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STORIES OF MODERN BUSINESS
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+ Spotify — Travel startups — Unbound — Istanbul — US expansion — Peanut butter
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10 PHOTO STORY The banana-picking robots
of Ocado.
12 NUMBERS Making money from kids clothing
and digging into peanut butter sales.
16 BRIEFING: MUSIC Is Spotify on a collision course
with music labels?
20 REPORT: TRAVEL Surprise holidays and instant
inspiration: the new class of travel startups.
23 REPORT: WOMEN IN STARTUP After years of being sidelined, female
founders are taking the stage.
34 TALKS Is food delivery a blessing for
customers but a curse for restaurants?
38 PORTRAIT Meet John Mitchinson,
the pig-farming co-founder of book publisher Unbound.
42 DISPATCH Making money in Istanbul
amid tear gas and a failed coup.
46 LEADER Role models: why it’s hard to
be what you can’t see.
47 DEBATE Does Facebook advertising work?
A tale of two founders.
49 COMMENT Why sustainable fashion is more
attitude than credentials, and tech’s tricky relationship with trust.
Courier Life: A design-fuelled journey through Morocco, p74.
5
CONTENTS
This issue
50 COLUMNS David Bryant on Silicon Valley’s
soul. Phoebe Lovatt on Gen Z’s migratory patterns. Musa Okwonga on Berlin’s Brexodus appeal. David Hieatt on moonshots.
53 LOWDOWN Verena von Pfetten, founder
of cannabis-friendly media brand Gossamer, talks sea urchin sushi.
55 WORKSHOP Computer kit - Furniture - Soap -
Healthy lunches - Tailoring - Custom footwear - Shoppable content Football podcast - Craft beer - Watches - Electric cars
68 STARTUP DIARY Our diarist on mission statements
and pitching to the NHS.
71 COURIER LIFE - Design tour in Morocco. - Jessica Skye on food. - Bringing back the darkroom. - District Vision’s favourite brand. - WeWork antidotes.
Cover story: Blooming Founders’ Lu Li , p23
6
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All rights reserved © 2018 Courier Holdings LtdISSN 2396-9334
OnlineOur online home couriermedia.co features the very best from the world of modern business and startup culture: select articles from our digital archives, exclusive stories, our new web store and much more. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @couriermedia.
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EventsJoin us for panel discussions, workshops and networking at our regular Courier Talks events in London, where you’ll hear from experts, meet fellow readers and have a chat with the Courier team.
More Courier PUBLISHER Jeff TaylorEDITOR IN CHIEF Soheb PanjaCOMMERCIAL DIRECTOR Cain Fleming
EditorialMANAGING EDITOR Tomas JivandaDEPUTY EDITOR Daniel GiacopelliSENIOR REPORTER Amy LewinREPORTER Sarah DrummSENIOR DESIGNER Simon Kuhn EDITOR AT LARGE John SunyerDESIGN Johanna Pearson SUB-EDITORS Lucy Douglas Naomi Joseph COVER PHOTOGRAPHY Mollie Rose COVER ART DIRECTION Yarra JonesCOVER STYLING Kitty CowellILLUSTRATION Valerio Pellegrini Michał Bednarski Nils Petter Ekwall Petra Eriksson Pete Gamlen Valero Doval PHOTOGRAPHY Will Morgan Tomas Jivanda Sophia Spring Kerem Uzel Yves Mourtada
Courier PartnersCourier Partners works with a range of clients to produce bespoke creative campaigns and strategic insights
ADVERTISING Cain FlemingCREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS Isabel WarbyINSIGHTS & INTELLIGENCE Jarryd Brogden
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9
behind this. It’s more a view that it makes for better stories.
The roots of this instinct probably lie in my primary school. I didn’t know it at the time, but the recent discovery of a class photo left me startled at the number of nationalities from which we appear to have been assembled. If someone had cast the 30 or so oddballs in class 4C, it would’ve been deemed unrealistic. We shared little other than inexplicable fashions and the decisions of our parents to swap the likes of India, Sudan, Vietnam, Jamaica and Inverness for north-west London.
On reflection, the mayhem and joy of that period has had a profound effect on my outlook.
You needn’t have been in 4C to value the benefit of a mixture of faces and backgrounds. John Mitchinson is founder of publishing startup Unbound and the Portrait subject in this issue (p38). He’s an individual who falls squarely into the category of privileged white male, and has also created a company which makes as eloquent a statement as you can find about the fruits of a diverse workforce.
It made me think of the Spanish footballer Juan Mata who recently reflected on winning the 2012 Champions League. ‘We came from all over the world, from different circumstances and spoke many different languages. Some had grown up during
Diversity makesfor better stories
Wonderful things happen when people from different backgrounds are brought together.
wartime. Some had grown up in poverty. But there we were, all standing together in Germany as champions of Europe. … [That] was more meaningful to me than the trophy.’
Making money is a big leveller, whether that’s on a football pitch, a trading floor or people starting a business. There’s a universality to the desire to create something which can better one’s life.
Wonderful things happen when people from different backgrounds are brought together. It’s what makes the broader political climate of nationalism and demonisation of ‘citizens of nowhere’ so dangerous.
In this issue we see how this kind of conservatism and nationalism has squeezed creative startup culture in Istanbul.
We’ve got a delightful mix of people behind many of our other stories. The bespectacled watchmaker Nicholas Bowman-Scargill (p58), madcap Euro fashion designer Brice Partouche (p82), New York media maven Verena von Pfetten (p53) and Courier cover star and Wolverhampton’s newest hero, Sharmadean Reid (p23).
I hope you enjoy this issue, and in particular our cover story, which I think shows the experiences, hopes, anxieties and challenges shared by female founders, as well as the richness of the emerging ecosystem many of them are forming.
EDITOR’S LETTER
It’s been a tough few months for privileged white men. It’s been open season on them.
Whenever the issue of entitlement or prejudice comes up they default to one of two reactions: staring at their feet or over-enthusiastically showing their disgust.
Some of my best friends are privileged, and white, and male. Most are, by and large, alright. I must confess I’ve revelled in the palpable guilt when such topics arise. One day, I’ll make the revelation that colonialism, cultural prejudice and entitlement aren’t entirely their fault and they don’t need to take full personal responsibility. I just want to give it a few more years.
As a man, I’m currently engaged in my own bit of tortured navel gazing. Our cover story reveals the emergence of a new ecosystem developing around women in UK startup, the individuals creating outstanding businesses, and just how deep male culture is ingrained. It’s made me question gender bias in everything from our coverage (not bad) to our recruitment (not good).
Even in the early days of Courier, I always thought tokenistic one-off coverage around ‘women’ was counter-productive. Instead we’ve tried to maintain a solid balance of genders and race in all of our pages, all of the time. There’s really no do-goodery
10
Inside Ocado’s robotsThere was a 10% jump in people buying their Christmas groceries online in 2017 compared to 2016. A lot of it was attributed to Morrisons, which began delivering to more of the UK through Ocado.
The UK’s £10.4bn-online grocery industry is further ahead than that of any other country in the world, thanks in no small part to 17-year-old Ocado. The company made its first profit in 2015.
It has since been investing in clever technology to get orders packed and shipped cheaper and faster. Courier visited its Hatfield warehouse (one of three in the UK) where robots have cut the time it takes to process an order from two or three hours to just five minutes.
The warehouse is organised by a layered grid system, with hundreds of robots that look like washing machines scooting around, collecting items. Ocado is working on developing humanoid robots with a human-like hand to dexterously pick up delicate objects like bananas.
Ocado’s CTO, Paul Clarke, recently said: ‘Our business runs on an intersection of five disruptive technologies: the Internet of Things, big data, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud. Of those we see AI, in the Tolkien sense, as the “one to rule them all”.’
In November, the company signed a deal with French retailer Casino to provide its tech. Ocado sees its future in selling tech to other retailers instead of merely being a supermarket.
11
NUMBERS
12
Growing fashion trendsActivewear and kidswear outshine the UK’s stalling clothing industry.
The UK clothing market needs a boost: the sector is expected to grow by just 17% over the next five years, roughly in line with inflation, according to Global Data.
Two outlier segments are kids’ clothes and activewear. New specialist brands have emerged while mainstream apparel companies are taking both areas more seriously.
Department stores have been an important engine for kidswear. In August 2016 Harrods launched a ‘Mini Fashion Lab’ and in July 2017 retail startup The Mini Edit opened a concession in Fenwick of Bond Street. Originally launched as a pop-up, The Mini Edit was so successful that it’s become a permanent store feature.
Making sports clothes stylish has been one of the biggest fashion stories in recent years. Brands like Lululemon, Sweaty Betty and Outdoor Voices have been opening stores and gaining momentum. Even JD Sports made profits of £238m in 2016, beating forecasts.
Retail analytics firm Edited shared its data on how many items in these two segments were for sale over consecutive years (see below).
1. Kidswear and activewear ranges keep growing
Q3 2015 Q3 2016 Q3 2017
297, 705 313, 748 333, 590
Q3 2017
153, 526
We’ve picked three startups in each area which caught our eye.
9.7 millionPeople in the UK are gym members
4xAthleisure market growth compared to UK clothing market
£2.5bnPredicted size of UK sports clothing market, 2017
VIGGASubscription clothing ‘leasing’ based on how quickly kids grow.
EVERY SECOND COUNTS Sportswear backed by Singaporean retail giant Triple.
PETIT PLIPleated clothing that expands as a child gets bigger.
3RD ROCK Peak District-based family business that uses recycled materials.
TOBIAS & THE BEARUnisex brand launched in 2014, now stocked in 120 shops.
SATISFY Technical materials meets rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic (see Courier Life, p88).
Number of brands selling in the UK
Average product price
£54.29£37 Average spend
4,026 3,720
£43.39 £53.21
BRAND SPOTLIGHT
Activewear
Kidswear
Q3 2015
110, 574Q3 2016
134, 546
813,200Babies born in 2011, the most since 1972
+20%Increase in Selfridges’ kidswear sales from 2016 to 2017
£5.8bnSize of UK kidswear market, 2015
Kidswear Activewear
Units for sale between July and September
Units for sale between July and September
NUMBERS
13
NERYYMACHIN
8b8bn£24.88METALS
£26.2bn
FOOD
£65.7bn
TRANSPORTEQUIPMENT
£28.2bn
CARS
£54.6bn
2. Apparel mostly made abroad
3. Clothing’s tiny impact
The book industry turns a new page
British brands commonly turn to countries such as Turkey, Portugal and Romania to get their creations made at cheaper rates than those offered by domestic factories.
Although mass production of apparel is unlikely to return to British shores, a crop of brands are setting themselves apart with small-batch production, ‘Made in Britain’. Blackhorse Lane Ateliers and White Hart London, founded in 2016 and 2012 respectively, both offer small-scale white-label manufacturing for clothing brands.
UK clothing production pales in comparison with our five largest manufacturing industries: food, cars, transport equipment, metals and machinery.
E-commerce firm Asos is doing its part to change this. Since 2013, it’s been partnering with Fashion Enter, a textile factory and technical fashion apprenticeships provider, on The Stitching Academy, in a bid to train up a new generation of garment makers.
After a gloomy few years for the publishing industry, things are looking up. Audio books, physical books and bookshops are growing in popularity, while ebooks haven’t become the harbinger of doom that many expected.
1. Audio books on the upThe ebook market is shrinking, while audio books continue to grow year-on-year.
2. Indie booksellers recoveringIn 2017, indie bookshop numbers in the UK saw net growth for the first time in 22 years – by one. In total, 24 new stores opened.
Imports Exports
Ebook Physical Audio Independent booksellers
Year
-on-
year
sale
s gro
wth
(%)
Num
ber o
f sto
res
Chain outlets
2015 20162013 2014
4000
3000
2000
0
2014 2015 2016
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
-5
£10m
Gross UK sales
£563m
£2.7bn
£16m
£3bn
£538m
CLOTHING
£1.7bn
£1,000m
£800m
£600m
£400m
2012 2013 2014 2015
£820m
£680m
£840m
£480m£460m£490m
£750m
£490m
NUMBERS
14
3,000
6,000
9,000
12,000
15,000
0
2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
£79.6m
Going nuts for nuts Peanut butter has been one of the most dynamic categories in supermarkets. Sales increased 17% in 2017.
There are new product categories, from sachets to giant tubs. And peanuts aren’t alone: shelves are groaning with cashew, almond and hazelnut butters, which were almost non-existent five years ago.
Nut butter sales overtook chocolate spreads in 2016, hitting £88m. Jam could be toppled next. Sales of the sweet stuff fell 2.9% to £107m in 2017.
