natwest entrepreneur

We Are Fetching was founded by Rachel Beech, to save parents time and stress by helping them to co-ordinate afterschool childcare through their trusted network of friends. The We Are Fetching platform gives complete visibility of who is authorised to take care of the user's child as well as providing updates to the school on who is going to be collecting that day.

during one particularly snowy day, Rachel received a surprise email from her child’s school, informing her that the school was closing at midday and that she would need to pick up her child before then. With work commitments in the way, Rachel had no other option but to reach out to a network of parents on WhatsApp and arrange for another parent to collect her child for her. Having already been struggling with re-organising her workday and working evenings to pick her child up at the end of school, Rachel found herself questioning the possibility of making sharing lifts a

permanent change. doing so would give her 2-3 days per week back without the stress of the afternoon school run, freeing up valuable hours in the day each week. After numerous coffees introducing the idea to some fellow parents and the school, the idea soon took off and Rachel had set up the basic idea of We Are Fetching.

As Rachel began to build her business idea further in her spare time, she found that she was beginning to struggle to manage both the business, her work and childcare at the same time. As Rachel approached the end of the year, she realised that this was a signifi cant turning point and the best opportunity to commit to her business full time.

So far, We Are Fetching has yet to be turned down by a school and has received really good feedback from its users. Rachel hopes to continue to implement further features to the app, such as adding in a drop off function which is integrated with the registration system at school. Further, she hopes that We Are Fetching can be used to eventually replace the outdated paper register system and provide live updates for when a child is absent / out of the school.

Rachel’s ultimate moon shot for her business is for it to become the most used childcare solution in the world. She hopes to break the competitive UK parenting culture, where parents would rather pay for a nanny than ask for help, and replace it with a collaborative one where people are comfortable keeping a track of debts between help.