YOU MIGHT NOT know it yet, but you’re already chums with Laura Henshaw and Steph Claire Smith. In fact, you could easily pick up the phone and tell them about how you walked into a glass door yesterday, or lament the apparent return of skinny jeans. You know that feeling. It’s when you meet someone and that indeterminable ‘click’ sounds. It’s like riding a bike you’ve never seen before. Well, these two have it in spades. You know them before you’ve even met them, and that’s even with the near-2 million strong Instagram accounts that could lull you into a false sense of familiarity. Henshaw and Smith just have it.
That’s what I’ve come to realise in just two relatively short convos; one online, one face-to-face. The latter is in their hotel room in the potty streets of Surry Hills. It’s 4.30am and we’re preparing for our Women’s Health sunrise cover shoot. Five of us – Laura, Steph, Peter the makeup artist, Max the hair stylist and myself – are sardined into a tiny room. Laura is perched on the end of the bed, a mug of tea balancing on her knee, chatting with Max about Oura rings. Across the matchbox, Steph is comparing Bluey episodes (‘Rain’ is the best ep, for those that practise) and adult fantasy fiction. These women are not talking as if it’s pre-dawn, and they’re not acting as if they’ve just met me. I have stepped into something strangely familiar. For what seems pretty scarce in the world of influence, Laura and Steph are unaffected. They’re creating something unique their way.
Laura and Steph are the co-founders of one of the country’s most successful fitness brands. What started as a book with 37 recipes is now a health and wellness platform that touches over 2.5 million people. The brand is catapulting from strength to strength and in recent years has signed a deal with premium athletic sports brand, New Balance. It is the very bones of the business, the ideology that both of these women share, that has made it such a success. At its core, Kic is about community and go-at-your-own-pace support. In a world of friction and comparison, it promotes acceptance and autonomy. The origins of it, though, were born out of testing personal circumstances for both women.
Laura and Steph wear new season New Balance
IT ALL CAME TO A HEAD with some ill fated overseas trips that surfaced and cruelly nurtured body dysmorphia in both women. On a personal level for Henshaw and Smith, it would turn out to be the catalyst for the rest of their lives. At a broader level, the trips exposed an outdated modelling industry, one that not only supported, but promoted unrealistic standards.
Both women started modelling in Australia. Steph’s first job was for Cotton On in Geelong, Laura’s was for a clothing brand in Collingwood. Soon invitations abroad trickled in.
Laura flew to Milan in 2014, age 21, her sights set on the hub of European beauty and fashion. She stepped into a demi-culture of size 6s, long days and coveted casting calls. One specific moment that stood out was after stepping off her flight from Melbourne.
“My agent in Milan said that they weren’t going to put me on the books until I’d lost the water retention from the flight. They said that my body was inflamed. And I remember thinking ‘I barely even drank water on the flight because I was worried about this happening.’ I was also the skinniest I’d ever been.”
Food consumed Laura’s mind. Discipline, which comes easily to her, drove her to push the needle of restriction further. When it came to snacking, she only allowed herself the liberty of having eight almonds, “and if I ate more than eight, the guilt I would feel would be immeasurable.”
A few months in, an opportunity presented itself to lose more weight, and she jumped at it. “I did a juice cleanse for five days. I couldn’t afford to do a proper juice cleanse, and the agency didn’t set me up with one, so I went to the supermarket, filled my trolley full of vegetables and bought the cheapest juice machine I could. Then for two kilometres I wheeled the trolley back to my apartment over cobblestones. I’ll never forget it.”
Laura recalls reaching her goal weight and finding the dangled carrot of promise didn’t bring that expected joy. She wanted more and the numbers, as they were, weren’t gratifying. She sidestepped pizza and pasta, and if she did enjoy herself while out with friends, she punished her body for days afterwards, hitting the gym, beelining for cardio. As a rule, too, strength training was out – it would build too much muscle. She committed to long distance running without eating beforehand and pushed herself for as far and as long as she could.
Laura wears new season New Balance
The same year, Steph, 20, also charged overseas with high hopes. From being a big fish in a small pond to the contrary, she found herself picked apart emotionally in New York.
“I was pretty naive about how that journey was going to go. And when I got there [New York], I realised pretty quickly how different the market was. I wasn’t treated like a person; the way they looked at measurements and spoke about them so bluntly in front of you was crazy. But I was so excited to be there. Even when I was told ‘you need to take inches off your hips’, or ‘we’re going to take you off the books until you lose weight’, I just wanted to make it work,” explains Steph.
Steph’s relationship with food morphed into something wholly more controlled. She thought about it 24/7 and when she wasn’t thinking about food, she was riddled with ideas on how and when she could work the calories off after overeating.
“At night, I’d make enough for lunch the next day, but then I’d eat something sweet and go back to the savoury until I was sick. I never stopped thinking about the cravings,” she reflects.
A cyclical spiral meant Steph felt incredibly alone in her studio apartment in Midtown. Those eat and purge noises were at their loudest, especially around mealtime, so she sought refuge at a friend of her husband’s place in the Lower East Side.