2016 2017Own label
£24.2m
£17.87m
£17.86m£11.3m
£1.76m£15m
£1.83m
£20.8m
£26.7m £23.8m
Sunpat
Whole Earth
Meridian Pip & Nut
10.7%
-0.1%
14.3%
32.9%
4.1%
10.7%
Startup brand: Pip & NutFounded in 2015, Pip and Nut is now reckoned to be worth over £6m. Last year the company signed deals with Morrisons, Asda and Tesco. Sales in January were up 193% on January 2017.
Ubiquity of coffee
47%Other coffee chains
31%Costa coffee
9%Caffe Nero
13%Starbucks
Three chains dominate UK’s coffee scene While brands such as The Department of Coffee and Social Affairs and Workshop are busy adding new sites to their portfolios, there’s a long way to go before independents can overtake high-street heavyweights.
£88.1m
Independents Branded chains Non-specialist
There’s been an explosive growth of baristas in barbers, bike shops and bookstores, as coffee has been adopted as an add-on to a variety of retail businesses.
Hotels, pubs and restaurants have beefed up their coffee offerings too. Around a fifth of new non-specialist coffee outlets in the UK came from pubs, with 648 starting to serve up coffee.
Welcome to The Fast Track, where five business owners share their stories so you can learn from their successes and mistakes. With articles, videos, podcasts and worksheets, there’s everything you need to help grow your business today.
thefasttrack.co
How to start moving your business forward today
16
BRIEFING: SPOTIFY
Spotify’s big playAs Spotify prepares to go public in the coming weeks, there’s a high risk plan inside the company to become ‘the Airbnb for artists’. But will it clash with music labels?
The country and western singer Russell Dickerson didn’t expect to find himself on the same billing as
rapper Trippie Redd. Yet there he was. The pair were among the first to front Spotify’s new initiative, Rise, launched last October.
Redd and Dickerson share a common struggle. Both need to break through the sea of aspiring musicians and persuade a record label to take a punt on them.
Rise, Spotify said, will give emerging artists like them a leg up, even without a label backing them. Each year, 16 artists will get Spotify’s support.
It had the hallmarks of the sort of well-meaning initiative usually unveiled with much fanfare only to be quietly shut down some months later. But, according to people close to Spotify, Rise is far from a PR stunt.
In fact, they say, it’s the precursor to something far more fundamental: turning Spotify into ‘the Airbnb for music’. The vision for the streaming service is a platform with music consumers on one side, and the tools to serve artists on the other.
If it works out and Spotify can reframe what it fundamentally does, it will find itself on a collision course with the record labels. The move comes as Spotify, founded in Stockholm over a decade ago, is poised to become a $20bn publicly-listed company in the coming weeks.
Having upended how we listen to music, its next disruptive act could be how artists make money from music.
DESTABILISING FRENEMIESSpotify has been quick to emphasise it won’t be stepping on record labels’ toes. Neither will it take cuts from artists’ copyrights or income made from touring and merchandise.
At least, not yet.Rise has come out of Spotify’s Creator
Services division, a unit it has been steadily (and stealthily) building over the last couple of years. As this side project takes shape, many see it as simultaneously giving Spotify a more stable long-term footing but also destabilising its already delicate ‘frenemy’ relationship with record labels.
GET CARTERTroy Carter was hired in June 2016 as global head of Creator Services. He has been spearheading the platform’s move to think of ways it can get closer to artists. Carter’s background was managing artists like Meaghan Trainor and Lady Gaga.
17
BRIEFING: SPOTIFY
4.8% and Warner 3.8%. Merlin, representing independent labels, also has a small stake.
But beyond that, as Spotify has made streaming music the new standard, the exorbitant royalties it pays have pumped much-needed revenue back into previously ailing record labels.
Each of the big three has seen its valuation skyrocket in recent years. Warner’s revenues, for example, increased almost five-fold between 2016 and 2017, from £30m to £149m.
Despite this, the labels remain deeply suspicious of Spotify. Many operate in a state of paranoia, still carrying the scars from the power exerted over them by various disrupters down the years (MTV, then Apple, Napster and even early Spotify).
On the other hand, insiders at Spotify still believe the power balance is tilted in favour of the labels.
NO NETFLIX AND CHILLUnlike its commercial hero, Netflix, Spotify can’t build a business on creating its own content. It relies instead upon providing a comprehensive catalogue from all the labels. It’s a precarious situation with little leverage. By contrast, no single TV network or film studio holds such sway over Netflix.
Spotify’s investors have talked about trying to make it ‘too big to fail’ for the labels, and yet been frustrated by how the three labels can dictate Spotify’s fortunes.
Chirag Modi, an analyst, argues it would be difficult for the labels to emulate Disney’s withdrawal from Netflix. ‘The reach of Spotify is too influential for music labels to play such a strategic game,’ he says.
APPLE AND AMAZON GROWTHOne label insider admitted twitchy labels are eager to ‘ensure Spotify doesn’t get too big’; the strategy is to ‘divide and conquer’.
‘You sense the frustration with just being a repository for music. Spotify is slowly, quietly and subtly reversing into label services.’—MARK MULLIGAN, MUSIC INDUSTRY ANALYST
What Carter and his team (now reported to be in the hundreds) are building is a modern artist support platform; a cross between a music manager, a record label and a publisher.
One person with close proximity to it says, ‘It’s better to think of [Rise] as what Airbnb does for hosts’.
Spotify would create tools for the supply side of its business; a means for anyone from hobbyist musician to superstar to put music out via Spotify and get paid. In this vision, making money from music would be liberated from the way the industry has traditionally worked.
Artists will get a rich feed of data and analytics, financial forecasting and other tools to market their work, make money and manage their businesses.
Spotify has been enthusiastically showing artists big and small what it can do for them.
Last year, it promoted high profile releases from artists including Katy Perry with billboard advertising, emails to subscribers, and links to live shows. ‘We didn’t ask for a billboard,’ Martin Kirkup, a partner at the marketing firm that represents Perry told Bloomberg. ‘[Spotify] offered it.’
SUSPICIOUS LABELSIt’s reckoned Spotify’s motivation behind the artist platform play is wrapped up in its imminent stock market listing. Although its estimated $20bn valuation would make it the biggest initial public tech stock since Facebook, Spotify knows it has to prove it is underpinned by a stable commercial model.
The company has been engaged in a constant power game with the record labels which has in many ways defined its business model to date.
The ‘big three’ labels all have equity stakes in Spotify – Sony BMG has 5.8%, Universal
Direct listing in sight for SpotifyThe streaming service is set to be one of the most eagerly anticipated public listings for some time.
At the time of writing, Spotify is on course to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in a matter of weeks. The move could propel the music streaming service to a seat alongside the elite in consumer tech.
Being a publicly traded company has been Spotify’s goal for some time, with its investors eager to see a return. The business has been expensive to run, with billions needed to keep paying record labels royalties, as well as the cost of sales and marketing as it seeks to maintain the growth rate by unlocking consumers in more parts of the globe.
It has had 17 private funding rounds, raising around £2bn, ratcheting up its value every time.
FIT TO FLOATIts stratospheric value has made a ‘trade sale’ too remote a possibility. Few companies in the world can afford to buy it, and those that can no longer need to.
Public markets typically take a dim view of loss-making companies. Spotify has long been one of those. (The interest rate on its debt apparently rises by 1% every six months it doesn’t go public.)
Barry McCarthy, Spotify’s CFO, has been working on getting the company fit for float ever since he was brought on board from Netflix four years ago. He guided the film and TV streaming business’ IPO in 2002.
Around 18 months ago, McCarthy hired Paul Vogel, a seasoned Wall Street operator as Spotify’s head of investor relations.
DIRECT TO MARKETIn December, Spotify filed its documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US.
It also put flesh on the bone of how exactly it intends to do what many thought impossible with its existing financial model and become a public company. It wants to do this through a rather unconventional ‘direct listing’, which will see it issue no new shares and raise no new money but allow investors to make their return.
The combination of this unorthodox float mechanism, the excitement of a new high profile tech stock and concern of its long term viability will give it star billing for anyone connected to tech, music or finance.
18
BRIEFING: SPOTIFY
Spotify has found its hopes of accelerating subscriber growth in the US in particular stunted by Apple Music and Amazon, fuelled by the big three who are only too happy to have several streaming players slugging it out. Recent growth in users signing up to streaming services from Apple, Amazon and smaller subscription services like Tidal also leaves Spotify with less scope to raise prices.
Amazon and Apple are playing bigger games with music subscription. Both have vast existing customer bases and platforms to integrate their music services into. They also have no need to make profits from music, thanks to enormous cash piles gained from other parts of their businesses. It gives the ‘pure play’ Spotify little wriggle room under the current rules of engagement.
EXPERIMENTING WITH OPTIONSTweaking the model has been a subject of debate at Spotify. There have been experiments ‘beyond music’. But the size of the business of podcasts is questionable; video and messaging too complex; news too far a lurch.
Spotify’s thinking is to focus its efforts on music. It has enjoyed decent success in building its playlist channels, notably Rap Caviar, as standalone music brands with the aim to exert some power as a ‘hit maker’ within the industry.
But becoming a platform for artists would represent a big transformation in how the company’s finances are structured.
THE FINANCIAL SQUEEZESpotify has a very narrow revenue source: in 2017, subscriptions made up 90% of its total revenue; the rest comes from advertising on its free service. Its costs are huge and don’t get much better with scale. In 2016 it spent a staggering £2bn on its ‘cost of goods’ (royalties) – accounting for 85% of revenue.
Spotify’s journey in numbers
Amount of funding raised:
$2.7bnover 17 rounds.
Average proportion of revenue from subscription fees:
80%Percentage of revenue Spotify pays labels:
52%2015 valuation $8.5bn
$20bn(estimated)2018 IPO valuation
One music executive says: ‘The cost of content [for Spotify] on a marginal basis is very high. And it doesn’t get cheaper to keep attracting new customers [with scale].’
If the platform play works, not only would Spotify create a considerably more diversified revenue base, it would blunt the power of labels.
Spotify also admitted last year to racking up much higher costs from expanding into new countries, improving the platform with features and hiring staff. It spent £344m in 2016 on signing up customers, and its wage bill reached £190m.
Industry analyst Mark Mulligan says: ‘You sense the frustration with being a repository for music. Spotify is slowly, quietly and subtly reversing into label services.’
It will be hard for Spotify to do so without sparking panic among the already paranoid partners it relies on. Its coming disruption could cause big problems for labels in the near future. For the soon-to-be publicly traded Spotify, it needs them on side for the time being.
Overall revenue and loss
-£221m -£247m
-£570m
Source: Midia Research
-500
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
-1000
2014 2015 2016
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek
Subscribers Ad supported
20
REPORT: TRAVEL
Travel turbulenceA new wave of startups are poised to transform how we book trips.
Tel Aviv-based Fairfly offers a similar solution for corporate travel managers. The company reckons an airfare changes nearly 100 times from the point the flight is published until takeoff. It will track these changes and offer real-time options to cancel or amend a flight to snatch a better price.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEMThere’s a subsection of travel startups focused on offering help when trouble strikes. US-based Freebird allows travellers with cancelled or delayed flights (or a missed connection) to quickly rebook on any airline – for free.
When flights are overbooked, severely delayed or cancelled, passengers in Europe are legally entitled to compensation, yet very few ever claim what they’re owed. Airhelp takes care of the mountain of paperwork for a 25% cut of the total refund. The company has attracted the attention of investors and raised more than £9m in Series A funding.
TRAVEL INCUBATORS Rather than go it alone, many founders in the industry are partnering with established brands. It’s an approach that works particularly well within the experiment-friendly confines of co-working spaces, incubators and accelerators.
In London, co-working operator The Trampery runs Traveltech Lab, a dedicated location built solely for travel startups. Late last year, the lab announced a ‘mentorship-driven’ accelerator programme called Hotel Jumpstart, in which startups receive
C ongratulations! Your sister is getting married. First, some good news: the wedding is planned for a blissfully
sunny beach in the Bahamas. The bad news: you’ll need to spend a research-heavy afternoon bouncing between booking sites to snag a cheap flight from London.
For years, online flight booking has been dominated by a handful of incumbents, from The Priceline Group (owner of Priceline, Booking.com, Kayak and Momondo) and Expedia Inc (Expedia, Cheap Tickets, Hotwire, Orbitz, Travelocity and Trivago), to the Chinese company Ctrip (parent of Skyscanner).
Such online travel agencies, meta-search engines and flight fare aggregators have unquestionably made arranging trips easier than in years past. (Remember all those hours spent in high-street travel agents and phoning multiple airlines to compare fees?)
