Based in Cambridge, Charlotte Ridley has built a career around technology, marketing and emerging ideas, but it is her experience as a mother, the loss of her father and her growing understanding of the importance of memories that has shaped the latest chapter of her life. As the founder of Yoree, a digital home for meaningful memories, Charlotte is exploring how technology can help us preserve the moments that matter while, perhaps more importantly, encouraging us to be more present for the lives we are living now.

Charlotte’s route into technology and business was not a conventional one. Rather than going to university, she studied marketing and business at college before gaining work experience and internships, including one with Hello! magazine. She also worked on the launch of The X Factor through a partnership with TalkTalk, an experience she describes as “quite cool”, before going on to join Intel’s graduate scheme.

Her career has since taken her firmly into the technology sector, but becoming a mother and experiencing a devastating personal loss changed the way she thought about the relationship between technology, wellbeing and everyday life.

In 2021, while pregnant with her first child, Charlotte’s father died suddenly at the age of 63. His death was completely unexpected and, because he had not planned for it, Charlotte and her family were unable to access much of his digital life.

“We couldn’t get access to his phone, to his iCloud, to anything because he wasn’t planning on dying, and we didn’t have the passwords,” she explains.

Her father was also a family photographer and had digitised many of Charlotte’s childhood photographs and VHS tapes, meaning the loss extended beyond the memories he had created himself. Charlotte was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing much of her own childhood history too.

The experience became even more significant when she had her daughter and began documenting her childhood through her phone. Charlotte estimates she took around 12,000 photographs during the first four years of her daughter’s life, but realised that having more photographs did not necessarily mean having a better way of preserving the memories behind them.

Her camera roll contained precious moments alongside screenshots, recipes and receipts, all sitting together with little distinction between what was truly important and what could easily be deleted. It made Charlotte question whether we have inadvertently created a new kind of problem for ourselves: having more memories than ever, but spending less time actually revisiting them.

The issue extends beyond our own camera rolls, with a recent survey of US adults finding that 56% believe friends and family are less present in social settings because of their phones.

That idea sits at the heart of Yoree, but for Charlotte, the wider conversation is really about wellbeing and how we experience our lives.

“A lot of my routine is actually about switching off from my phone,” she says. During dinner, bedtime and stories with her daughter, Charlotte deliberately puts her phone away so she can be completely present.

“I put it away for at least a couple of hours just while I’m doing dinner time, bedtime and stories and just make sure that I’m truly present.”

It is an approach that has become particularly important as Charlotte balances motherhood with building a growing business. Her daughter is four and has recently started reception, bringing another shift as she begins to encounter a much wider world beyond the environment her parents have previously been able to control.

For Charlotte, learning to accept the different seasons of life has also become an important part of looking after her own wellbeing.

“At this point in my life I’m focussing on getting my head down, growing the business, and raising my daughter, and at some point in the future, I’ll think about getting a bit more toned again,” she says, reflecting on the pressure women can put on themselves to achieve everything simultaneously.

“I think it’s like all us women, we kind of want to be everything and do everything all at once, but actually we’ve just got to be a bit nicer on ourselves.”

That philosophy also feeds into her approach to family life and the memories she wants to create. Charlotte believes meaningful experiences do not have to be expensive or elaborate and that some of the moments we remember most vividly are often the spontaneous, slightly ridiculous ones.

“It’s actually about really carving time out to go and spend quality time with the people we love doing things that are sometimes a bit unorthodox,” she says.

For Charlotte, that might mean putting a tent in the garden or going stargazing rather than planning an expensive day out. Or instead of a meal at a fancy Michelin-starred restaurant, to enjoy singing along to the music in a tuk-tuk on the way out for dinner with family or friends.

“You’ve got to kind of do more of that in your life,” she says.

It is this idea of conscious reminiscing that has become one of Charlotte’s biggest personal lessons. Through Yoree, she is exploring how technology can organise the photographs and stories that families accumulate, while her own experience has taught her that wellbeing is also found in the act of making those memories in the first place.

She describes the practice of going back and talking about experiences as “elaborate reminiscing”, something she believes can provide children with important anchor points as they grow and develop their sense of identity.

Ultimately, Charlotte’s message is surprisingly simple. In a world where we can record almost everything, perhaps the real luxury is being present enough to enjoy it.

“It’s not about the fact you ate a Michelin star fancy restaurant because your brain will actually potentially slightly forget that. But what it will remember is the crazy singing in the tuk tuk really loud when you’re going down Regent Street.”

For a woman whose career has been built around technology, Charlotte’s greatest lesson may therefore be about knowing when to put it down. Because while our phones can capture thousands of photographs, it is the time we spend together, the stories we tell and the moments we genuinely experience that ultimately give our lives their richness.