It was the new van that gave Paul Major the idea of changing his “& Sons” construction business to “& Daughters”. “My wife had seen an ‘& Daughters’ coach driving along a motorway when she was younger and it had stuck in her head,” said Major, from Sevenoaks, Kent. “Years later when my dad had passed away and our fourth and final daughter had been born, I bought our new van and my wife said changing the name would be great branding, and also the obvious thing to do.”
Ten years on and Major still gets a comment on the name at least once a week. “Often it’s a group of us blokes sitting around during a job, and someone will come up and say: ‘So, you’re the daughters, are you?’ Never fails to make us laugh.
“I can’t put my finger on why but people really like it,” he added. “I think it gives them more trust in us – it’s somehow more meaningful than an ‘& Sons’ name – and in the construction industry it does stand out. I think we do probably get more calls from female customers.”
Major’s eldest daughter, Ruby, worked for the company for a while but has moved on now. “My younger teenage daughters have their moments, showing interest in following in their dad’s footprints,” he said. “It would be lovely if they did.”
There has been a 75% growth in the use of the “& Daughter(s)” suffix in companies registered at Companies House over the past five years. The more traditional “& Son(s)” suffix has increased by 51% over the same period.
Numbers are still small: over the past five years, there were 114 new companies registered under the “& Daughter(s)” suffix, compared with 2,379 new companies with “& Son(s)”. There are now 152 companies registered as “& Daughter(s)”.
It’s a change that has been slow to take root. Britain’s earliest registered “& Daughter” company was the fishmongers H Marment & Daughter in Caterham, Surrey, which operated from 1928 to 2022.
The company made headlines at the time, with a front-page story in the Daily Mirror reporting how Marment had made the decision to reflect “the excellent leadership of his daughter, Miss Amy F Marment, during her time running the business during the first world war”.
The 31 January 1928 edition of the Brechin Advertiser stated: “This is certainly the age of women. H Marment & Daughter has established a precedent which will, probably, be often followed.”
Almost a century later, however, just 19% of the UK’s small and medium-sized enterprises are led by women – even though women typically invest a higher proportion of their earnings in their families and communities than men, creating a strong base for economic growth and prosperity.
“Women are indispensable for economic growth and female entrepreneurship is about more than just economic empowerment, it’s about paving the way for future generations of women in business,” said Corin Camenisch, the global product marketing lead at SumUp, a London-based global financial technology company.
Charlotte Hearnden-Smith is the daughter at the Middlesex-based Hearnden-Smith & Daughters Funeral Directors, and she hopes to be joined by her younger sister in a few years’ time.
“My mother, Suzanne, set this business up in 1998 with her father,” she said. “She was the driving force: this was her vision, her dream and her goal.”
Hearnden-Smith said the name emphasised a feminine touch in a male-dominated industry. “People often like to have hugs at this difficult moment in their lives,” she said. “People rarely turn down a hug, but a hug from a woman is usually especially welcome.”
Mick Aldred recently founded the R Carter & Daughter Delicatessen in Bamburgh, Northumberland, next to his family business, R Carter & Son Butchers. His daughter worked there at the time but he said the “& Daughters” suffix was a tribute to the line of “incredibly strong” women who had built the business up, more than it was a nod to the future.
“My grandmother Jane was an amazing businesswomen who kept the shop going after her husband drank it dry,” he said. “Then my mother, Kathleen, took over. She was amazing too.
“The ‘& Daughters’ name was partly a branding exercise,” he admitted. “But mainly it was to pay tribute to the women of our family who are now dead and gone but who we owe it all to.”
Gediminas Juškys, the strategy director at the female-run branding company Sons and Daughters ID, said the “& Daughter(s)” moniker was so powerful that they had used it for their own marketing company despite there being no daughters in the company.
“It is a statement of difference in attitude towards how our business is run and the role of women in business and life in general,” he said. “It makes you think and that’s a great thing for a brand.”
Matt Waksman, the head of strategy, advertising, at Ogilvy UK, believes that adding an “& Daughter” name to a business can bring in a different type of clientele and exude a sense of openness.
“Using a daughter’s name instead of a son’s name reflects family values by showing a business’s respect for tradition while also being future-facing,” he said.
Sairah Ashman, the global CEO at the branding consultancy Wolff Olins, said that with increasing numbers of women setting up businesses and making a virtue of passing that on to daughters, the suffix “feels like it’s an obvious thing to do”.
