'What’s the worst that can happen? I’m going to learn something'. This is the current mantra of Anne-Marie Tomchak – the Irish broadcast journalist, digital innovator, and alumni of the BBC, Mashable and British Vogue. With not one but two start-ups launching this year, ShareJoy & DesignTracker, London-based Anne-Marie is adding entrepreneur in social enterprise and sustainability to her many accomplishments.

Words: Emily Armstrong

Photography: Helene Sandberg

It seems that ‘What’s the worst that can happen’ has always been Anne-Marie’s mantra when facing new challenges. As a daring and driven 27-year-old, six years into a broadcasting career at RTE radio in Ireland, she decided on a whim to move to London and try to break into TV broadcasting. What’s the worst that can happen? She stayed at a friend’s house and set up coffees with everyone and anyone that was related to media. She was focused and unflappable. Then the big moment of serendipity happened (don’t all the Irish believe in serendipity?). An introduction led to a job offer at the BBC newsroom - a fatalistic and formative experience - and where she also met her future husband, David Tomchak.

That was the moment Anne-Marie’s stellar career took off and it’s proved a rollicking ride through the biggest news, broadcast and digital companies in the UK. She also created ground-breaking work on artificial intelligence and data privacy that became and remains on the Irish national curriculum and says this is “genuinely the proudest moment of my career”. Now, with her feet firmly in start-up territory, it’s her time. And you get the feeling for Anne-Marie Tomchak, it’s also high time. 

There’s a dichotomy about Anne-Marie that makes her magnetic – she balances the obvious career success with genuine warmth and easy charm; she loves the culture of London but has never lost touch with her Irish farming and music roots; she is intelligent yet inclusive, professional but personal, romantic and pragmatic. And she is a woman on a mission. 

Earlier this year she launched the social enterprise, Share Joy, a non-profit platform sharing pre-loved fashion for young adult mental health charities as part of the ‘tech for wellbeing’ movement. 

DesignTracker, the sustainable business platform, launching this summer, will empower individuals and companies to embrace sustainable practices, and join the fight against climate change. 

 Anne-Marie is not only passionate about protecting our planet but also pragmatic. 

“We can send a man to the Moon, and we can go off to Mars, so Jesus, we can figure out how to solve reducing our carbon emissions,” she says with the kind of rousing tone that makes you want to get on board her mission immediately. “We've got the ingenuity. We just need to have the curiosity and the will to get out there and put our heads together and share ideas. It’s through conscious capitalism and intersectional environmentalism that we are going to see real change. And it’s about time.”

Long before that fateful move to London over a decade ago, Anne-Marie McNerney was born in Longford, Ireland as an identical twin with her sister, amongst a close extended family. A fairly idyllic country childhood unfolded where she and her sisters roamed the family farm, listened to Top of The Pops, went to lots of local live music – including to see their uncle who was a well-known country and western singer, played the violin and loved painting and drawing. From an early age, she had a genuine love of people and storytelling. A keen appreciation of the arts, particularly in music, art and languages ran prominently through Anne-Marie’s genes but she also had a love of science and engineering.

“My parents always encouraged us” she recalls. “They never pushed us into study but I always had this competitive mindset from a really early age I've no idea where that comes from, possibly the psychology of being an identical twin. You're complicated characters when you're a twin as you have someone who looks exactly like you and you're trying to assert your little place in the world even from a very young age. 

As a child, I was more interested in the arts and music. I always thought I would either go down the route of becoming a scientist or theoretical physics or maths or else become an artist. Those two things that sound very far apart. A bit of analysis mixed with a bit of creativity; I think that's really what I was trying to crave. So I found myself becoming a journalist.”

“Storytelling is such a part of Irish culture”, Anne-Marie tells us. “It's almost in our DNA”. But the move into a journalism career wasn’t a direct or easy route despite her dogged determination. 

“I loved the idea of reading the news and being a presenter, but I ended up studying communications, film and broadcasting,”, recalls Anne-Marie. “The final year of that degree, I made a radio documentary, a process of going out, interviewing people, and then stitching this narrative all together into a half-hour. I utterly loved that process and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to be a journalist’ So I did a master’s in journalism at DCU, (Dublin City University), and was itching to get the qualification so I could get out into the world and start working as a journalist. Luckily, the course that I did had a work placement as part of their summer internship, which was critical for me because I knew nobody in the industry. 