And yet for many people, booking a flight remains somewhat painful – the wanderlust equivalent of getting a root canal. Websites are often cluttered and unintuitive. Pricing is opaque, fluctuating from day to day and from one site to the next. While the huge variety
of choice should be good for consumers, it can also make the experience overwhelming, stressful and time-consuming. More dark art than science, more chore than fun.
THE NEW GENERATIONA new wave of companies has been taking notes and adding clever twists to the booking experience. The travel tech space has surged.
According to industry news outlet Skift, startups in the space saw ‘a record amount’ of venture investment in 2017. Data intelligence firm CB Insights adds that almost £3.9bn was invested in roughly 350 deals last year; the ‘fifth consecutive year of deal growth’ for travel tech companies, an area it says is ‘rapidly evolving’.
THE PRICE IS RIGHTBecause of its direct impact on travellers’ wallets, price optimisation is a fast-growing field. Flyr, a San Francisco-based startup, allows users to ‘lock-in’ an airfare if more time is needed to plan a trip and actually buy the ticket. If the price rises in the interim, Flyr will pay the difference. If it drops, it will alert you.
The Luckytrip co-founders Alex and Tiff Burns at their Hackney office
21
REPORT: TRAVEL
strategic support from Hotels.com and the Expedia Affiliate Network, including access to Expedia’s data.
EASYJET DREAMSAirlines are keen to join in. Budget brand Easyjet has set up a joint programme with tech accelerator and incubator Founders Factory. As part of the scheme, announced in 2016, five early-stage startups will be supported and two new companies co-created from scratch each year.
Among its early cohort are Luckytrip and Flightsayer (see below), plus Taptrip, a service built entirely in-house that allows users to view flight options in the context of their personal calendar.
JetBlue and Lufthansa have also dipped their toes in the accelerator game. More than a dozen such travel-focused programmes now exist.
5 travel startups taking off
a LUCKYTRIPFounded 2014The inspiration search engine Brothers Tiff and Alex Burns built Luckytrip in the kitchen of their Hackney flat. It’s now one of the fastest-growing travel startups in London.
The Burns brothers tell Courier that inspiration and discovery were the key missing ingredients on most travel websites. ‘We really love going away but we hate the planning process,’ Tiff Burns explains. ‘Travel booking websites tend to look like spreadsheets of prices, because most of them started out as spreadsheets in someone’s bedroom back in the day.’
To fix this, the pair invented an app that soothes planning headaches. A user sets their preferred budget and dates, taps a ‘Lucky’ button, and is offered trip suggestions broken down into three
categories: ‘Somewhere to go’, ‘Somewhere to stay’, and ‘Something to make you happy’ (i.e. handpicked things to do). If the results aren’t quite right, simply hit the ‘Lucky’ button again.
Luckytrip was one of the first two startups admitted into the Founders Factory travel accelerator programme. It has since partnered with Booking.com for hotel suggestions and Skyscanner for flights.
a JACK’S FLIGHT CLUBFounded 2016Cheap deals to your inboxJack Sheldon – Texas-born, London-based – runs this free email service focused on cheap flights.
Sheldon and his team send hand-picked flight deals – hidden offers, discounts and ‘error fares’ – to their bulging membership.
Sign-ups have recently hit 350,000 in the UK and Ireland. ‘It’s been an incredibly rapid growth period considering we were at just over 40,000 this time last year,’ he says.
It all began as a bit of fun: ‘Being a bit of a numbers guy at heart, I started exploring different methods of tracking prices and looking for deals,’ he tells Courier. ‘The sheer excitement and curiosity from my friends and family about the bargains I’d find is what really made me think there was more to this than just a personal hobby.’
One year ago, Sheldon began monetising the site by adding a premium membership, giving access to four times as many deals.
The company has been bootstrapped so far and kept costs low by working remotely. ‘I’ve yet to meet our latest two team members in person,’ he says. ‘One of them has been with us for three months now.’
a SRPRS.MEFounded 2014Journey into the unknownNot for the faint-hearted: Srprs.me, based in Amsterdam, believes the best adventures should be spontaneous. Users say when they want to leave and for how many days they would like to be gone for, and the company takes care of the rest. Unlike Luckytrip, Srprs.me goes a step further and chooses the destination, flights and hotel all without the customers’ knowledge. ‘You will discover your destination at the airport,’ the site explains.
Stefan Wobben, one of the company’s founders, came up with the idea after he asked a friend to book him a flight and only tell him the departure gate and when to arrive at the airport.
So how do the surprise trips actually work? A week before the departure date, the company shares the location’s weather forecast (helpful for packing), but only reveals the destination after sending out a scratchcard in the post explaining what time to arrive at the terminal.
According to the company, the goal is to avoid what it calls ‘decision stress’ and also to ‘give the travel industry a shake’.
a FLIGHTSAYERFounded 2015Always on timeFlight delays, cancellations and missed connections cost passengers billions of pounds per year globally.
Armed with a $1.75m (£1.26m) grant from Nasa, Boston-based startup Flightsayer says its advanced simulation algorithms and machine learning technology can predict flight delays hours, days or even weeks before takeoff.
‘As a former road warrior, I used various rules of thumb to book better flights,’ says founder Bala Chandran, a frequent traveller. ‘But I was frustrated that there wasn’t a service that would just tell me if my flight was likely to be delayed.’
Chandran created Flightsayer to ease this frustration. The service allows users to search delay predictions by flight, airport and route, and receive alternate flight recommendations.
a TRVLFounded 2010DIY travel agent Through its free service, Trvl is looking to monetise travel advice for everyone, from the established blogger to the casual traveller. Users can set up pages and make hotel and travel recommendations, earning a commission when others book through their page and complete their stay. Customers can also reach out to these ‘agents’ for advice, a sort of personalised recommendation feature that Trvl sees as lacking in the sea of other travel sites.
Though it’s attempting to reinvent travel, the company currently relies on some of the industry’s biggest names to operate: Booking.com, Hotels.com, Expedia and Priceline. These established firms pay Trvl a commission on each booking (the majority of which Trvl says it passes on to users).
Trvl picked up £2.2m in funding last year and plans to grow its business to include car rentals and flights.
Travel startups have their sights on these seven areas
Price fluctuations and transparency
Flight cancellations and delays
Trip discovery and inspiration
Spontaneous and deal-driven booking
User recommendations and suggestions
Artificial intelligence and voice commands
Augmented reality
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A crop of ambitious women are leading the formation of a new startup ecosystem built by and for women. It’s a milestone moment.
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FEMALE FOUNDERS
I t’s been a momentous yet maddening time for women in business. Across the pond, the sexual harassment cases brought against Uber and Google were swiftly followed by the #MeToo movement. Closer to home, report after report revealed how poorly women
are represented across Europe’s startup ecosystem. In the UK, the BBC was shamed for its gender pay gap.
The statistics aren’t very pretty, either. Each year, only 15% of funding in the UK goes to female founders; women make up less than 20% of VC investors; and just 6% of European venture-backed tech startups have female CEOs.
Why, then, is the mood on the ground so buoyant?
In the UK last year, a rapid and unprecedented growth of events, networks, funds, courses and workspaces geared towards female founders started to emerge.
AllBright and Blooming Founders, both female founders’ networks, launched profit-making conferences over multiple days. New series of business talks such as Women Who, Future Girl Corp and Bumble Bizz took place at venues from Shoreditch House and the Ace Hotel to Google Campus. London gained its first female-focused co-working space, Blooms. The list goes on.
Mentorship schemes and professional development courses have also gained steam, meeting the appetite to learn new skills from FF
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When it comes to helping women start businesses, Thomson explains, one of the main challenges is self-perception. The business world is still male-dominated and, until this changes, women need to see other women in leadership roles.
Thomson thinks role models and support groups are key, as confidence comes with seeing ‘someone you can relate to’ – even if only on the grounds of a shared gender – succeeding in business.
As for skills and knowledge, Thomson believes the challenge is often less about what women know than what women think they know. To counter this, sharing information is essential, whether practical or anecdotal. Thomson says, ‘The biggest thing that kills someone’s confidence is when they don’t feel prepared.’
Many of the women in attendance in Shoreditch that day have gone on to become successful CEOs. Numra Siddiqui says the event motivated her to launch her restaurant residency, Empress Market, in Hackney last year. Up until then she’d been running a Pakistani street food stall for three years, but didn’t know how to move forward and scale the business.
‘It might be cheesy,’ says Siddiqui, ‘but [the FGC event] was really inspiring and morale-building.’ One month later, she ran her first supper club; she’s since opened a restaurant and cocktail bar residency in Hackney.
Throughout 2017, practical business events for women started to take place all over London. FGC continued as a series of free monthly talks expanding on the subjects
women both working in and running businesses. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, investors are increasingly starting internal programmes to reassess how they fund women in business and, consequently, have started hiring more female partners. Several fintech startups signed up to the government’s ‘Women in Finance’ charter, committing to have women in 30% of senior leadership roles by 2021.
If these ventures have the impact they say they will, many more women could soon have the money, skills and networks often required to start successful companies and take up leadership positions. The startup landscape will look vastly different.
Of course, there are many hurdles, from unconscious bias to ageism and institutional prejudice. It will take several years at best for many women starting businesses today to
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‘I wanted to convey that one day, there will be boardrooms of women and corporations of women – not just startups.’
SHARMADEAN REID Co-founder Future Girl Corp
grow them successfully; for VC firms to reach an equal balance of female and male investors; and for exited female founders to become investors or mentors themselves.
It will be a long, sometimes frustrating journey, but the shift has begun. 2018 could prove to be a watershed moment for women in business.
THE CHOSEN FEWOn a drizzly morning in October 2016, 100 women gathered in a room in Shoreditch for a day-long skills workshop. All successful or aspiring female founders, they talked about their business plans, vision statements, social media and marketing strategies. Attendees were encouraged to network hard and keep in touch. Some women handed out their business cards immediately; those more sceptical held back.
Before the classroom sessions kicked off, they were welcomed by co-founder Sharmadean Reid. Hundreds of women had applied, she said, and they were the chosen few. Each attendee was assigned a number – following a tradition started at Harvard Business School. Together, they formed the Future Girl Corp. The group’s mission statement: ‘Inspiring the next generation of future female CEOs.’
‘I wanted it to sound like something that would be in RoboCop,’ Reid explains to Courier. ‘I was really into big, 80s
corporations. I wanted to convey the idea that, one day, there will be boardrooms of women and corporations of women – and not just startups.’
Amy Thomson, Future Girl Corp’s co-founder, adds: ‘It was born out of the massive need for support for women.’ Support would come through ‘not only understanding how to start a business and receiving factual information but also just from talking to inspirational women’.
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covered in the one-day event. ‘It’s not always the most sexy information, but it’s relevant and important,’ says Thomson. Topics have ranged from financials and legals to community building.
Thomson says FGC started as a response to more funding opportunities arising for women and not, as might be expected, as a means to fuel them. ‘We saw a huge trend in investment into female founders, and also a need for more infrastructure to help make those female founders successful.’
BUILDING BLOCKSIn November 2016, Debbie Wosskow, then-CEO of house-swap site Love Home Swap, and Anna Jones, then-CEO of the publisher Hearst, announced the launch of a new venture, AllBright. The company wanted
Bumble Bizz A female- and mobile-friendly professional network. Like with the company’s dating app, women have to connect with men first. Bumble is running a series of events with female founders to promote the app.
Cosmopolitan Self Made Summit A one-day event for ‘entrepreneurial- minded young women’ with panel discussions and mentoring sessions from magazine Cosmopolitan.
23 Code Street A coding school based in London for women where every paying student funds lessons for disadvantaged students in India.
Future Girl Corp Started by Wah Nails founder Sharmadean Reid and Seen agency founder Amy Thomson, Future Girl Corp aims to ‘support the next gen of female CEOs’.
Blooming Founders The female founders’ network with over 2,000 members. This year, founder Lu Li plans to run 100 events and open a second workspace in London.
WOMEN’S NETWORKS1. One of Future Girl Corp’s events for
female founders. 2-5. Inside Blooms, the women-focused workspace in Old Street. 6. Women in attendance at Future Girl Corp’s workshops share their vision statements for their businesses.
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Ambitious Ladies in TechA mentor network for women working at (but not running) tech startups. It pairs women with two mentors (one male, one female) for one hour per month.
Angel AcademeAn angel network that will only invest in companies with at least one woman in the founding team. It also encourages women to become angel investors themselves.
Code First Girls A not-for-profit that funds and runs courses to teach women the skills for a career in tech, from the founders of accelerator Entrepreneur First.
Women WhoAn event series and weekly newsletter founded by Otegha Uwagba. Primarily aimed at women working in the creative sector, it’s increasingly attracting professionals from fields such as finance and law.
