In this episode of Show Us Your Bits, Alice and Josie are joined by the brilliant Ciara Crossan, founder of Wedding Dates, for a conversation full of adventure, instinct, motherhood, bold decisions and the magic of saying yes. From backpacking around the world with kilos of sand in her suitcase, to just saying 'yes' and flying across the world to LA for the Grammy Awards with a DJ friend after being offered a free ticket, to building a business as a single mum of identical twin boys, Ciara’s story is packed with colour, courage and those extraordinary little moments that change everything. Her bits are just as full of life. She brings sand collected from beaches across the world, a painting she bought after that unforgettable Grammy adventure as a reminder of the moment she stepped out of her comfort zone and said yes, and a beautiful diamond necklace with three stones: one for Ciara and two for her sons. Bought to mark a huge personal milestone, it has become a daily reminder of what she has built, what she has overcome, and the boys at the heart of it all. There are seagulls in Brighton, a psychic twin dream, a wedding dress marathon, Kilimanjaro, imposter syndrome, instinct, and the kind of stories that make you want to look again at the objects you carry through life.

A gorgeous, funny and inspiring episode about trusting your gut, backing yourself, and the bits that tell the biggest stories.

In this episode-

In this episode of Show Us Your Bits, Ciara Crossan shares the story behind the meaningful objects she has collected through travel, motherhood, business and personal growth.

Ciara is the founder of Wedding Dates, a wedding technology platform based in Cork, Ireland. She started the business in 2008 after growing up in a hotel family and spotting a gap in how couples searched for wedding venues and suppliers by date. Over the years, Wedding Dates has grown into a platform supporting hotels and wedding venues across Ireland and the UK, including its venue CRM system, WedPro.

The conversation explores Ciara’s journey as a female founder, tech entrepreneur and single mother to identical twin boys. She talks about the loneliness of building a business, the importance of women’s networks, finding confidence in rooms where she once felt she did not belong, and the power of trusting your gut.

Ciara’s personal objects, or “bits”, include sand collected from beaches around the world during two years of backpacking, a painting she bought after flying across the world to Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards with a DJ friend after being offered a free ticket, and a beautiful three-diamond Chupi necklace. The painting reminds her of a moment when she stepped out of her comfort zone and said yes to an unexpected adventure.

Her Chupi necklace has three diamonds: one larger diamond representing Ciara, and two smaller diamonds representing her twin sons. She bought it to mark completing her postgraduate masters in international selling in 2019 to 2020, after once swearing she would never return to education. She now wears it almost every day as a reminder of what she is building for herself and her boys.

This episode touches on entrepreneurship, motherhood, women in business, imposter syndrome, travel, friendship, intuition, meaningful jewellery, personal storytelling and the objects that hold our most important memories.

Listen for stories about Brighton seagulls, a psychic dream about twins, running a marathon in a wedding dress, appearing on Dragon’s Den, launching the Irish Wedding Venue Awards, climbing Kilimanjaro with women from the EY Winning Women network, and learning to say yes to life’s unexpected opportunities.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Show Us Your Bits, hosts Alice Rivers Cripps and Josie Lloyd are deep in the Brighton Festival - and in the spirit of May Madness, they have brought on one of Brighton's most distinctive characters to help make sense of it all. Their guest is Jed Novick, veteran journalist, former lecturer at Brighton University and the founder of a brand new Brighton arts and culture magazine called The Beat. Jed started his career as a sports feature writer on The Times after journalism college in 1986, before landing what he calls the best job of his life at The Independent in its earliest days - where he became quietly famous for writing invented TV listings, including entirely made-up soap opera storylines that attracted boxes of letters from readers suggesting plot ideas for characters who didn't exist. He later worked at The Guardian and set up several magazines before moving into lecturing, where he taught journalism at Brighton University until the course's shift away from print made him feel, as he puts it, like a stegosaurus. Taking voluntary redundancy, he has marked the start of his new chapter by launching The Beat - a 48-page print magazine curating the best of Brighton's arts, music, food, and culture scene, starting with a festival special featuring a double-page spread on the band Angine de Poitrine and coverage of The Great Escape music festival. The Beat is available via subscription through its Instagram page @thebrightonbeat_