Having this paid internship, was incredibly important for me. All I needed was the chance to get my foot in the door and prove myself, and after the three-month contract ended, I just kept pitching ideas, was incredibly determined. 

I wish I could borrow even a drop of that determination when I started out to put into my business now because it was just so determined with blinkers. If I got rejected by one person, I would just go in with the same idea to another editor and someone would eventually take it. I think it was that drive that helped me get my career off the ground.”

On her early days in London and entering the most important stage of her career with the BBC, Anne-Marie recalls, “It was so serendipitous, I got talking to a woman who I'd done some work for. Her name's Emily Buchanan, she worked in the World Affairs Unit. She was very kind to me, we went for lunch and she said, ‘I know who I need to introduce you to.’ And she introduced me to the Scheduling Manager of BBC World News, who was an Irishman, and I think he was from Kerry. He said he thought I was stone mad leaving my great job in RTE in Dublin to come over to London, he had no guarantee of work for me. But he could see I was really determined, so he said, ‘Look, if any opportunity comes up, then we'll give you a chance.’”

The chance came up shortly afterwards, and so Anne-Marie started her chapter in the BBC newsroom, possibly the most important chapter of her career. “Again, it was self-determination,” she says of entering this new role. “with like blinkers on, not even really thinking of the reality or the gravity. I think sometimes you need a little bit of ‘ignorance is bliss', if you think about things too much you get scared and then are not able to take the leap. There were challenges in learning how to put together live, rolling television news when you've come from a national newsroom as opposed to an international one. This was a 24-hour newsroom, so it wasn't easy. 

It's a bit like when you start playing tennis and suddenly, you're playing with Djokovic. Got to up your game and you learn pretty hard and pretty quickly. I had great supporters along the way, and I think that can make a huge difference to you. You need to have people who are supporting you, someone who's advocating for you in these large environments. Otherwise, you're literally fighting the tide.”

The opportunity to present BBC Trending was another pivotal movement in Anne-Marie’s professional journey. “The reason I was approached to pilot BBC Trending by Global News in the BBC was because I was in the newsroom doing things way beyond my job description around social media, video newsgathering, asking the presenters to do little videos for us while they were out in the field, and then for us to publish those onto our Facebook page. This is way long before Facebook was being used as news distribution and a newsgathering tool. It was what's referred to now as User Generated Content, we were integrating that into the newsroom environment.

When you start doing something new the managers pick up on that, and BBC Trending was really like a start-up within a large corporation. We were this team of people who came from different parts of the BBC, we were put together, and it was like this innovation hub. We were part of the Video Innovation Lab, we were there to break loads of the rules - obviously to follow BBC Editorial Guidelines, but we didn't follow the status quo.

BBC Trending is still so relevant now. So, all of those skills I've been able to take with me, it was a very organic move into Mashable because Mashable was a social media blog, to begin with, and they wanted someone who wanted a strong editorial background, but also really understood the value of meme culture and internet storytelling.”

During her time with Mashable, Anne-Marie tells us: “Mashable was an incredible experience, and I was lucky to have been able to lead a team of journalists. I learned so much about running a business and integrating e-commerce into an editorial operation and the importance of having a team with clearly defined roles.

I was able to work at the forefront of technology while also producing several feature-length TV documentaries for RTE Science Week. I went to Silicon Valley to interview the great and good of the AI world and to learn about how automation and robotics would impact our work in the future, and I got to make a documentary in different parts of Europe about data privacy. It was added to the (Irish) curriculum in 2019 which I still see as the proudest moment of my career. Education is everything.”

After Mashable, Anne-Marie accepted a role at British Vogue as the Digital Director, a move that would take her knowledge and experience of digital transformation to positively disrupt one of the world’s oldest print publications. 