AllBrightA female business network founded by Debbie Wosskow and Anna Jones. There are plans to open three members’ clubs this year, along with 12-week training courses through the AllBright Academy for female founders
to provide the infrastructure that the female founder ecosystem needed. ‘Making the UK the best place to be a female leader,’ ran its mission statement.
According to research carried out by AllBright, one in 10 women in the UK are interested in starting a business, but far fewer than that do, feeling they lack access to the necessary finance, skills or networks.
In offering this, Wosskow sees an opportunity to ‘combine profit with purpose’. Her involvement brings serious commercial clout: she sold Love Home Swap for £40m last year and she sits on the Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board.
AllBright has been quick to make its mark. Last year, it trialled a crowdfunding site for female founders, raised money for a small fund (and backed eight female-founded businesses), put on a six-day festival of events in London and Manchester with 1,000 attendees, launched a training academy and, most ambitiously, is due to open a women-only members club in Bloomsbury in February 2018.
While there have been hiccups – its crowdfunding site failed to get traction, and it came far short of raising its fund’s £10m target – AllBright has largely delivered everything with polish and professionalism. For the events, for example, AllBright attracted an impressive crop of mentors – including Pip Murray, founder of the fast-growing peanut butter brand Pip and Nut – and speakers at its summer festival have included Local Globe partner Suzanne Ashman and beauty brand founder Liz Earle.
For Wosskow, ‘The AllBright Club is like what might happen if Soho House and WeWork had an enlightened baby.’
TALE OF NEW YORK No doubt Wosskow and Jones were also motivated by the runaway success of The Wing. Based in New York, the women-only members club received a £24m investment from WeWork just one year after opening its first site.
The Wing’s particular brand of expensive, pastel-coloured feminism has proven successful. The actress and writer Lena Dunham is one of 1,500 members, while the waiting list stretches into the thousands.
And a second site in SoHo – with a conference room named after Blanche Devereaux, a character from US sitcom The Golden Girls – has just opened.
Not everyone is a fan – and by no means do all its members use the Chanel-sponsored
beauty room on a day-to-day basis. But the WeWork investment certainly threw the ‘niche’ sector of women’s workspaces into quite a different light.
AllBright is hoping to bring a similar allure, prestige and aesthetic to its club. Its founding members include influential women in tech, media and politics. There will be a cocktail bar, cafe, library and beauty room, along with workspaces and bookable meeting rooms.
At £600 per year, plus a £250 joining fee, an AllBright membership is more affordable than The Wing’s £1,700 annual fee – but still rather exclusive.
UNDERSERVED MARKETLu Li, who started female founders’ network Blooming Founders in 2015, thinks WeWork’s investment into The Wing proves there’s an underserved market here.
In October last year, she opened London’s first female-focused co-working space, Blooms, near Old Street. The majority of women in her 2,000-strong network, she says, typically have very different needs to those that most co-working spaces cater for.
Visitors to Blooms might initially think it doesn’t seem so different from other co-working spaces. After all, there are desks, sofas, meeting rooms and more than a few pot plants. Yet there’s also a crèche, at least three visibly pregnant
‘It’s been proven time and time again that the more diverse you are the more you help the bottom line.’ANISAH OSMAN BRITTON Founder 23 Code Street
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members and, on the day Courier visited, just two men.
Blooms offers cheap, flexible membership packages, costing £25-200 per month. (WeWork’s hot-desking option, by comparison, is £500 per month.) Members can choose to work from Blooms full-time, or just when needs be.
‘Practically speaking, women who are starting out are quite savvy with their money,’ Li says. ‘They have to be, because 80% of them are bootstrapped – investing their own money rather than raising investment – so they think twice before spending anything.’
PINK WALLS AND FREE TAMPONS Li insists that the impact of the aesthetics of the workspace also shouldn’t be downplayed. ‘You should be in an environment that makes you feel at home.
‘Historically, the business world has been created by guys, for guys,’ Li continues. That’s carried into startup workplaces too.
While WeWork doesn’t intentionally design or advertise ‘male-focused’ spaces, in some respects it does just that. After all, an environment that offers free beer on tap but not, say, free tampons has been created with a specific consumer in mind.
That’s not to say that Blooms’ decor necessarily appeals to all women – and no men – or that any workspace could. Rather, it has been designed with the typical Blooming Founders’ member in mind: there’s a beauty room (apparently used more regularly for meetings than makeup), several sofa areas for informal networking and, yes, a few pink walls.
Lauren Brener and Frances Para-Mallam, founders of two-year-old digital agency Duo Creative, are full-time, founding members of Blooms. They spent 18 months renting space at a WeWork site. But for Brener, ‘Over time it lost its original flair and lacked personal touch, becoming ever more corporate.’
Blooms, by contrast, ‘hit home on a number of elements which modern co-working spaces fail to recognise’. The lower price was a big draw, as was the fact that ‘it feels like an extended living room’.
SEXIST? ELITIST? Such female-focused ventures have their detractors. Like The Wing, the AllBright Club has been criticised for its price tag.
The business is ‘unashamedly profit-making’ says Wosskow; nevertheless the £600 annual fee sits at odds with the company’s overall messaging, which claims it wants to help all female founders.
‘AllBright is here to turbo-charge women’s journey to equality,’ stated one recent newsletter from the brand.
Although the club does offer a small discount for under-27s, it feels quite exclusively designed for a woman of a certain age, background and income.
The same problem is true of the scores of courses launching for women in business, many of which cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. It was for this reason that New York-based Courier columnist Phoebe Lovatt
decided the events and networking sessions run by WW Club, the global women’s network for creative professionals she founded in 2015, should be free.
‘There’s a danger of perpetuating the elitist “old boys club” cycle that we should be seeking to break,’ she says.
Greater equality and diversity can have commercial implications, too.
‘If you’re being really cynical, it comes down to the bottom line,’ argues Anisah Osman Britton, founder of 23 Code Street, a coding school for women.
‘It’s been proven time and time again that the more diverse you are the more you help the bottom line. Take products and services: when you have a workforce that represents the society you’re working for, you start to build for everyone, not just for people who look like you.’
Some female founders, however, are sceptical about the benefits these moves claim to bring.
Focusing on ‘upskilling’ women can reinforce unhelpful – and untrue – stereotypes that women are less business-savvy than men.
Other founders lament such tokenistic gestures, worrying they create new forms of exclusion, segregation or elitism.
Nicola McClafferty, investment director at VC firm Draper Esprit, once worked in a female-only space. ‘Most rooms I walk into, I’m outnumbered.
‘It was nice to be in a different environment for a change. But women should be benchmarking themselves against anyone in the workplace.’
Osman Britton is no stranger to criticisms of reverse sexism. ‘I have an issue with female-only workspaces, but not an issue with female-focused spaces,’ she says.
‘And there’s an important difference. “Female-focused” just means trying to create a culture where women feel accepted. Our tactic is more to say that we need a workforce that represents our society.’
BEYOND WOMENIt’s a notion that Li agrees with. While creating spaces that appeal to and advance female founders is a key priority for her, she’s also designed Blooms with the UK’s growing number of freelancers and part-time business founders, of all genders, in mind.
‘Ultimately I’m looking to [cater] for this massive shift in society – people starting their own businesses,’ she says.
Graham Rittener, founder of Barcelona-based design lab Zinc, is one of the six men
1. The feminist library at The Wing in New York. 2. Lu Li in Blooms, the co-working space she founded. 3. Workshops at 23 Code Street, which teaches coding skills to women.
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who are members at Blooms. His country-hopping schedule doesn’t fit most co-working spaces’ inflexible templates, so he prefers Blooms whenever he’s in London.
Between 2008 and 2016, the number of freelancers in the UK increased by 43%, from 1.4 million to 2 million (of which one in five work in London). The number of new businesses also grew 8% from 2015 to 2016.
AllBright is also keen to provide space for this growing sector. ‘15% of the UK workforce is freelance already, so you have this sense as an entrepreneur of where the opportunity is, and take things in that direction,’ says Wosskow, who plans to open at least two more AllBright clubs in London and Manchester this year.
Yet the current ecosystem around startups, says Li, is tailored almost exclusively to high-growth, capital-intensive businesses. It belies the fact that many founders are growing businesses more slowly – and, often, more securely.
‘The further you are from the two young white guys – one with a computer science degree, one with a business degree – in terms of gender, skin colour and background, you’re [disregarded] by the current ecosystem,’ she says. ‘I think Blooms as an infrastructure serves those people.’
COMMUNITY MATTERSIn November 2017, Li ran her first two-day conference for female founders. Hundreds of women, and some men, congregated on the top floor of the Havas Media building above King’s Cross.
Talks ran through how to pitch to investors, working during motherhood, managing growth and building a diverse culture; there were legal workshops on expanding to the US and VC term sheets; an Ottolenghi-esque salad bar lunch, and gin and tonic-fuelled networking to close.
The conference developed out of frustration, Li explains. She was frequently being asked to speak at other, male-dominated conferences on token panels about ‘female entrepreneurship’ rather than ‘business’.
Her ambitions for the conference were similar to those of FGC: she wanted the event to start ‘open, candid, genuine conversations’, give aspiring founders role models and offer practical advice, tailored especially to those at an early stage. ‘From an ecosystem perspective, that’s where you have to work to lift people and get them to the next level,’ Li says.
Some attendees told Courier the talks were too basic; others found it frustrating that questions about work-life balance or parenting recurred (a topic audience members rarely ask male founders). Many said they found it refreshing to hear honest accounts of other founders’ highs and lows.
GIRL GANGSMany successful female founders talk about the value of surrounding themselves with other women who are also starting businesses, for advice, support and candid conversations.
‘The women that you pick up on the journey, who are going through the same thing, have really helped me along the way,’ says Wosskow.
‘It’s quite hard to access a very open and transparent approach to what really happens when you’re starting a business,’ adds Jones.
It’s relevant to note that most women starting businesses are solo founders – 70% of the Blooming Founders network run businesses alone – making these support networks even more valued.
‘It’s an isolating experience. It can feel like no-one really understands what you’re going through,’ says Siddiqui. Meeting with other female founders gives her ‘a support structure and a sense of camaraderie, that we’re not alone in our mission’.
That’s not to say that advice and support can’t come from men; many female founders attribute much of their success to their male mentors. ‘I think 50% of the people who help us are men, if not more,’ says Osman Britton.
Nevertheless, there’s a common feeling that women’s networks create a safe space, to ask questions and receive honest answers.
It was partly to kickstart this network-forming process that Thomson and Reid set up FGC. ‘[We] built our networks up over time. Your success is [down to] the people around you.’
THE NEW NETWORKING‘We had this idea of a business school, with alumni, who would create a self-fulfilling cycle,’ says Thomson; successive generations of female CEOs forming break-off groups and mentoring one another. The ironic name, the neon pink and blue logo and the event format was all very deliberate, says Thomson, and very different from the typical business school. ‘You can centralise a community around an aesthetic because people relate to it.’
The notion of relating to a business event, as a woman, is a relatively new concept. ‘Turning up to a big networking event – where quite often people are just standing in great big circles, lots of guys in suits – doesn’t feel like the kind of environment [women] thrive in and feel comfortable in,’ says Wosskow.
Increasingly, networking is shaking off its awkward image, and gaining new professional skills has kudos. Naomi Oluleye, who ran four panel events to market the launch of networking app Bumble Bizz, thinks personal development is having a moment.
‘There’s definitely been a shift. People are really wanting to learn and educate themselves constantly,’ she says.
Incidentally, Oluleye is a member of Blooming Founders – and one of the 100 original members of the Future Girl Corp. Her first two clients when she took her events business independent came through the FGC network.
Looking ahead, expect more women’s networking events, workspaces – and maybe even free tampons – to continue to rewrite the rules of the startup scene.
‘There’s going to be a massive, positive shift,’ says Amy Thomson of FGC. ‘There are incredible female leaders out there, and they’re starting to speak out a lot more.’
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1. A panel discussion at FoundHer, AllBright’s summer event series that included workshops and talks for female founders. 2. AllBright founders Debbie Wosskow (left) and Anna Jones. 3. Pip Jamieson, founder of creative network, The Dots.
The trials and tribulations of raising money as a female founder Why do companies led by women receive far less investment than those led by men – and how can that change?
How three startups are changing the workplace.
Pip Jamieson has become one of the best-known female founders within London’s tech scene. In December 2017, she announced her latest £4m funding round for her creative network The Dots.
Yet in the months leading up to it, she made sure a male member of her senior leadership team was alongside her at every investment meeting.
‘I learnt the hard way,’ says Jamieson. ‘I still do the pitch, but I [don’t] get the respect. In some meetings, investors only speak to my male counterpart.’
