By Sam Naughton
Before founding Cocoon, my career was in PR and communications, and for several years I worked in senior leadership roles including Head of Brand Communications at Yorkshire Tea. I loved the creativity and pace of corporate life, and I genuinely believed that was the industry I would remain in long term.
Like many women balancing leadership roles alongside family life, I had worked hard to build stability and progression, and I thought I had a fairly clear picture of what the future looked like professionally and personally. However, losing my baby, Willow, at ten weeks pregnant changed that perspective entirely and forced me to reassess not only my own priorities, but the way women experience healthcare during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
What stayed with me most strongly after the loss was not simply the grief itself, but the emotional disconnect within many healthcare experiences surrounding fertility, miscarriage and pregnancy after loss. Clinically, miscarriage may be common, but emotionally it can feel life-altering, particularly when families have already imagined a future with that child.
When I became pregnant again afterwards, the anxiety was overwhelming and often isolating. I found myself navigating environments built almost entirely around celebration and excitement while internally carrying fear that something terrible might happen again. It made me realise how many women quietly manage complex emotional experiences while continuing to function professionally, care for families and maintain everyday responsibilities without feeling fully supported or understood.
Those experiences eventually led me to leave corporate life and establish Cocoon in Harrogate. The business originally launched as a pregnancy and women’s wellbeing clinic, bringing together scans, fertility support, midwifery care, therapy and holistic wellbeing services in an environment designed to feel calmer, more compassionate and more human.
I wanted to create a business that recognised women not simply as patients moving through appointments, but as people carrying emotional, physical and practical pressures simultaneously. That philosophy quickly resonated with clients, particularly women who felt exhausted by healthcare experiences that often felt rushed, impersonal or difficult to navigate around work and family life.
One of the most rewarding parts of building Cocoon has been creating a predominantly female-led senior team spanning midwifery, therapy and patient care. Many of the women within the business bring not only significant professional expertise, but also personal understanding of fertility challenges, pregnancy, parenthood, menopause and wider health concerns. That combination creates a level of empathy and trust which clients often immediately recognise.
At the same time, the business has also benefited enormously from working alongside exceptional male colleagues and allies whose expertise and values align closely with the kind of healthcare experience we wanted to build. While Cocoon is proudly female-led across many areas of the business, our growth has been shaped by a wider collaborative leadership team focused on creating more accessible, compassionate and patient-centred healthcare.
Interestingly, although Cocoon was initially shaped through my experiences within women’s healthcare, the more people I spoke to, the more I found myself thinking about wider questions around prevention, accessibility and helping people take a more proactive approach to their health.
Part of that thinking was influenced by losing one of my closest friends to breast cancer in her early forties. Watching somebody vibrant and full of life become seriously ill reinforced the importance of helping people access information and support earlier, rather than only once concerns have become more serious.
Those experiences have helped shape my ambitions for the future of the business. Alongside our established pregnancy and women’s wellbeing services, we recently launched Cocoon At Home, a clinician-led blood testing service bringing clinical-grade venous blood testing directly into people’s homes across the UK.
For me, Cocoon At Home represents the first step towards a broader vision of making healthcare more accessible, convenient and proactive. While our core focus remains pregnancy and women’s wellbeing, I am increasingly passionate about the role earlier health insights and preventative approaches can play in helping people better understand and manage their health.
Building a healthcare business has taught me that lived experience can be an incredibly powerful starting point for entrepreneurship, particularly for female founders building services around gaps they have personally encountered. However, lived experience alone is not enough to sustain a business, especially within healthcare. Alongside purpose and empathy, there also has to be clinical credibility, governance, operational structure, financial sustainability and the ability to build trust at every stage of growth. Patients are placing their health in your hands, and that responsibility is something I take very seriously.
I also believe there is growing strength in female-led businesses which combine commercial ambition with emotional intelligence and genuine understanding of people’s lives. Women are increasingly building businesses around experiences and industries they feel passionate about improving. In many cases, those businesses are succeeding precisely because they are grounded in real-world understanding rather than abstract market opportunity alone.
Although losing Willow remains one of the hardest experiences of my life, it ultimately reshaped the direction of my career and led to the creation of a business that now supports people through some of life’s most significant health and wellbeing journeys. The vision for Cocoon has evolved far beyond the original idea I first imagined, but the underlying purpose has remained consistent: creating healthcare that feels more compassionate, more accessible and better aligned with the realities of modern life. For me, that is what meaningful entrepreneurship looks like, building something commercially strong while genuinely improving the experiences of the people it exists to serve.
Sam Naughton is the Founder and CEO of Cocoon Healthcare. Cocoon provides pregnancy and women’s wellbeing services from its Harrogate clinic and recently launched Cocoon At Home, a clinician-led blood testing service available across the UK. For more information, visit www.Cocoon-Hgt.com.