“I was researching British Vogue ahead of doing an interview and found out that it's been around since 1916. And for any Irish person, that year is really important, as 1916 is the year that the Irish Republic was founded” she recalls. “So I thought, ‘Oh my god. In terms of that culture and heritage that is there, it's actually as old as the country where I'm from.’ So, I felt this sense of responsibility about the legacy heritage, but then there was also this drive to do things differently under Edward Enninful's editorship. He was doing a lot around diversity in the pages of Vogue, and he comes with a really specific visual aesthetic as well, I think, in terms of what he brings to the magazine. Again, I felt that there was a lot of responsibility there, in how you translate that visually rich experience of the print issue. How do you translate that vision onto digital in a world where sometimes the digital is rough and ready? And sometimes the beauty of digital is just how agile it is, and how imperfect it is.”

Anne-Marie identified challenges in producing content in a digital space at a fast pace but where every aspect of the digital experience for consumers also needs to reflect the very high standards of British Vogue as a tangible print brand.  Understanding the culture and content creation inherent at Vogue from an insider’s point of view and translating this to appeal to the audience was very important to Anne-Marie. “I was an external person who'd never worked in fashion before, coming into an environment where it was all about being an insider, and I think that was a challenge to understand the way that the content is produced is from the insider's mentality or the insider lens,” she tells us. “That was one thing, it's about this idea of access and a certain Vogue community. But what had also really appealed to me, was the fact that there was a drive to welcome everyone in. It’s a bit of an oxymoron, I think, because it's like, "Right, how do you make it welcoming and for everyone, but also super-exclusive?"

“One of the things I was doing a lot of work around was their video strategy”, says Anne-Marie. “Conde Nast leadership are on a big drive to build out their video offering as a part of their intellectual property. That's where the future strategy of the company is. They want to make use of their IP, and so I was brought in as someone who had a lot of experience of working in video and was proud of what we did with the YouTube channel in terms of building it out, scaling it, making more of the franchises.”

After years leading digital transformation, Anne-Marie has now embraced the chance to lead transformation in the sustainable space with her two start-ups, ShareJoy and DesignTracker. 

With the launch of ShareJoy earlier in the year in her native Ireland, Anne-Marie wanted to leverage the positive aspects of both the tech and fashion industries to do good. The platform has grown considerably and been supported with may high profile women donating as part of the launch edit. There are plans to now extend into the UK.

But there is a painful personal story behind the purpose of ShareJoy. As Anne-Marie shares, “I got a phone call last year from a friend of mine, we were just having a catch-up, but she told me about a childhood pal of hers whose 23-year-old daughter, had died by suicide in the first few weeks of lockdown, she lost her battle to mental health.”

As a journalist, I thought, ‘Maybe I'll do an article on this.’ But I was working on ideas for a sustainability-related project around selling clothes online and then raising funds for charity. So I proposed this idea to Marie Sullivan whose daughter had died. It was an amazing call because her daughter, Arwen, loved fashion. There were so many alignments between me and her and felt that this would be something she would be fully behind. The women on ShareJoy, they're just amazing. Marie Sullivan, she's someone who I've known only since last November, but I feel so fortunate to have her in my life. She's an absolute gift, and I call her The Heart.”

ShareJoy launched in January with the aim to do something joyful at a time when we're all a bit miserable. It's a non-profit but it's turning around tens of thousands of pounds in clothes that are donated by people, with all the money then donated to the designated charities. “Our charities do a lot of work around suicide prevention, and we are asking them to use the funds we give them towards assisting people in the 16 to 24 age demographic,” says Anne-Marie. 

“The mental health charity sector has really suffered during the pandemic because they haven't been able to fundraise and go out there and do their events and things that they normally would do,” she says. “But the demand for their services is up, more people are ringing their hotline, so there’s a bit of an imbalance there with supply and demand”.

DesignTracker, set to launch this summer, is a tech company focused on setting the gold standard of sustainable business. “In the immediate term, we are launching our publishing platform and membership program which is free. The goal is to inspire, empower and inform people about sustainability and ESG - which can often feel very technical and overwhelming. Another objective is to grow a community in the thought leadership arena that has the power to influence policy at the government and corporate levels,” says Anne-Marie.

“The longer-term goal of DesignTracker is to create an ESG specific ratings agency -- starting with our annual index (The DesignTracker 100) and building it out from there. This annual index will be the makings of an ESG specific ratings agency with proprietary technology that will allow companies to see how they fare on the index and clients can then work with our consultancy on how to set and achieve goals that will improve the bottom line and value of your company.”