Jamieson’s experience is echoed many times over by other female founders. Take Sarah Wood, another prominent female founder based in London. Her adtech agency, Unruly, was acquired by News Corp for £114m in 2015.
And yet, she told Courier, she found herself frequently mistaken for a PR in investment meetings.
REVERSE MENTORINGLast year, Jamieson began ‘reverse mentoring’ a number of VCs. ‘They’re really willing to change the way they’re assessing founders,’ she says. Typically, she argues, VCs ‘unconsciously look for masculine traits – people who are dogmatically wedded to their vision’.
‘The way they test for that is to throw a left-of-centre question at a founder – like an idea for a product that’s different from what they’ve presented. They want a founder to say, that’s ridiculous, and dismiss the idea out of hand. It’s a bit Trump-esque. But that’s not how [people with feminine traits] tend to act; they take ideas onboard, listen, assess, are more collaborative – and then they’ll be decisive.’
AMBITIONS OF EQUALITY There are difficulties not only with the way investors actively judge founders, but also with subliminal assumptions that may be
made. Robyn Scott is co-founder of Apolitical, a platform which connects civil servants across the world. ‘In some ways the biggest problem is an unconscious bias assuming women’s ambitions are lesser than men’s,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t manifest itself in outrageous and shocking stories, but more of an insidious white noise against the conversations you have with, particularly, male VCs.’
‘It’s a fact that there are fewer women who’ve founded and exited huge and disruptive businesses,’ she adds. ‘VCs are well-known for pattern recognition. Whether pattern recognition in terms of person, or model – “Uber for x”. They don’t have a good pattern yet of women starting wildly successful disruptive businesses, in large numbers.’
WOMEN BACKING WOMENJamieson believes getting more women into VC firms and investing will have positive knock-on effects.
Yet this will clearly take some time. The problem partly stems from the fact that many investors are themselves successful founders – and so, on the most part, men. Increasingly, however, funds such as Local Globe are taking on younger women and training them to become senior partners to address this imbalance.
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Plenty of companies are good at publicising their good intentions about readdressing the gender imbalance in the workplace, but few put words into action.
For Anisah Osman Britton, startup founders all too frequently ‘focus on the culture they want, forgetting that it’s not a culture that suits everyone else’.
At many of the UK’s most successful young companies there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to gender, age, race and economic background.
Talent retention is becoming a major concern and companies are increasingly recognising how workplace values can set them apart.
Here are some examples of the most successful, or promising, strategies being adopted by companies.
Starling: Start with senior management Having a woman at the top has had a positive trickle-down effect at startup bank Starling. Of the company’s 136 staff, 46 employees, and a third of the senior management team, are women, along with a quarter of the board – CEO Anne Boden and chief platform officer Megan Caywood.
Having a female CEO, says Boden, helps attract good employees. ‘People expect things to be more inclusive. The women of Starling realise they have every prospect of being promoted and having their opinion shared. We also attract very fair-minded men.’
Ustwo: Equal parental leave In May 2017, the London studio of design company Ustwo introduced a generous parental leave package for its 85 employees. Parents – male or female – receive six months paid leave at full salary. FF
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‘I wish unconscious bias didn’t exist, but I think founders do need to put in place coping mechanisms to deal with it,’ says Jamieson, who says she is ‘a more assertive version of [her]self ’ when meeting investors.
Scott agrees that ambitious female founders ‘need to learn how to head those biases off before they sabotage what you’re trying to do’.
‘You have to assume that if you’re talking to a man, there is a strong chance he is going to be underestimating your ambitions on the business side of things, and you have to head that off. We often start conversations with really ballsy numbers and use that to set the stage. People are sometimes taken aback with it. It deals with any latent assumption.’
CONFIDENCE CONTROVERSY Many people within the business world say women lack the confidence and ambition of men.
‘I’m reluctant to call it confidence, but women are naturally more reserved,’ says McClafferty. ‘VCs want people to sell you on a big vision. Women have a tendency to undersell ambition.’
Kate Daly, co-founder of divorce app Amicable, also disagrees with the lazy generalisation. ‘I’m so bored of hearing that women are under-confident,’ she says. ‘I go to a lot of events where it’s trotted out that women need mentors, are not bullish enough. But we’re not under-confident, we don’t always need mentoring. We need people who have money to spend their money on women.’
Daly thinks the problem lies within VC culture, and not with female founders. ‘They want you to grab their attention with a flashy presentation that doesn’t shape up to reality at all. They would rather give money to two men bullshitting than two women who’ve proven traction.’
CHANGE THE GAME Yet courting VC money is far from the only way to grow a business, despite the acclaim successive rounds of funding receive in the media.
‘VCs have a responsibility to be building a firm that’s more representative,’ says Nicola McClafferty, investment director at Draper Esprit. ‘The best decision-making comes from a place of diversity.’
Sarah Turner is co-founder of Angel Academe, a group of angel investors which only invests in companies with at least one woman on the founding team.
She thinks that with the numbers as they are – with most investment decisions being made by men – even the women who do work in venture capital start following the examples of their male colleagues.
‘They’re so heavily outnumbered,’ she explains. ‘Behaviour starts to change when 30-40% of investors are women. Now they’re not going to be able to stick their neck out.’
To counter the imbalance, Angel Academe aims to encourage more women to become angel investors (although it counts men amongst its members).
‘It feels as though gender bias cuts both ways,’ says Turner, pointing out that if men tend to fund men, women also tend to fund women. ‘There’s a strong appetite for backing other women in our network.’
The benefits of bringing more women into investment also goes beyond female founders. ‘It makes more money available for all early-stage businesses,’ she points out.
PLAY THE GAMEUntil the status quo changes, female founders must decide which rules they want to play by.
‘I’m bored of hearing that women are under-confident. We need people to invest in women.’
KATE DALY Co-founder, Amicable
So far, four men and two women have taken parental leave, including three members of the leadership team.
‘Commercially, equal parental leave is key to helping us retain and attract diverse talent,’ says Nicki Sprinz, Ustwo’s managing director. ‘And by enabling men to take as much paid parental leave as women, it demonstrates that caring for and raising children is not a woman’s job alone.’
Streetbees: Reinventing recruitingMarket researcher Streetbees has a diverse team for a three-year-old tech startup. Its 65 staff are 45% female, 52% male and 3% non-binary, of numerous nationalities with 16 different languages. It’s the result of several key policies:
— Streetbees avoids using traditional recruitment jobs boards and agencies, which CEO Tugce Bulut believes offer fairly homogenous candidates. Streetbees encourages its whole team to find new staff through personal and professional networks, and at events and talks they attend.
— At CV stage candidates are not assessed on qualifications, educational background or technical skills. Instead, says Bulut, ‘We look at ambition, enthusiasm and curiosity.’ She believes this eliminates the advantages that many people have based on their background, rather than aptitude.
— Job descriptions emphasise the diversity of the team and flexibility of the roles – around working hours in particular – to appeal to people who might have family or other out-of-office responsibilities.
— There’s a clear structure for pay and promotions. As with large public sector organisations, Streetbees’ staff are placed in bands within certain roles. To be promoted or paid more, people must meet predetermined targets. ‘You shouldn’t be paid more for your negotiation skills, just your job skills,’ says Bulut.
‘I think the ecosystem is male-dominated and masculine. High-growth, very testosterone-driven startups end up being glamourised and portrayed as heroes,’ says Lu Li, founder of Blooming Founders.
‘The challenge is whether we should play the game,’ adds Li. ‘Or whether there’s some kind of alternative we can create for ourselves – one where we can grow the business, maybe not as fast but more sustainably, and still achieve a good result. And what is a good result? Everybody has to identify their own measure of success to start with, and that’s not only about becoming a unicorn.’
‘I hope there’s going to be more awareness around alternative ways of funding; venture capital is just one option. I think angel investors can be quite crucial. I also think all exited founders should invest back into the ecosystem and become angel investors, because that’s the best way we can support early stage startups and create a truly entrepreneurial society.’
1. Blooming Founders’ startup conference.
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PART 3 OF 3
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TOP 10 TRENDS FOR RETAILIn the third and final instalment of our retail report we explore the longer term predictions for retail strategy, and seek to understand how consumer behaviour might evolve within the next 10 years.
Over the course of our three-part series ‘Setting up Shop’ we’ve covered modern contradictions in retail, the rise of in store technology and shared some examples of global retailers doing ‘new retail’ incredibly well. We also introduced you to our leisure team, who discussed the role of leisure in shaping retail destinations along with emphasising the importance of creating a mix of F&B, leisure and traditional retail in new destinations to offer a balanced experience for customers. So, what’s next? We’ve shared 5 trends happening now that will shape retail as we know it:
1 KYC – Know your Customer To survive it is imperative retailers fully understand their customer’s wants and needs.
2 Community not Commerce If entertainment is the new product, stores will need to create excitement to pull you into an environment where you want to spend time beyond making a purchase.
3 Transparent Retail People are more and more conscious of a products journey.
Improvements in technology now allow brands to showcase the journey of products; whether to protect their reputation, to inform their customers, or to ensure the quality and authenticity of goods.
4 ‘I Want to Hold your Hand’ In a world where everything is available at the touch of a button, customers want bespoke products and more guidance on product selection from the retailer, showing them what they should be buying to suit their individual needs and wants.
5 Off-Price is On Retailers are seeing the value of having a presence in outlet centres. As a result, there has been continued growth across Europe and Asia due to a belief that they provide a solution to ‘excess stock and slow growth’.
We believe this is the start of retail’s evolution period, not its decline. The future of bricks and mortar looks bright but different. As retailers evolve to meet consumers ever changing needs and expectations, physical retail units as we know them are becoming obsolete. This can be a result of the
wrong configuration, location and specification.
We believe winning bricks and mortar stores will need to adapt to offer:
‘Memories’ – give shoppers something that lasts beyond their purchase and makes them want to come back for more.
‘Discovery’ – revealing new concepts on a regular basis – think additional retailers, pop ups and so on.
‘Fun and Community’ – curated spaces people want to visit and spend time in, with an emphasis on fun.
‘Every Day’ – making everyday essentials easily accessible
‘Expanding Horizons’ – culture, history and education will no longer be siloed from retail. Instead, they will be incorporated into the wider experience.
‘Bringing People Together’ – shopping centres will be places that appeal to all ages and demographics.
Landlords, occupiers and owners that have too much of the wrong space in the wrong location and are not adaptable will be defeated during this evolution period. However, we encourage these spaces to be transformed by remixing the tenant offering, redeveloping and/or refurbishing to create a thriving destination where people want to work, live, shop, dine and play.
It’s important to remember it is not a one-size fits all approach and strategic changes should be considered along with expert advice. At Cushman & Wakefield, we are industry leaders best positioned to advise on retail strategy for small and large projects.
Do get in touch with a member of our team to discuss further or follow us @CushWakeRTailUK to see what we are up to.
JUSTIN TAYLORHead of EMEA Retail, Cushman & Wakefield
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2020 AND BEYOND
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Despite predictions that automation and advances in delivery speed and efficiency in e-commerce spell the death of the high street, bricks-and-mortar retailing isn’t going anywhere. Even those who’ve grown up with the internet still prefer to shop in- store, according to data from Accenture.
However, the stores of 2030 will be almost unrecognisable from today’s physical retail environments. Behavioural futurist William Higham predicts that the evolution of the industry will favour large department retailers and flagship stores with the budgets to invest in cutting-edge tech, and specialist independents that are able to add value to their customers’ experience by sharing their knowledge.
He believes that in a hyper-connected world, where there is so much information and choice, consumers will be drawn to smaller retailers that truly understand their customers, have curated a relevant portfolio of products and offer authoritative advice. ‘The time is coming for the independent store,’ says Higham. ‘It’s not about inventory anymore; it’s about knowledge and community.’
‘Every store now is an extension of the flagship store in that it’s about exciting people around the brand,’ says Higham.
At the other end of the spectrum, the shopping centres of today will evolve into self-sufficient villages and communities. Developers seeking to boost footfall will increasingly look beyond leisure facilities, to include co-working and co-living spaces.
‘This younger generation like the idea of playing and working where they live. We’re already starting to see more Build To Rent properties – properties that are specifically made to rent out; kind of a non-university halls of residence.’
Meanwhile, shopping for everyday essentials will become an instant process, enabled by connected devices in our homes, and even our cars. ‘Anything that’s low interest is increasingly about convenience,’ says
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Higham. ‘It’s going to be increasingly about efficiency and speed.’
Voice-activated technology will evolve to become the everyday retail method of many customers, enabling us to shop via devices such as phones and wearables without lifting a finger. Meanwhile, connected devices in our homes, such as fridges, will automatically order commonly used items that we are running low on.
