Widd marketing director Sarah Beaumont on the year that changed her life
A surprising turn of events made Sarah Beaumont re-evaluate her approach to professional life. She tells John Blow about the year that changed everything.
It was time for a reset. Most people’s lives changed in 2020, but for Sarah Beaumont things were extra unexpected. “That was the year that everything changed dramatically in every aspect of my world,” she says. Born in the old Manygates Hospital in Wakefield, she has lived in the city for almost all of her life except for a few years down the road in Liversedge.
Her maternal grandfather Dennis Jackson owned Five Rise Press in Oulton – now Vintage in Oulton antiques store – and she lived above the shop, getting her first work experience as her father Brian Butler also worked there.
Over the last two decades and more, she has risen through the ranks of numerous West Yorkshire companies – Bezier, Billington Cartmell, Kolorcraft, Capita, Branded3, HH Global, ADM Group – in management, marketing and director roles. A year ago, she became partnerships and marketing director at Widd, one of the UK’s oldest sign companies based in Leeds, marking a major transformation in her professional life.
But when COVID happened, she was working as senior account director at HH Global, which delivers campaigns for big brands.
"We were working stupid long-hour days trying to figure out how you manage all that messaging because it was changing every day,” says Sarah. “So as a print management company working with a retailer at that point, it was completely insane.”
She has always been passionate about her work, but wanted a change. In December 2020, things had to change. Sarah’s husband Carl had been feeling unwell for a while but they put it down to the stress of working through the pandemic. Then he went for a routine eye test.
“They did some scans, found he’d got small bleed on his eye, recommended he had a blood test, and then he got a call about a day later to say he was in renal failure. He’d got four per cent kidney function, could he please get himself to A&E now? So he was admitted. He literally got in a cab with his overnight bag and was admitted to Pinderfields with renal failure.”
Carl went on dialysis, was put on the kidney donor list and the family were encouraged to explore transplant matches.
Sarah, as it happened, was very close tissue match and, as the father of her children, says it was a “no brainer”. The transplant took place at St James’s Hospital in Leeds in July 2021. “We waved goodbye in the car park,” says Sarah.
“It was a real wake up call, I guess, because I think that the key thing for us in that moment was being on the operating table pretty much simultaneously with two kids at home and waking up, coming round, going okay, that went really well, that's great. Let's not do that again. A lot of things could have gone sideways, and it gave us a chance to think about what was important.”
After having time to take stock, she decided that she wanted to work somewhere smaller - it is incredibly hard, she says, to have an impact in big businesses - which was product-based and also structured in such a way that she could see the mark she made.
Widd, which was founded in 1888, has grown into a partner with retailers including Primark, Marks & Spencer, Astonish and Berry’s Jewellers, but with clients around the world, “ticked the box,” she says.
She started in September 2024 and last month marked the conclusion of year’s worth of work as the company announced the launch of its new brand identity and website.
And post-op, Sarah took a new approach to her job, revealing her real self to co-workers. "Me showing up as me allowed other people to do the same,” she says.
Part of this new attitude included Sarah sharing with colleagues what she liked to do in her free time, something she had previously shied away from doing. This included hobbies people might not necessarily expect from an experienced businesswoman: attending Regency-style balls in dresses she has made herself; working as a film extra in upcoming Alan Bennett movie The Choral; and getting stuck into kickboxing (she is an orange belt).
Being an extra gave her the chance to see one of her favourite actors, Ralph Fiennes, at work during the shoot in Saltaire. It also reminded her, after the pandemic and home working, that she missed human contact. “I remembered how much I liked spending time physically around people as well because you're in a room with hundreds of other extras, you've got a lot of time to kill, you've just got to randomly be able to go and strike up a conversation with people from all walks of life.”
Elsewhere, her dressmaking draws on skills she developed in her formative years as a keen textile student, and the most recent event where she wore her own creations was the Regency Ball at Harewood House on September 20.
These events are inspired by literature and popular with people who discuss fiction on social media as part of the ‘BookTok’ community.
“It literally is just people going, ‘You know what, I'm not ready to give up the story, I want to be in the story’,” says Sarah. “What I love about them is that rather than it been about escapism, I find that I feel more authentically me in that space than I do in other places. I think it’s something about just discarding what personas you're used to showing up in every day, and just being around different people and talking about something you're excited about. It's quite freeing.”
Back home in Wrenthorpe, there is now a better work-life balance so she can make the most of her time with Carl, 53, and their children Remy, who turns 14 on Friday, and Miesha, eight.
And as host of what he calls the “Rolls-Royce of kidneys”, Carl is also doing well. But how can he repay the gift of a vital organ? Sarah smiles. “He has just been dressed up and taken to a ball again last weekend.”