“I feel that the work I’m doing now is very much a business first and foremost fuelled by a genuine passion and desire for being a part of positive change,” she says. “It’s part of the zeitgeist which I am no stranger to having launched BBC Trending. But it is far from a passing trend. Remember, the legacy of BBC Trending is still innovative now and it was borne out of genuine passion and curiosity. I feel the same about Design Tracker. What has prompted it is curiosity and a desire to find answers to some really difficult questions.”

But with all the motivation to do good in this important space, Anne-Marie is also concerned with running a successful business and nurturing a positive working culture. “I realise, running any business you've got to grow. You've got to still have a turnover, I get that”, she says. “I've worked in those environments before. But it should not come at all costs, especially not at the cost of the wellbeing of the people you're working with.”

“I'm interested in looking at positive growth, that is nurturing and good for you, that leads to prosperity. As opposed to growth that is just growth for growth's sake” she tells us. “I think there's a difference between making money and actually having a profitable company. There's a difference between that and breed or exploitation. 

“The penny dropped for me during the pandemic, in putting together the idea for DesignTracker” she says. “I was reading a lot of business news and articles from people like Larry Fink from BlackRock, who was talking about one of the world's biggest wealth management companies. The idea that they are advising their clients to invest in companies that have strong ESG credentials, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because they're going to make a higher return, that's what interested me for DesignTracker initially.”

It was a light bulb moment for Anne-Marie. “You can actually be good to people and the planet, and that will actually make you more money. It just seems like such a no brainer and the idea that the whole financial community now, people like Larry Rock and the Chief Executive of Unilever are saying that purpose-led products sell better, that the values of the company really matter in terms of the talent, not just the talent acquisition but the talent retention. I think that's important to Millennials, and it's going to be even more important to Gen Z.”

“Gen Z are our climate activists,” she continues. “they're the ones fighting the fight and taking on big corporates, and they're not going to want to work, no matter how much money, for a company that doesn't align with their values. And I'm feeling that value system is something that's really, really important to me as well.”

“In the last 18 months, I've just been breaking all the rules that I've been running on digital for these new social enterprises. I'm not trying to create a sticky website or tons of content or get loads of unique visitors. I'm doing the antithesis almost of the commercial or capitalist digital media model. 

It feels liberating, because I think you can focus just on the product, and this is why I've bootstrapped DesignTracker. I haven't gone down the route of getting any venture capitalist funding or seed funding for it to begin with, because I need it to be what it needs to be to begin, and for it to grow organically. The audience acquisition strategy is around targeting Chief Sustainability Officers, people who are working at the director level in government who can shape policy. But then also people like myself who are editors in the sustainability space, or people who are working in events and want to know how to run them more sustainably, and then consumers.

That's the beauty of digital, it's like a living, breathing thing where you can listen in real-time, which you often don't get in other media. (With other formats) I can't tell if someone just skipped that one feature that we did on Angela Merkel, did anyone actually read it? But you can pick that up when you've got the digital version, you can see people sharing it and the visibility and the oversight you have with it is really empowering.

Having said that, I'm not going to be driven by big metrics. I think that that would be almost counterintuitive to what this is about, which is conscious capitalism, which is about purpose, which is about quality and engagement. If I've got 100 really engaged followers on the newsletter, to me that's actually more valuable than having 100,000 who don't actually click in and read it. It's just about thinking about it a bit differently.”

On moving from the corporate to the start-up world, Anne-Marie says, “The change of environment from being in the big corporations and leading teams to being a self-starting individual has been quite a transition, especially with the backdrop of the pandemic. I can’t figure out if it’s been harder or easier because of lockdown. But I do know that outreach has been a survival tool for me. On the one hand, you don’t have those serendipitous chance encounters with people who will open a door or an opportunity but on the other hand, you have people’s attention. We are more aware and in listening mode. I think leaning into your network and being tuned into what anchors you is really important when starting a company. You’d be surprised how many people are ready and willing to help and how things work in swings and roundabouts. On a personal note, entrepreneurship has reminded me how much I need social interactions in my daily life. Although I enjoy working independently, I thrive when I am part of a team collaborating with others.”