Drone delivery, already starting to emerge with the likes of Amazon and dedicated startups like Flytrex, will be commonplace; consumers will expect their e-commerce purchases to arrive at their home within a few minutes.
Drone usage will allow retailers – from independents to giants like Amazon – to offer near-instant delivery.
AR and VR in stores will show customers a wide range of products while allowing retailers to carry less stock.
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Retail consumers of the future: power to the peopleEstablished norms and behaviours are breaking down when it comes to retail. Technological innovation has democratised shopping, enabling people to ‘consume’ in so many different ways. By 2030 retail will undoubtedly take on forms that we could only dream about at the turn of this millennium.
Customers are in the driving seat, exerting an ever-greater influence on retail brands, and their products and services. With this power shift comes a breakdown of established norms in terms of silos, rules, and rigidity.
CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR EVOLUTIONPeople will increasingly define themselves by what they do, not what they own. Wanting to be the best version of themselves possible, experience will be social currency – especially when it comes to travel, education, health, and wellbeing.
A desire for values over value means people will choose brands with shared ideals and an ability to do good in the world – and they’ll ditch those that don’t. Material consumption, and its effect on resources and the environment, will continue to climb the agenda. This, combined with the fact that people are likely to have less disposable income, will see the growth of ‘NOwnership’ models based on sharing and borrowing. Witness the rise of car clubs for city-dwelling millennials that either can’t afford their own car, or don’t want one due to the environmental impact.
Social media will be huge in terms of consumer behaviour – it will give people the opportunity to grow and shape brands through their own usage, and influence their purchase decisions even more so.
WHAT CHANNELS WILL THEY USE?Customers won’t differentiate across channels and will use all of them. But according to McKinsey, 75% of the world’s 8.5 billion people will have mobile internet access in 2030. So the phone/tablet will be king, reflecting fluid, on-demand lifestyles.
Other technology will support this
– VR will create exciting virtual retail worlds to entertain; connected cars will enable dashboard shopping. New channels will be established. For example, fashion shows will become live shopping events for all to enjoy, as opposed to a selected few.
And bricks-and-mortar is definitely here to stay. Experience will be the brand differentiator, as social, community, sensory and energy attributes can’t be beaten.
CONSUMER DEMAND ON RETAILERSConsumers will demand it all – wanting to save time and money, and have a fantastic experience.
Convenience and frictionless ease will continue to be important – one-click-pay Amazon Dash buttons equal time well-saved for customers.
Consumer data will be used to understand who people are, rather than what they do, to provide greater personalisation and relevancy – perhaps resulting in things like premium/exclusive concierge services. They will also demand ethical and supply chain transparency.
Consumers will still want human interaction, but only if it really adds value. They want staff with passion and expertise who don’t just sell more stuff, but provide relevant solutions.
ONLINE VS PHYSICAL RETAILOnline and physical experiences will be totally seamless. AI/VR/AR will all play a part in both – to illuminate, inspire, educate and entertain.
Stores will capture new types of data about consumers to enhance their visit and respond to their mood. Products will have built-in smart tech – think trainers that tell you when they’ve done too many miles.
Ultimately, stores as we know them won’t exist. Consumers will look for brands and categories that come together under one roof. Facilitated by technology, people will find the lifestyle solutions they seek to self-actualise: health, wellness, knowledge, looking good, having fun, and being entertained.
@CushWakeRtailUK Cushman & Wakefield
FOR MORE INFO VISIT: cushmanwakefield.co.uk/retail04
03 Voice recognition technology will allow customers to shop via connected devices in their homes and even cars.
Household items like fridges will be able to automatically order everyday items that are running low.
DAVID MARTINJoint managing director, M Worldwide
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The future of dinnerCompanies like Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat have upended how restaurants do business. With a panel on the frontline, we talked explosive growth, delivery drivers and the nightmare of keeping chips warm.
How much is food delivery growing in London?
Toussaint Wattinne: There has been an acceleration in the food delivery space in the last year and also in the share that online food delivery is taking of that overall pie.
We’ve had more than two million people sign up to use Uber Eats over the last 18 months in the UK. One recent phenomenon is the big chunk of consumers who are now ordering food more frequently, almost habitually.
Zan Kaufman: In the last six months delivery has taken London by storm. You look at your weekly profit and loss and it’s like, holy shit.
You need to treat delivery companies with respect or you’re going to get run over by this thing.
What do you mean ‘by storm’?
ZK: Over the last year, deliveries at our Spitalfields site increased 250%.
Has the adoption of delivery been a smooth process?
Brittney Bean: It was really difficult for a period of time to figure out how we simultaneously serve our customers if they walk up to order something, while also getting all this food out to these dudes on bikes.
We run street food operations, so there’s a kitchen the size of a table, with one guy and 17 iPads in it, because every one of these delivery services has a dedicated iPad. It was like a Forex desk.
ZK: Initially, I told Deliveroo to fuck off. It’s not something I’m proud of now because we have a close relationship,
but I had a problem with the percentage they wanted – over 30%.
Where did you bring them down to?
ZK: It’s less than that. I think we just need to have mutual respect for each other.
Are restaurants freaking out over the need to re-engineer business around delivery?
TW: It’s definitely one of the first questions that comes up, so you can’t ignore it.
There are a couple of considerations. One, the share of the total business that it represents, because moving from 10% to 50% of your total business changes the impact on your bottom line. They are pretty comfortable until it hits around 40%.
The second part is how much of that share is incremental versus how much eats up in-store traffic. The vast majority of feedback we received is that this business was incremental, based on historical analysis of like-for-like store sales.
Do you feel this is incremental? If so, where were those people previously eating?
BB: I wish I could answer that question, but it’s hard to say with certainty.
TOUSSAINT WATTINNEUber EatsWattinne relocated from France to the UK to lead the launch of Uber Eats in London in November 2016. He has been with Uber since 2013.
BRITTNEY BEANMother CluckerBean has been serving fried chicken at Kerb markets since 2012. In 2016, she opened her first Deliveroo Editions unit.
ZAN KAUFMANBleecker BurgerKaufman set up Bleecker Burger in 2012 at Red Market, a food incubator based on Old Street. It now has three London sites.
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restaurant needs and the end user needs in a better way. Editions tries to achieve that in a few ways.
We’re looking into a few areas. One is what we’ve dubbed a ‘virtual kitchen’; this idea that you have a second menu that you’re offering only for delivery that’s enabling you to bring further incremental sales.
The second is closer to Deliveroo Editions, based around dedicated kitchens for delivery. We’re working with a few restaurant partners around what that looks like. We’re still in early days.
Zan, are you thinking about doing Deliveroo Editions?
ZK: You can’t not think about it. But I need my team to see who they’re fighting for. They need to see customers.
I also worry that if I put a team in an Edition, they might feel marginalised in relation to the other team, and I don’t want to start creating these
hierarchies. That said, I’m ridiculously fickle, so this might change in the future.
There’s perhaps an existential question to this. What is a modern restaurant if you strip away service, atmosphere and all that stuff?
BB: It’s something we’re working on. The idea of trying to give something to our customer which is about more than just the product, and more about who we are as a brand.
ZK: Translate the experience on delivery? It’s just so hard. Like Brittney, we’re looking at it too. We’re still absorbing the volume. Transporting the brand will be the next step.
BB: It’s like what the music industry used to say about streaming. It’s all dependant on how that product gets to the consumer. People are looking at how songs work specifically on Spotify. So it may be the way you
We treat a lot of the delivery as discovery. We opened a Deliveroo Editions unit [an off-site, delivery-only kitchen] in Crouch End. We’d never done anything in Crouch End, so no one there knows who we are. Most likely they’re finding us in the app.
ZK: Most of our Deliveroo orders, if I were to guess, are in addition to our in-person sales. People are not going from our website to Deliveroo. They’re on Deliveroo and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is a burger with a good rating.’
TW: My feeling is that a lot of it is coming from people trading up from a ready meal bought in a supermarket.
The big restaurant chains are doing some quite advanced analysis on this. They reckon around 60% to 75% of their delivery sales are from customers who might otherwise not have previously come to them.
Have you had to remodel your business to accommodate delivery?
BB: We opened Editions units, which allowed us to push what we saw as a growth-driver in a way that didn’t cannibalise our existing business.
ZK: We have to adapt. We’ve asked ourselves: how do we manage this? We need to talk to the team about respect for the delivery drivers. We need to learn their names. We all need to be on the same side, and we need to treat drivers with the same respect that we treat customers who order a burger in person.
Would Uber Eats go down the Editions route?
TW: We’re always looking at how we can fulfil both the
‘Consumers are ordering food almost habitually.’ — toussaint wattinne
30 second briefinga There was a surge in food delivery in the last six months of 2017. Kaufman saw deliveries rise by 250%. This level chimed with others.
a Restaurants are worried about deliveries ‘cannibalising’ food bought directly from them. Uber Eats’ Wattinne claims 60% to 75% of delivery orders are incremental, rather than replacement purchases.
a Business models of restaurants come into question once deliveries push past 40% of total sales.
a Restaurants are worried about being held over a barrel by delivery companies’ rising commissions — which currently sit at roughly 30%.
a Restaurants are experimenting with how they can add unique brand touches to food delivery.
treat delivery is very different from the way you treat a sit-down restaurant experience, a takeaway experience or a street food experience. It’s all about optimising the product for the experience, while maintaining a consistent brand presence.
In the future will you open fewer real stores?
BB: We always plan to open shops. Maybe what changes is we’ll open units driven by delivery, based on location, and some driven by walk-ups.
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Do restaurants worry about what Uber or Deliveroo can do to their reputation?
ZK: When things go wrong, people blame the restaurant. That’s the normal reaction. It might change in the future when they get more understanding of how this whole thing works, but you just deal with it and the upside is much higher than the downside.
Do some dishes travel better than others? Chips, for example?
ZK: We have ‘angry’ fries and normal fries. Angry fries have sauce on them. When we first started on delivery you could only get those, because the sauce insulates heat. Normal fries are not good at all, but we were inundated with people asking for sauce on the side.
I had to give in, even though they’re a shadow of themselves once they’ve been delivered.
BB: If any of you are thinking to yourselves ‘What business should I launch tomorrow?’, make a food packaging company. And do it really well. I’d love to take chips off the menu, but people just want them.
Uber has been backed with over £16bn in venture funding and
Deliveroo’s raised £740m – both are yet to turn a profit. Is this sustainable?
TW: As far as Uber Eats is concerned, our economics are healthy. In terms of the lifecycle of the business, we’ve been in the UK for 18 months. We’re in a much healthier financial standpoint than the rides business was at a similar point in its lifecycle. The marketplace is functioning healthily and is extremely sustainable from where we are.
Brittney and Zan, have you considered running your own fleets?
BB: The idea of running my own delivery service makes me want to run away and hide forever. Running your own businesses is enough of a pain in the arse; I don’t know why anybody would also choose to get some more people with bikes.
ZK: I’m from New York and New York delivery is amazing. There the delivery drivers double as kitchen porters, so initially I thought this could work for us.
Then I realised how hard it is to run a food business. Delivery was completely put on the back-burner. As we developed, I didn’t even question doing it with a third party. We don’t
even have waiters and waitresses because I think they cause too many problems.
Do you worry about these guys jacking up commissions to make it more profitable?
BB: No, not right now. I think there’s enough understanding that if you start screwing around with your suppliers, you’re not going to have anything to supply.
ZK: As the percentage has crept up my nerves have crept up. We’re well-known street food traders and people love our food, but does Uber care about that? I don’t know.
This is an edited and condensed extract of a conversation which took place at Mortimer House in London on 12 December 2017.
Open mic
‘Hearing from the restaurants about how they are informed by the platforms they’re partnering with, I was surprised at the limited data they’re getting at the moment.’George Goldhagen, Amazon Pay.
‘That energy a restaurant gives a driver gets translated to the customer at the other end. Zan [talking] about how she tells staff to treat Deliveroo drivers as customers [is] interesting – so they deliver a product with pride. No one’s downbeat about it, it’s an interesting opportunity.’ Grace Regan, Spice Box.
‘[It’s interesting] knowing that more of these little kitchens are popping up rather than restaurants. Is this how life is going to be? Eventually, will restaurants be phased out and will no one ever leave their house?’Leanne Williamson, food entrepreneur.
‘[These] marketplaces are like a trifecta, rather than a one-to-one with consumers. [You need to be] thinking about how to keep those three happy all the time.’Hadden Fray-Smith, Dining Out and In.
‘As the percentage [of commission] has crept up, so have my nerves.’