“At the time, my friend didn’t really know what I was going through. Most nights of the week I would stay at his house till pretty late at night before going home because I’d fallen into such a bad habit of binge eating. I just knew that if I went home around dinner time or even just after dinner time, I wouldn’t stop eating. If I went home at midnight, though, I’d go to bed. I was really scared to be alone because of the habits that I’d formed.”
Ultimately, both women reflect on the time as a period in which they lost themselves. A time of frantic paddling without a life raft, hating castings, hating calories, hating muscle, and above all, feeling hounded by a feeling of overwhelming shame.
Steph wears new season New Balance
BACK HOME, Laura and Steph met initially at their first Melbourne Fashion Week. Over several castings, backstage moments and broken chit chat, similarities between their two overseas stints unfurled. Both women were in the throes of rebuilding not only a life in their home state, but their sense of self-worth, their relationship with food and how to exercise in balance.
While living back with her parents, Steph trained her mum on what was healthy and what wasn’t: the best type of chocolate, the right amount of protein, the types, or lack thereof, of fats. Old habits were deeply etched in.
“Every Christmas since I can remember my parents have put gold coins in our stockings. I remember one Christmas my mum got me this 85% Lindt chocolate block instead because I’d told her that was the lowest percentage that I would eat. I remember I’d gone through all this work in rebuilding my relationship with food, and that Christmas I just bawled my eyes out. I felt so sad that something as innocent as gold coins, I’d demonised.”
Largely, both women’s disordered eating lay in private silence. Laura explains the inability to talk about it with anyone, though Steph provided an outlet of shared experience. That ‘click’ snapped into place between them, and out of something dark, something light and warm peeked through.
Laura and Steph wear new season New Balance
IN LATE 2014, Laura and Steph met up at Top Paddock Cafe in Richmond, months after their first meeting at fashion week. They hatched a plan and created an eBook of recipes. It didn’t count calories, and it didn’t set restrictions, something that still rings true to the recipes within the Kic app 10 years on.
In the months and years that followed, they developed a business plan based around good energy and movement. A focal aim was to bring solutions to women: help them to move their bodies, feel confident at the gym, cook simple meals, run their first 5 kilometres, and feel that propelling buttress of support. The freedom of Kic, formerly known as Keep It Cleaner, was a conceptual antidote to the restrictions both women had laboured under for so many years prior.
“Kic is ultimately about confidence. We help women be who they are. We don’t tell women to take up less space. We are more than health and fitness, we’re a movement,” explains Laura.
RUNNING A BUSINESS with a friend doesn’t come without its challenges. The pair not only have a private friendship, but a commercial public one, too. The two women are pinned up against one another often: they’re of similar age, they’ve had a similar professional journey, they were married at a similar time. Surely there’s trouble in paradise? And, yes, of course, it can take work to balance individual needs. Both women are in different seasons of life right now. Add in a little boy, Harvey, for Steph and things look unique for each on a daily basis. Professionally speaking, too, Laura is more strategic and business minded, whereas Steph leans towards creativity and fostering Kic’s community. It’s been an exercise in finding and nurturing those strong suits, negotiating and consistently listening.
This year they’ve cobbled and ironed out their clearest path yet. One of the biggest learnings is around the idea of assumption. Jumping to conclusions about each other has gotten them into sticky awkwardness, but communication has proven to be the key to a calmer relationship. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but it’s something that can easily get lost in the tightrope of everyday life. That, and understanding that one problem might have several solutions, all of which need to be canvassed and worked through.
Laura explains their current mantra: “hard conversations easy life, easy conversations hard life.”
Steph adds, “Until you bring it up and talk about it, it’ll eat away at you and things add on and pile on. And what’s likely a small problem can so easily be solved by having even one conversation.”
The solution? Reconnect on a friendship level. Forget work for a moment, go out, have a drink together and re-fun.
Laura and Steph wear new season New Balance
TODAY, WE’RE sitting at a cafe, again. We’ve ordered coffees and breakfast in North Bondi after a long morning shooting the cover. We’re so hungry we could chew our arms off. Laura and Steph babble, envisioning and gesticulating about grand, infectious plans ahead. They’re about balance and sustainable health goals. Where the business was once broad, it’s now pointier. It’s not for everyone, it’s not about toxic positivity, it’s about supporting women and helping you find what works for you.
Laura is training for the New York marathon in November of this year in partnership with New Balance (and clocking up the k’s in her 1080v14 shoes) – a company that holds similar empowering values as Kic. She is documenting what will be one of her biggest life achievements to date – the highs, the lows, the nothing days, too. Laura is doing it her way.
Steph is leaning into work and parenthood. Specifically authenticity and sharing the days that aren’t sunshine and rainbows. Balancing optimism with truism, marketing initiatives aplenty with whole bowls of pasta tossed on the floor by a turbulent, cute toddler.
And with that we conclude our chat about big, grand ideas around relationships and self-betterment, instead turning to tales of smacked faces in glass doors, the mortification of reading A Court Of Thorns in public and obstinate resistance to suction-tight jeans.
