Team
Sophie Rochester
Founder
Sophie Rochester is the founder of Yodomo. She is an advocate of the power and benefits of making, championing Yodomo’s mission to grow participation in crafts to support wellbeing and sustainability.
She founded Yodomo in 2017 and crowdfunded with Seedrs to launch the platform in 2018. With support from Cambridge Social Ventures, she helped Yodomo transition to a social venture in 2021.
Sophie is a mentor for the Creative Business Accelerator (Central Saint Martins, UAL) and a judge for 'New Designer of the Year' Award, New Designers 2022.
Sophie is a life-long learner and recently completed the Designing for Environmental Sustainability and Social Impact course (Acumen 2022) and the Cambridge Social Ventures programme (Cambridge Judge Business School 2021).
She is the author of Making a Living: How to Craft your Business (Hachette 2021).
Before setting up Yodomo, Sophie worked for over two decades in publishing working with Pan Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin Random House, Nesta, British Council and many more. She founded The Literary Platform, which continues at the University of Exeter and co-founded The Writing Platform, with Bath Spa University and Queensland University of Technology.
She is listed as a Top 10 British Council UK Creative Entrepreneur on the Guardian Professional hClub 100 list and in the FutureBook 40: The Bookseller's definitive list of innovators in the UK 2018.
Rachel Forster
Business Development and Service R&D
Rachel Forster specialises in Architectural, Interior and Furniture Design. She graduated from Kingston University with a Bachelor of Arts (BA), interior design followed by an MA, interior and spatial design from the Royal College of Art. Rachel set up her own practice, Forster Inc, over twenty-five years ago, to allow her the creative freedom to develop ideas directly with her clients and to provide sustainable solutions to interior design projects.
Having been disillusioned with the levels of waste within the interior design industry, Rachel founded SortedLondon looking to change customer behaviour around waste and over-consumption. Rachel joined the Yodomo team to develop its work in the circular economy specifically looking to reduce textile waste in the interior design industry, through redistribution of materials to Yodomo's maker community.
Rachel's experience of working in product design also feeds into Yodomo's ambitions to close the loop on textile waste, and she leads on our R&D into innovation around materials.
Eloise Wales
Producer and Community Research
At Yodomo, Eloise produces courses and events and manages our cohort of makers and welcomes new ones.
She is also a Director and Researcher at ALSO which runs a number of creative workshops and masterclasses, and where repair, reuse, renew are at its heart. She has worked with a variety of arts, media and publishing organisations including Guardian Masterclasses, The Literary Platform and Salon London, where she has delivered live content for Latitude Festival, and Festival No.6. She has also worked at Runnymede Direct Services Organisation supporting the team managing recycling, waste collection and street-care services across the borough.
Eloise loves to learn and is excited by the creative learning opportunities at Yodomo. She is currently a PhD researcher in the School of Society and Culture at the University of Plymouth.
Sandy Di Yu
Data and Research
Sandy Di Yu oversees content and SEO at Yodomo. She is a writer, artist, cultural critic and researcher based in London, UK. Sandy has written extensively on the varied developments across contemporary culture, with work published in The Independent, TechRadar, the Strategist, Media Diversity Institute, Wellcome Collection, ArtRabbit and more. She has worked on digital content strategy with many organisations in the UK and internationally, including ArtRabbit, the Canada-UK Foundation, the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE).
She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently a PhD researcher in Digital Media at the University of Sussex, focusing on how digital technologies can cultivate new cultural shifts that lead to positive societal change.