— zan kaufman
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Long tails, short tales and curly tails
John Mitchinson is facing a dilemma shared by, in all probability, no other tech startup founder. He’s mulling over
whether or not to kill his ageing pig, Buster. ‘He’s the only pig I’ve ever named, but he’s
getting to that age… I’m really torn about it.’ The ethics of rearing and eating animals
aside, his other concerns are more typical: doubling his company’s customer base, meeting investors’ targets, keeping his staff happy, finding an unoccupied meeting room.
RADICAL NEW MODELMitchinson is co-founder of Unbound, widely considered to be the most exciting thing to happen to the publishing industry for decades. When it launched in 2011, Unbound unveiled a radical new model which combined crowdfunding with traditional publishing services (see sidebar, p42).
The startup made its name by backing the projects other publishers might turn away; one of its biggest successes, The Good Immigrant, a book of essays by writers of colour, was published shortly after the 2016 referendum and has sold over 70,000 copies to date.
Unbound puts authors in direct contact with readers, and ensures books have a market before being published. Internally too, it strays from convention by hiring editors from news media as well as books publishing and, more recently, employing a wellbeing officer. It has created an alternative ecosystem in publishing. Trade turnover almost tripled last year, and total turnover – which includes the crowdfunding sales – hit £3.5m.
‘It’s had a really shockwave-y impact on the industry,’ says Natasha Onwuemezi, reporter at The Bookseller. ‘It’s a publishing company people definitely want to work for.’
HIT FACTORIES Unbound is surrounded by a remarkable degree of enthusiasm, excitement and positivity. Its many fans say it’s changing the industry for the better – supporting good authors and good books, cutting out most of the middle-men, championing a truly diverse range of voices, and letting people vote with their wallets for what they want to read. It’s a startup that readers, authors, investors and employees really, really want to do well.
Perhaps surprisingly for those not in it, the books business is not always such a happy
place. ‘The emotional climate of publishing is often one of hostility and suspicion and fear,’ says Mitchinson, who has been working in the sector since 1989, with stints as marketing director of Waterstones, managing director of Harvill Press and deputy publisher at Orion.
Publishers, squeezed by Amazon, are increasingly focusing their attention on a very small band of authors and taking fewer punts on unknown writers. ‘Publishing houses are turning into hit factories, all about building and making bestsellers,’ says Mitchinson. ‘They’re increasingly trying to fill slots for retailers – not readers.’
Unbound’s model changes those dynamics; profits are split 50/50 between publisher and author, meaning it’s in the interest of both to help the book do well. ‘Because it’s a joint venture, suddenly the nature of the conversation changes: What can we do? Can we do this? Try this?’ says Mitchinson. It also means that books which aren’t everyone’s cup of tea – but are enough people’s – make it onto shelves. ‘We care about books and writers, and we care about the long tail,’ he adds.
CARE AND COLLABORATIONIt’s not all about the business model, though. This willingness to experiment, think creatively and act with generosity are clearly traits that stem from Mitchinson and his co-founder Dan Kieran.
‘They really care,’ says Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant. ‘If I ever had a problem with anything, then John would be on the phone to me. And I think that level of care and engagement with their authors makes them [really special].’
Such a culture of consideration seems to extend throughout the company.
‘I would say more by instinct [than] discussion, Dan and I have evolved a management philosophy based on simple things like respect and listening to people and making sure people get praise for things they do well,’ says Mitchinson. ‘None of it seems like rocket science, and of course some of it doesn’t always work.
‘Most of the time I’m in the office I spend talking to people, rather than sitting here answering emails,’ adds Mitchinson, who commutes into the canal-side Islington office from a small village in Oxfordshire four days a week. ‘I’m a great believer in face-to-face – five
minutes, sit down, make a cup of coffee, what’s the problem?
‘My fundamental management philosophy is to walk towards the sound of gunfire.’
FIRE-FIGHTINGWhat fire-fighting there has been is fairly typical of a growing company: a few bad hires, some grumpy agents, realising there was only two weeks’ cash left in the bank.
Notably, unlike so many businesses that are playing catch-up on issues such as diversity and staff wellbeing, Unbound seems to have those at its core.
‘There is a friendliness here which is really interesting,’ says Mitchinson. ‘At a lot of places I’ve worked there was a culture of fear. The real fear is that if the fear stopped, everybody would stop doing [their jobs]. I just think that’s not fit for purpose any more.
‘It’s tough enough for a group of mostly millennials, getting paid insufficient amounts of money to buy houses. If you’re going to treat them like shit when they’re at work and expect them to be productive, you’re just not going to retain good people.’
VISIBLY DIFFERENTFor Arifa Akbar, former literary editor of the Independent and one of Unbound’s most recent hires, the company is a refreshing change from the newsrooms where she’s spent most of her career. ‘It’s visibly different,’ she says. ‘It’s not all white.
‘Dan and John have a mature view of what inclusion means – not because it looks good and ticks boxes. They think, London’s multicultural, so let’s have a workforce that reflects who we are as a city.’
Importantly, she thinks the same is true of the writers Unbound backs – a far less homogenous bunch than those on most publishers’ lists. It’s become, in many ways, a haven for under-represented voices.
‘Diversity is coming to the forefront of the industry, changing the way people publish and do business. Unbound is leading that charge,’ says Onwuezemi.
BREAKING THE MOULDCall them diversity advocates, tech visionaries or management gurus, but at heart Mitchinson, Kieran and third co-founder, Justin Pollard, are three men
John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound
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who just really love books. ‘I guess the usual thing is to get an entrepreneur and a money person and a tech guy, and we didn’t fit that bill at all,’ says Mitchinson, who is older than the stereotypical startup founder, with a beard that is more Father Christmas than hipster. ‘We’re three ideas guys really.’
As the company has grown, Kieran ‘discovered quite quickly that he’s really good at raising money and pitching the business’. Mitchinson, for his part, is more interested in the ‘softer sides’ of culture and content.
‘I don’t want to be the person who runs a business – that’s not my skillset. I can inspire people, I can sell things, I can make an environment for people that makes them feel supported, secure, happy and, I hope, challenged enough to do good work.’
At Unbound, that manifests in flexible working hours, a flat hierarchy, acknowledging each other’s successes, discouraging gossip, yoga lessons, endless cups of tea, and a shared devotion to books and ideas. It feels, staff and authors say, like family.
‘I’ve never enjoyed working at any of the jobs I’ve done more than this,’ says Mitchinson, who admits he was at first wary of returning to office life after creating and running comedy TV show QI for a decade. ‘It’s lovely writing at home, but actually having a team of really brilliant people, and feeling like you’re making a difference [is exciting].’
CONTENT AND CUSTOMERSWorking with people comes naturally to Mitchinson. His challenge over the next year is to maintain relationships at scale and more than double Unbound’s user base.
So far, 180,000 people have pledged money on Unbound. ‘We thought we would sign up many more people more quickly than we actually have done,’ says Mitchinson.
‘I’ve always thought when we get to half a million active users, we ought to be able to sell more or less anything,’ he adds.
At that point, Mitchinson reckons the site will be seen by enough people interested in subjects as varied as Mac gaming, lidos, or Iranian teenage freedom fighters (three of the works currently seeking funds) for almost all books to raise enough money to get published.
BOUNDLESS ENTHUSIASMLast year Unbound revealed its audience-expansion plan. In December, it launched Boundless, a new site for free, long-form writing – into a media landscape where clickbait rules and readers’ attention spans are supposedly dropping off.
‘It could be madness,’ says Akbar, editor of Boundless and Unbound’s head of content. ‘But in this climate, maybe it’s the perfect time.’
Akbar’s remit is to commission writers – from novelist Ali Smith to journalist Boyd Tonkin – to write the unexpected. ‘It’s going to be stuff you don’t often read about, or if you do, with a new angle,’ she says.
‘You could characterise it as an indulgence, but that’s not how we see it,’ argues Mitchinson, whose fortnightly podcast about semi-forgotten books, Backlisted, is a regular feature on Boundless. It has 25,000 monthly listeners.
‘The DNA of what we’re doing is ideas and stories,’ he says. ‘We’re prepared to take a risk to demonstrate there is a way to make money.’
Squaring loss-making moves with investors, which include Draper Esprit and IQ Capital, hasn’t been hard so far, says Mitchinson. ‘We basically say, trust us. We’ve taken the business this far. We are hitting our targets. It’s an experiment; we’ll see.’
DIAMOND-DUST DATA Unsurprisingly, Boundless is not a purely artistic move. It’s a data-mining exercise,
and a content-marketing strategy. ‘Boundless is a way of enlarging our data set, with relatively minimal investment. It could potentially pay for itself quite quickly,’ Mitchinson says.
Better understanding its audience’s reading behaviours would give Unbound a huge advantage over traditional publishers, which are almost entirely disconnected from readers.
Unbound is also working on a programme which will enable it to assess potential authors and, based on their social media profiles, work out whether a book might be able to raise the necessary money, Mitchinson explains. ‘That’s our big strategic play.’
He’s also been musing about how Unbound can better leverage the origin stories of its books – ‘the story behind the story’. It’s a product marketing strategy that’s working for food and fashion brands, and could help Unbound’s books stand out.
BEYOND BOOKS It will be a decisive year for Unbound – growing its community, investing in marketing for the first time, promoting Boundless, employing data, expanding to the US and potentially restructuring its distribution model (currently run in partnership with the UK’s biggest publisher, Penguin Random House). Its influence could extend beyond books, too.
‘They see themselves more as a media company,’ says Onwuemezi. ‘Not just books – all sorts of mediums. They could be very big.’
‘We want to be the most data-driven publisher on the planet,’ laughs Mitchinson. ‘That’s our small, modest aim.’
If he can achieve that, it will make quite some story.
‘My fundamental management philosophy is to walk towards
the sound of gunfire.’
1. PITCH Authors pitch to Unbound editors, ‘gatekeepers who open the gate a lot wider’, as Mitchinson refers to them. Editors, who cover around 10 categories from literary fiction to sci-fi and anthologies, are also increasingly ‘micro-targeting’ writers of all kinds. Unbound avoids mainstream genres like crime and chick lit.
2. CROWDFUNDING Successful books are crowdfunded on the site. Unbound acts as ‘matchmaker’ between its community of readers and authors. Authors are encouraged to self-promote through their personal networks and social channels. If they hit their target, books’ production costs are covered, ‘taking a massive amount of risk out of the equation’. There is no time limit on funding campaigns; 40% of books get funded after three months. The average transaction value on the site is £37.
3. PRODUCTIONBooks pass through the traditional editorial and design stages. Authors do not get advances; industry-wide, only 20% of books earn back their advances. In 2017, Unbound published 50 books, and has 110 titles on the list for 2018.
4. DISTRIBUTIONSubscriber editions are sent directly to readers. Trade editions are distributed to bookshops and online retailers through a deal with Penguin Random House. Some books are only available digitally; this is the fastest-growing area of the business. Unbound plans to take more distribution in-house: ‘We need to own those relationships; that’s key for us. It’s crazy we don’t control pricing of our ebooks.’
5. SALES Profits are split 50/50 between Unbound and the author. When books are sold through retailers, the author’s cut reduces to around 33%. (With traditional publishers, it’s closer to 10%.) The ideal scenario is for Unbound to sell as many books as possible direct to customers.
Unbound’s alternative publishing model What would publishing look like if you had a blank sheet of paper?
W W W. S H O RT- F I L M S . C O M
B E A U T I F U L F A S H I O N A B L E C O N T E N T
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Trouble in Turkey
Two weeks after a deadly terror attack at Atatürk International Airport in June 2016, armed forces within Turkey’s military unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In the tumultuous aftermath, an Erdoğan-led political crackdown hit all sectors of Turkish society, with sweeping arrests in government, education and the media. Months later on New Year’s Eve, there was an attack in one of Istanbul’s most prominent nightclubs, claimed by Isis. Amid these events, Turkey’s politics have been transformed by a conservative and religious shift.
YOUTHFUL IMAGEIt wasn’t supposed to go like this. Over the last decade, Istanbul has projected a modern and youthful image, with its own energetic startup scene. A highly-educated, ambitious and tech-savvy entrepreneurial class was making its mark. Fashion designers, media businesses and a buzzy art scene popped up. Members’ club Soho House even took notice and opened a site in Istanbul in 2015.
That energy has faded. Tourism slowed (2016 saw a 30% decline in visitors, the lowest
number for nine years). The LGBT community has left in droves. Nightlife isn’t the free-spirited riot of fun it once was. Foreign investment in the first half of 2016 dropped to £3.6bn – half what it was the previous year.
BUSINESS TAKES A HITFor more than half a millennium, the Grand Bazaar flourished as Istanbul’s beating heart of trade. In 2016, 600 of its 3,600 shops shuttered. The Confederation of Turkish Tradesmen and Craftsmen estimates that roughly 8,000 companies closed that year across the city.
