Kate Reid was recovering from an eating disorder when she booked a plane ticket to Paris, walked into a bakery and asked its owner for an apprenticeship. 

“The chances were slim,” she recalls. “I don’t speak French, I didn’t have a French passport and I had no experience… God knows why, but he decided to say yes. And so a few months later I found myself back in Paris, working in the best boulangerie in the city.”

Kate is now the founder of Lune, an Australian croissanterie lauded as one of the finest in the world. But hers is not a story of a woman who was lucky. It’s a story of a woman who worked her way to the top of not one, but two industries. A woman who suffered personally while her professional star rose. 

Speaking on the award winning FW podcast, Too Much: The Switch, Kate shares that, often, the grittier, less glossy details of her story are skirted around. 

Image credit: Getty Images

“When I think about how the media have portrayed my career to date, it’s typically a dot point version of: you wanted to work in Formula One. You rode off to your favourite Formula One team. They offered you a job as an aerodynamicist, which was your dream job, at the age of 23,” she tells host Briana Blackett. 

Kate did, at that young age, join the legendary Williams Formula 1 racing team in the UK. 

“But there was an incredibly difficult university degree, volunteering at a Formula 3 team in Melbourne, where I was bullied by the mechanics, and I had to get through all of that to get to that point,” she says. 

Her pivot into pastry also didn’t come easy. Living away from home, working long hours, Kate developed anxiety, depression and, in an effort to regain control over her life, anorexia.  

“My performance at work had dropped significantly,” she says. “I fell asleep in a meeting and my boss got angry at me and told me off about it, but I’d worked five days straight at an event with a sum total of about eight hours sleep… I think that was a breaking point for me.”

“I do think that there is this misnomer out there that I’ve just been incredibly lucky with my success.”

Urged by her worried parents, Kate left this job and came back to Australia. Here is where the “dot-point” version of Kate’s achievements goes something like: she learned how to bake, happened upon a boulangerie in Paris, was offered an apprenticeship and returned home to launch the wildly successful Lune. 

“All of that looks like everything I’ve done in my life has just transpired at the exact moment that I wanted it,” says Kate who, on Too Much, fleshes out the not-so-glamorous details of moving back in with her mum and dad, working as a counterhand at a local café and slowly repairing her relationship with food. 

“I do think that there is this misnomer out there that I’ve just been incredibly lucky with my success in my life and my career,” she says. 

Kate didn’t stumble into becoming a world-class pastry chef. She found a photo of Pain au Chocolat in a library book, became mesmerised by it, and booked a plane ticket to Paris to visit the boulangerie where it was made.

“I wasn’t healthy,” she says. “I’m sure mum and dad learned later that night that I booked the trip and were like, what is she doing? She’s like 40 kilos. She can’t go off to Paris by herself. But when I decide I’m going to do something, nothing will stop me.” 

That, right there, is the reason Kate has achieved globally celebrated success. Not luck, but obsessive, unrelenting hard work. Her career pivot wasn’t effortless or elegant. It was landing at rock bottom and rebuilding. 

“My eating disorder forced me to make the switch… But now, having gone through that experience and survived it, I now know that if I am unhappy with some aspect of my life, if it’s something that I have the power to change, then I should just do it,” she says.

“If we don’t keep trying to evolve and reinvent ourselves, we’re never going to land on the thing that will bring us true happiness.”

Listen to Too Much: The Switch on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Like what you hear? Please rate, review, comment and share.