Clara Mulligan: ‘The robots tend to sell themselves once somebody sees them in action’

One thing becomes very apparent when chatting to Clara Mulligan: she has always been a grafter. I’m grabbing a word with her before the school run. She’s just back from a business trip to China and recovering from a 24-hour vomiting bug which swept through her household over the weekend, yet she didn’t shy away from my call.

HomeBot Ireland is a range of home robots. It currently sells a range of robotic lawn mowers, vacuums and mops. Based in West Cork, the small Irish family business has spent the past year competing with market giants like Dyson and Husqvarna, but it’s holding its own, not to mention the family friendly names of the robots like Buddy, Spritz, Dottie and Chomper…who doesn’t want a lawn mower called Buddy? Word is that the range will expand with robotic window cleaners and solar panel cleaners in the future.

It’s far from robotics that Mulligan’s career began, starting her working life in the hospitality industry while at school and college, while she moved into an equestrian career. Where did the equine enthusiasm come from? “I always rode ponies when I was younger, for a neighbour, but never competitively, I just hacked around the roads and in the forest. When I left school, I did a year at Kildalton College and passed some British Horse Society (BHS) exams. When I finished college, I went to work in an equestrian centre in Clane, finished my BHS exams and got my assistant instructor qualification. In 2007, I went on to work for Marie Burke, an international show jumper in Clare,” she explains.

Hoping the grass was greener and keen to explore the idea of earning more than the dismal wage that the equestrian industry supplied at the time, Mulligan made the jump to door-to-door sales. “The equine industry was quite difficult, with very minimal pay and very long hours and I just wanted to see what else was available – so I swapped to an equally difficult industry…out of the frying pan, straight into the fire,” she says.

The sales job was for Airtricity, a relatively new concept for customers to switch to at the time, so it was a challenging sales job, and working on 100% commission meant that you had to be good at it to make anything. “I did two years there and said to myself, oh well, the horses weren’t so bad, I’ll open my own place. I opened Hazelbrook Equestrian Centre with someone who I originally worked for in 2006. I brought a lump sum of money, and she brought her expertise and some equipment,” she says. “It was really successful, it went from brand new to fully booked within about 18 months with lessons and pony camps all absolutely full to the brim.”

When the lease was up and it was not going to be renewed, Mulligan left the business and took to the road with a new clipping business. Clipping horses is similar to taking a dog to the groomers, only the horses generally get their new haircuts done in the comfort of their own stable. “I did private horses, but I also had big clients like Henry de Bromhead, Gordon Elliot and Cathail Daniels like that. At one point, I had six people working for me, clipping eight horses a day each, across the country for the whole winter,” she explains.

During this time, Mulligan had bought a set of horse clippers which hadn’t worked, and then the replacement she received was also no good. When she was chatting to the company about the issues, it became apparent that no one in the company actually knew about horse clipping. Soon, Mulligan was heading off to China to source decent clipping products for them and that experience gave her the supply chain knowledge she’s used again later in her own business.

Soon after, she had her two kids and a late-night rash purchase, unbeknownst to her at the time, would set her on the path to her robotics business. “I bought a well-known brand’s robotic vacuum cleaner, in a fit of madness at four o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t slept in about six weeks, I was just exhausted, and the ads kept popping up. It was €1000, but I thought, feck it, I deserve this. So I bought it in a fit of madness,” she explains. “It never worked properly, and by the time I got around to ringing customer service, it was 31 days after I bought it, and they had a 30-day policy. I did think if this was an Irish company I was dealing with, I would get to talk to a real person who would just help, and the policy wouldn’t be so stringent. That vacuum is collecting dust in the garage; it never worked.”

“Then Covid happened, so we moved to be near my father-in-law. We were watching him lug his lawnmower up and down the steps into his garden, and he was too independent to allow anybody to help. He even took it to cut his neighbour’s grass until he broke his ankle pushing up a homemade ramp into a van – six weeks later, he was back doing the same thing, so we thought we had to put a stop to this,” she says.

A search for a robotic lawn mover ensued. “The price for a robot lawnmower was astronomical, and there didn’t seem to be one available on the market that he could just pick up and put in different areas. The combination of all these things happened at the same time, and we just thought we could do that a bit better. We had all the contacts in the factories, and my husband is a Mercedes technician with all the training in AI, so he had the expertise, and I had all the supply chain knowledge,” she says.

HomeBot Ireland was born, and the past year has been a whirlwind of trade shows, product reviews and awards events. Mulligan was shortlisted for Young Business Woman of the Year at the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman Awards earlier this year. “It was amazing to attend the awards and be in a room filled with such incredible, successful women,” she says.

Forgetting she is one of those herself at times, I remind her and ask her what she brings from her eclectic career to her business today. “From each industry, you can bring something. The sales experience is obviously very helpful, especially as we do the likes of the Ploughing Championships and the Ideal Home Show. Having sales knowledge and a skill set is very useful there. But equally, my brother, who is a carpenter and my husband, who is a Mercedes specialist, helped at the Ploughing Championships for the first year, and they were on par with me with what they sold. The robots do actually tend to sell themselves once somebody sees them in action,” she says.

“From the equestrian side of things, you have to be so diligent – your attention to detail has to be second to none. With horses, something like a small cut can turn into something massive very quickly if it’s missed. Bringing that skill set in when creating your own brand is very useful, because you pay attention to all the smaller details that might not matter a lot on their own, but when they’re put together to make a bigger picture, it really does matter.”

“The equine industry is so busy, so you have to be unbelievable at managing your time. Take that into today, where we’ve a robot business, my husband has his own mechanics business, we’ve two young kids and a house build…you have to be able to swap hats really fast and jump from this interview into a school run into speaking to the builders, and then back onto robot business. You have to be able to keep swapping hats without letting it overwhelm you,” she says.

So, just how does she manage stress? What does she do to relax?

“My husband would be laughing at this question; he’d say I’m not able to relax! I think you just need to remember that everything is in phases. This is a busy phase, and it will be a quiet phase again. It goes up and down, kind of like kids’ sleep goes up and down. It’s variable, so don’t take it too seriously – don’t sweat the small stuff.”