
The Six-Minute Entrepreneur by Sara Davies is published by Torva on March 13, priced £20.