Despite the success of Adidas and Puma, companies that established themselves as two of the world's most dominant sportswear brands, the brothers' conflict was never resolved. Even in death, they would be divided, with the brothers' graves situated at the opposite ends of the main Herzogenaurach cemetery.
Read More"A quick, even split suggests that the founders don't have the business maturity to have a tough dialogue."
Splitting the equity in your startup usually sounds like a straightforward task. You incorporate a business, create share capital, give it a nominal value and split the shares equally. If you use a good accountant or online provider, creating the shares is simple enough. The hard and underestimated challenge is precisely how to divide up the equity.
Read More"You don't have a business unless you have a reasonable margin to play with. Without a good margin, you can't surprise and delight your customers, invest in growth or hire exceptional people. We learnt that without a healthy margin, you don't have a business model that works. So we make sure our customers respect that we make a high-quality product and need to charge a fair amount for it." - Dan Mrray-Serter
Read MoreNothing is more exciting for a startup and scaleup founder than an order. More than a dopamine hit, if your customers are B2B, these orders are often substantial and can make a tough week a great week.
Hence as a founder, I know how hard it is to turn orders down. However, it is sometimes the right thing to do.
Read MoreThe Octopus is quite the animal, I keep learning bizarre and impressive facts about them. They are also the namesake of one of the UK's leading green energy providers. Let me spend a moment explaining what that is and why it's important, before telling you why I like Octopus so much.
Read MoreYes. Yes, you are invited. We definitely all are.
Today is Earth Day, and Earth Day is for everyone. No matter who or where they are. Now I'm starting to sound like a Miss World contestant, so I'll get to the point.
Read More“We would never have considered the product without the community, and vice versa. We saw it as a holistic offering”, Tom Stancliffe, co-founder of Tribe.
Tribe is a business from a boy’s own story, their founders run thousands of miles, traversing though deserts, climbing up volcanos, crossing oceans, rivers and borders. All the while powered on by a mission to end modern-day slavery and child trafficking. To do this they have created a community of people to share in the journey and in turn, built a sports nutrition business to serve this community.
Read More“Whoa, this is going to work a lot better than we had thought.”
- Brie Read four hours after turning on snagtights.com
This is the blog post to read when you are worried that all the good ideas are gone, and the ones that are left are too niche to consider. Snag is one of the UK’s fastest growing DTC brands, less than three years old and already bringing in £3 million worth of sales a month. And it all started a with a clothing malfunction on Scotland’s busiest shopping street.
Read More"You have to get your brand, product and service spot on and if you still have to rely on paid-for acquisition, you are going to run into problems", Lucas London, CEO and Co-Founder of Lick
Lick launched in 2020 as a multi-product, multi-region, omnichannel, DTC and B2B company. If it sounds ambitious that is because it is, and it is what it is, according to its founders Lucas and Sam, as it is the only way it can succeed.
Read More“It was a radical idea, and we have been fortunate that it was even more popular than we expected”.
Aron Gelbard told me how he used Net Promoter Score to find an industry ripe for disruption and how by doing so, he fulfilled his primary goal of making people happy. This is the story of how Bloom and Wild turned the flower industry on its head.
Read More“When he saw me sitting there, he just doubled over in laughter, gave me a pat on the back, took the cash, wrote out the invoice and got two pallets of razors forked around to the car, which my stepfather and I loaded into the boot and back seat. We had our launch stock”.
Read More“I am probably a bit weird, but not that weird, so there must be other people out there who want similar types of stuff. My goal at this time was to have a lifestyle business. I was thinking about the Kevin Kelly concept of 1000 true fans, and I realised that if 1000 people would buy £45 worth of stuff a month then that is a business turning over five hundred grand a year and I could probably manage all this from home. That would be a nice lifestyle, and that was really the concept.” - Julian Hearn CEO and founder of Huel
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