As for his bits, Jed is one of the most jewellery-laden guests the show has ever had, wearing more rings than fingers - each one a story. A twisted spoon ring given by a friend for his sixtieth birthday; a ring from the National Jewish Museum in Amsterdam; a huge Moroccan silver ring spanning knuckle to knuckle; a black onyx ring bought in Kathmandu during four years of travelling that began when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; a tiger's eye ring made from two stones he quietly pocketed from his mother-in-law's broken necklace; a matching ring made by the jeweller landlady of his local pub The Eddy in West Hill for Gilly's 60th birthday and a ring he cast himself in a cuttlefish casting course at the Phoenix Art Centre in Brighton - a gift for his wife Gilly Smith (food writer and host of the Cooking The Books podcast and also a previous guest on the podcast). He also wears a leather necklace holding a single surviving batik cow-bone bead given to him by a Dean Moriarty-type figure he met in Tokyo, a keepsake from his Jack Kerouac-inspired years on the road. As for suits, Jed traces his love of tailoring straight back to punk - both, he says, are about refusing to be generic.

The episode also touches on his marriage to Gilly: the two eloped on April Fool's Day, told no one, then announced it at a party that evening. He grew up in Hackney, moved to Brighton in 1995 after the arrival of their first child, and once bought a house in the Sussex countryside purely because his wife sent him a photo of its pond.

Alice and Josie close the episode buzzing about The Beat and the Brighton Festival, with Josie heading off to a wedding at Dreamland in Margate followed by the Cannes Film Festival to promote The Bright Side Running Club.

Topics Covered

The Brighton Festival and Brighton May Madness

Artists' Open Houses in Brighton

Jed Novick's career: The Times, The Independent, The Guardian

The Beat magazine -- Brighton's new arts and culture print magazine

The Great Escape music festival and Angine de Poitrine

Inventing TV listings and soap opera storylines at The Independent

Lecturing at Brighton University

Jed's ring collection and the stories behind each one

The National Jewish Museum in Amsterdam

Travelling from Berlin to Kathmandu after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Jack Kerouac and the On the Road years

Batik bone necklace from Kenya via Tokyo

Punk fashion vs bespoke suits

Eloping on April Fool's Day

Josie heading to Cannes for The Bright Side Running Club

Season 10 of Show Us Your Bits

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Season 10 of Show Us Your Bits -- and what a milestone it is. In this opening episode, hosts Alice Rivers Cripps and Josie Lloyd reunite after the summer break to catch up on everything that happened while they were apart, before teasing an exciting new season of guests.

Alice shares the extraordinary story of a three-day charity walk across the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, organised to raise funds for Leo's Angels -- a charity set up by her friend Emma after the tragic death of her 11-year-old son Leo from an epileptic fit. Twenty-three female founders walked more than 60 kilometres together through the mountains, raising over £23,000. The walk was not without drama: the group survived a terrifying encounter with a massive swarm of angry bees that had been smoked out of their hive, forcing the women -- including one member with a severe bee allergy -- to silently wade through a river bed surrounded by thousands of bees for two kilometres. Alice came home buzzing with energy and renewed motivation for life and business.

Josie, meanwhile, had been travelling in Vietnam. The trip took in Ho Chi Minh City, the island of Phu Quoc, Ninh Binh's stunning inland waterways, the ghost-town tourist developments around Ha Long Bay, and the vibrant old quarter of Hanoi. Josie also did a Vietnamese cookery course, visited a Michelin-starred pho restaurant and came home via a stopover in the futuristic city of Shenzhen. Back in the UK, she celebrated her husband Emlyn's birthday with a full Beatles tourist experience in Liverpool.

On the business front, Alice has been appearing on QVC to sell her Posh Totty Designs jewellery collection and is growing increasingly comfortable in front of the cameras. Josie is heading to Cannes to promote her film The Bright Side Running Club.

The episode closes with both hosts looking ahead to a packed Season 10 guest line up, including several of the female founders from Alice's charity walk.

Topics Covered

- Leo's Angels charity and the story behind it

- The Sierra Nevada 60km charity walk for epilepsy research

- The bee swarm survival story

- Travel in Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City, Phu Quoc, Ninh Binh, Ha Long Bay, Hanoi

- Vietnamese food and the Michelin-starred pho restaurant

- Shenzhen airport and modern China

- Liverpool and the Beatles tourist trail

- Selling jewellery on QVC

- The Bright Side Running Club film at Cannes

- Preview of Season 10 guests

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.