Perhaps the start-ups surrounding sustainability, community and mental health have in part been informed by Anne Marie’s voluntary leadership and mentoring roles in climate change and social enterprise. She’s on the European Leadership Council for the humanitarian aid organisation Mercy Corps, and she mentors female journalists on schemes with the Second Source (tackling harassment of female journalists in the workplace) and WABJ (We Are Black Journalists). 

On the importance of female role models in her personal and professional life, Anne-Marie says, “I have been so lucky to have had so many amazing women in my life. My sisters, mum and mother-in-law are always a constant source of support. And on the work front, women like Samantha Barry and Ciara Riordan have been long-standing anchors for me personally and professionally. More recently the women in ShareJoy have been what I can only describe as an absolute gift to have in my life. I don’t have words for the levels of respect and admiration I have for my ShareJoy co-founders Maeve McMahon and Marie Sullivan.”

The gift of mentoring is also something Anne-Marie places great value on. “There were so many people that left a big impression on me. An editor called Mukul Devichand was one of the best journalists I’ve ever worked with and he always challenged me and pushed me to think more critically. Among the best bosses I’ve ever had were Hilary McGouran (now deputy MD of RTE News) from my RTE days and Geoff Inns (now international MD of Ziff Davis) from my time with Mashable. Both of them guided me during very different stages of my career and I learned a huge amount from them about the value of compassionate and empathetic leadership. I have been really lucky to have amazing people in my life. Some of the greatest mentors I've had have been men, and I think that's a really important point to make. Men are welcome at the table as well.”

With so much of her career to date in large corporate organisations, Anne-Marie has had time to experience different work cultures and time to reflect on the type of culture she wants to cultivate in her own enterprises. “I want to lead with empathy and build a type of culture that I could be proud of, and I feel like I have that with ShareJoy. We're about almost six months in, and the kind of empathy and culture that we have within that team is just amazing. Of course, it's a non-profit so it's a different kind of entity, but I would like to bring that into how I run DesignTracker as well. I think it's really important.”

On the subject of self-doubt, Anne-Marie speaks candidly, “I’ve been really lucky to have had a strong sense of myself throughout my career and my confidence has grown over time and as I’ve accrued more experience. I did feel a confidence gap in the early stages of my career. I had lots of ability and a great work ethic, but my lack of self-belief held me back. What I lacked in experience I compensated with bravado - not sure how effective that was but it was a natural response to being young and inexperienced but very keen to learn. 

I had a turning point confidence-wise as I entered my 30s in the BBC. I remember reading a book called The Confidence Code by Katty Kay (a former BBC North America anchor) and it was helpful in understanding where this confidence gap comes from. It was a catalyst, and I made the decision to clearly articulate to the powers that be what my goals and objectives were rather than waiting for them to ‘discover me’ as a new talent. I put myself forward for things that I previously wouldn’t have dreamt of doing and it paid off.”

Anne-Marie reveals the best piece of advice she has ever received was “to own my own voice and not try to be anyone else. It really makes a difference to embrace your authentic self. And my current mantra is: What’s the worst that can happen? I’m going to learn something.”

With all the success in her exceptional career to date, I can’t help but wonder, has there been a bit of the luck of the Irish? It certainly feels like Anne-Marie Tomchak is always riding the tip of the next wave, innovating alongside the early adopters, seeing the next big thing before it’s ever a thing. With her new entrepreneurial chapter embracing the circular economy, how is it that she is always pivoting just before the main procession? Is it luck? 

“I actually don't think it's down to luck, and I think people make their own luck”, she says. “I think it's really down to curiosity, and that's what entrepreneurs are, they're curious people. They see something, they ask a question. Journalists are curious as well; they see a problem and they ask a question. Often the question they're asking is really obvious and then when the answer isn't so obvious coming back to them, they're thinking, ‘Well, why don't we just solve this problem?’" 

It feels like the problems we are solving through Anne-Marie’s newest ventures are in safe hands, and as she puts it, “I always say it's amazing what happens when Irish women put their, hearts, minds and wardrobes together. Now, you can take out the Irish and you can apply that to women all around the world. What's possible when we put our hearts and minds together? And then throw in your clothes, then the sky's the limit.”

Indeed, it is, and we can’t wait to see it all unfold. 

Photography: Helene Sandberg