‘I Can’t Imagine Doing It Without Her’: KIC’s Laura Henshaw On Going Into Business With Her Best Friend

Laura Henshaw and Steph Claire Smith don’t subscribe to conventional business wisdom. Not only have they successfully built health empire Keep It Cleaner (KIC) by mixing business with pleasure as best friends, but the former-models-turned-tech-entrepreneurs have a Google search to thank for their early success.

“It was six years ago,” Laura tells Sylvia Jeffreys in the final episode of Future Women and AIA Australia’s Next Generation Innovators podcast. “It started with an ebook called ‘Keep It Clean’. I had a blog at the time with all my healthy recipes, I loved doing that on the side of uni and Steph had quite a big following at that point. She was always asked what she was eating and she really liked my recipes on my blog. We’d spoken about doing something together, but didn’t know what it would be. We’d both gone through the modelling industry. Our idea of ‘healthy’ had been morphed because we grew up in healthy families and I loved sport and I loved eating food, but the modelling industry really changed my idea of that. I started focusing on food and calorie counting and exercising to make myself look a certain way because of the pressures from the overseas market. And I think when we came back to Australia we were both trying to get out of that mindset, because we hadn’t been in it our whole lives. It’s amazing, up until [the age of] 18 I never even knew what the word ‘diet’ was, but then I fell so deep down the hole of putting so much pressure on myself. We came together over that.