However, for others the show goes on. Kolektif House, a local co-working space, is a testament to that. Since launching in 2014, membership has grown from 740 to 1400 and it has increased its footprint by expanding onto two more floors above. It also plans to open another location in June.
THINKING IMAGINATIVELYEnis Hulli, an Istanbul-based venture partner at 500 Startups, the Silicon Valley seed fund organisation, believes the political instability has given birth to a new type
ISTANBUL: In recent years, Turkey has been witness to a failed coup, terror attacks and rising religious conservatism. Courier heads to its largest city to see what it’s like running a business amid the turbulence.
of business founder; one that’s forced to think more imaginatively.
‘Creating a product in Istanbul is much cheaper than in San Francisco, Berlin or London,’ he says. ‘Entrepreneurs in Istanbul can sustain [themselves] much longer with lower amounts of capital, giving them a competitive advantage to be best positioned when the right time comes.’
In this city, where the politics have become conservative and the business landscape problematic, resilience and adaptation have become crucial traits.
Courier profiles three businesses which have followed this playbook for success.
TURKEY’S BIGGEST STARTUP EXITS
Yemeksepeti (Food delivery) Sold in 2015 £387m
Gittigidiyor (E-commerce) Sold in 2011 £135m
Markafoni (E-commerce) Sold in 2011 £124m
Pozitron (Mobile commerce tech) Sold in 2014 £59m
Sadece Hosting (Web hosting) Sold in 2013 £16m
Mikro-Ödeme (Micro payments) Sold in 2014 £21m
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Istanbul’s music scene has felt the strain of the political crackdowns. Gevrec Music Production has survived and thrived by carving out a niche.
Long before reuniting to form a company, friends Barış Baykan and Sabi Saltiel played together in a high-school band – Baykan on drums, Saltiel on guitar. Throughout the years, music has remained their passion. Baykan went on to work for Babajim Records in Istanbul as a sound engineer, while Saltiel attended Berklee College of Music in Boston and gigged with local bands in California.
THE MUSIC MAKERSWhen contemplating where to set up a business, however, the cost and competitiveness of the US made Saltiel reconsider his homeland.
In Istanbul, he says, ‘there are more windows of opportunity for people
PART 1
Protests, tear gas and cheap rent
industries in Turkey, music is a tight-knit and local affair. Who you know is often more important than sheer talent, and word-of-mouth reigns supreme.
The political and security situation hasn’t helped Turkey’s music business. In 2013, the increasingly religious government banned alcohol advertising, cutting off a major revenue stream for the industry. Large, sponsor-heavy festivals such as Rock’n Coke have been cancelled ever since.
RISKY BETSIn a city that’s seen frequent terror attacks, the inability to ensure safety and security at concerts has been blamed for low turnouts and venue closures. The stream of international musicians visiting has dwindled. As a result, an already small industry has shrunk as producers avoid risk and spend money on safe bets like established pop stars.
Though it’s been difficult for Baykan and Saltiel to carve out a space for themselves, the economic situation has forced them to diversify, moving beyond music production into education and consulting. And whereas others in the industry are betting big on acts which command mammoth social media followings, Gevrec has focused on unknown, raw talent. Staying small and giving the business a personal touch has become its competitive advantage.
ARTIST DIVERSITYLast year, perhaps as proof the approach works, the team landed a contract to record an album for Sertab Erener, one of Turkey’s most successful female singers. It propelled Gevrec into the mainstream. It’s since recorded an album for alternative singer-songwriter Mabel Matiz, who is openly gay.
This doesn’t exactly mesh with Turkey’s turn towards a more conservative society. For Baykan, the picture is more nuanced. ‘Throughout the history of this country there have been many instances of oppression. Following these periods it’s always the opposite… a forgiving time. We plan to be equipped for it as best as we can.’
1. Gevrec Music Production founders Barış Baykan and Sabi Saltiel. 2. Gavrec’s recording studio in Moda, a neighbourhood in Istanbul’s Asian side.
like me’. So, in the summer of 2013, the year mass demonstrations engulfed Istanbul following government plans to turn a popular park into a shopping mall, the duo came together to launch their music production house, Gevrec (named after a sesame-covered ring-shaped pastry, a homage to their roots in Izmir). It records and produces albums for Turkish music artists.
DRIFT TO THE ASIAN SIDEThe first order of business was finding a location for their recording studio. The two wanted to avoid the protest chaos in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu neighbourhood, then caught up in the Gezi Park demonstrations. They settled instead on Moda, on the cheaper Asian side of the city’s continental divide.
This didn’t stop them from getting tear gassed. During their first months, they were forced to leave the office early because of toxic smoke drifting in from nearby protests. Yet, while political violence continued on the European side of the city, a demographic shift in Gevrec’s area reaffirmed their choice of home. With artists moving in, Moda has transformed into what Beyoğlu once was: a hub for urban creatives.
BANS AND CANCELLATIONSBaykan and Saltiel have had a tough time breaking into the music scene. Like many
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5.
PART 2
Immodest growthTurkish startup Modanisa has been called the ‘Net-a-Porter of the modest fashion industry’. It’s found success by understanding that Muslim fashion goes beyond black burkas.
By the end of 2015, £33bn was spent on ‘modest fashion’ around the globe, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in retail. Yet, when e-commerce startup Modanisa launched in 2011, co-founders Kerim Türe and Lale Tüzün were told that selling women’s fashion on the internet was foolish and didn’t match the purchasing habits of Turkey’s conservative consumers.
SWIMWEAR AND ABAYASThankfully for Modanisa, the early naysayers were wrong. In less than seven years, the company has grown into one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites for Muslim women.
In 2016, it sold more than three million items, from swimwear to abayas (the traditional robe worn by some Muslim women), and shipped to 120 countries. Ten million people now visit the website each month to browse its catalogue of modest clothing.
CONSERVATIVE EXPANSION For Modanisa, success came quickly. Its first order was received just a few days after the website was set up. Three months later Ramadan orders poured in. By month five, Modanisa’s office became too small and it expanded from 50sq meters to 1250sq meters.
Though initially self-funded by the founders, the company’s growth has been fuelled by a series of multimillion-dollar investment rounds, which has led it to open a new depot and two bricks-and-mortar stores.
GLOBAL MUSLIM MARKET‘The expansive market gap in the retail industry for fashionable clothing tailored for Muslim women remains the driving force,’ explains Türe. ‘Before us there wasn’t even a segment called modest fashion,’ he claims. ‘Producers believed there was no need for it.’
That might have something to do with Turkey’s recent history of secularism.Following the military coup in 1980, the wearing of headscarves, burkas and hijab was banned from all educational and governmental institutes.
That has changed under Erdoğan. In 2007, his conservative Justice and Development Party allowed headscarf-wearing students to attend university for the first time. In 2013, this was extended to Parliament, courtrooms and other public service departments, excluding the military.
FASHION FOR HEADSCARVESIt’s difficult to determine how much of Modanisa’s growth is due to this change in society; critics claim that statistics on the number of women wearing headscarves have been inflated for political gain.
What’s undeniable is that under Erdoğan, attendance at religious schools has risen. The number of students in such schools was five times higher in 2016 than it was in 2012.
‘Our criteria is the market demand,’ Türe says. ‘Modest fashion is growing at this rate because it has been a neglected sector for years. It is beyond politics. So is Modanisa.’
LEAP OF FAITH
Muslim consumers make up 11% of global fashion spending, and the value is expected to rise from £166bn to £265bn by 2021. Modest fashion is projected to play a big role in that growth.
Large brands have cashed in. In 2015, model Mariah Idrissi caught the world’s attention by wearing a hijab in H&M’s Close the Loop video campaign (pictured). Dolce and Gabbana used its signature black lace to design ready-to-wear abayas and hijabs for its Autumn 2016 collection. Burberry, DKNY and Mango followed suit with collections for Ramadan. In 2017, Uniqlo worked with UK-born fashion designer Hana Tajima on its line of modest-wear, and Vogue Arabia launched with Saudi princess Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz at the helm.
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PART 3
An unlikely startup moveIn a land famed for its barbers, an American living in the city is running his own venture trimming beards and cutting hair.
The barber is an iconic figure in Turkish culture and identity. It’s a skill that’s spread around the world as Turkish barbers have set up shop in far-flung cities, everywhere from Helsinki to Hull.
Istanbul is certainly not short of barbershops. Officially, there are more than 5,600 operating in the greater metropolitan area. Unofficially, countless others exist ‘off the books’.
Turkish men typically pledge themselves to a single barber. ‘Barber loyalty is a global thing. But I’ll say here in Turkey, [it] can be a bit more dramatic,’ says Brandon Patton, owner of Frontier Barber in Istanbul’s Bebek neighbourhood. ‘Some guys cite that the guilt they would feel by changing barbers would be too much for them to consider it.’
Patton, an American, arrived in Istanbul in 2010, staying for a year and a half before returning to New York to train as a barber. When he came back to Turkey to open his own place in 2016, he understood the risks of throwing his hat in the ring. Shipping in vintage 1930s New York-style barber chairs, Patton’s approach was to offer more than just a quick shave and cut; he lured in locals intrigued by his Brooklyn-esque ‘barber as
lifestyle brand’, where conversations go beyond ‘give me a trim’.
Patton says starting a business as a foreigner and establishing an A.Ş., the Turkish version of a limited liability company, is surprisingly easier than one expects. ‘A little bit of paperwork, capital, and some help from a lawyer was all it took,’ he explains.
Frontier Barber was established just two months after the attempted coup. So far, it hasn’t affected the business. Life in Istanbul goes on as usual. ‘These last two years have obviously been tough politically and naturally that affects the way people go about their daily lives,’ he says. ‘When times get tough, people tend to revert to their comforts and old habits; staying within neighbourhoods they are comfortable with.’
For a barber in Turkey, that’s nothing but good news.
1. Modanisa has two bricks-and-mortar stores in the city’s Pendik neighbourhood. 2. Frontier Barber is located in the waterside district of Bebek.3. Frontier Barber Founder Brandon Patton in his shop, inspired by 1930s New York.
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LEADER
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The truly awful revelations about what it is to be a woman at work continue to roll in.
More offices, film sets, sports teams and fashion studios are routinely being outed for their toxic cultures of harassment and prejudice.
For men, the extent and severity of accusations have been a wake-up call; for women, they’ve confirmed a depressing reality.
As we reveal in our cover story (page 23), the startup world isn’t exempt. Tech in particular has a problem with gender balance – and possibly worse. Men dominate funding and senior positions. It’s fair to say startup looks and feels like a boys’ club; not only is it instinctive to recruit in one’s own image, but it is also more natural to be inspired by and follow in the footsteps of people who were once you.
LACKING INSPIRATIONApart from biases in hiring and securing investment is the issue of access to opportunity and individual progression, which goes far beyond gender. A lack of role models exist, not just for women hoping to launch businesses but for a range of other under-represented groups; those who are LGBTQ, from certain ethnic or economic backgrounds or even from beyond southeast England.
There is no evidence that white, brash males make better business leaders than any other demographic. But people do reward those in their own image with jobs and money – and when 89% of FTSE CEOs are white and male, it’s no wonder the cycle persists.
This matters for a number of reasons. The big one is economic prosperity. Talent which could be unleashed isn’t realising its potential. Products, companies, sectors and the economy at large are smaller and blander without diversity of people and ideas.
One McKinsey study found that diverse teams make better business decisions, performing 35% better when ethnically-diverse, and 15% better when gender-diverse.
The power role models have to encourage people to create and grow large businesses is hard to underestimate. Role models can change beliefs, behaviours and perceptions. The absence of strong and varied role models can often hold people back just as much as any structural bias or prejudice.
PARENTAL DETERMINANTLet’s look at the evidence. The most obvious role model is a parent. A wide-ranging Swedish study in 2012 concluded ‘parental entrepreneurship is a strong – probably the strongest – determinant of own entrepreneurship’.
The research found that a person was 60% more likely to start a
business if their parent had done the same. Even adopted children were twice as likely to be entrepreneurial if their adoptive parents were business founders, regardless of whether or not their biological parents were. It suggests nurture rather than nature is the decisive factor.
PLURALITY OF IDENTITIESSeeing a successful person who looks like, acts like or has skills in common with oneself has a transformative effect on confidence and aspirations. Lu Li, founder of women’s network Blooming Founders who’s interviewed as part of our cover story, says with brutal clarity: ‘You can’t be what you can’t see.’
Successful female role models can reset social perceptions in a richer and more far-reaching way than any well-intentioned public messages or anti-prejudice initiatives.
Of course, success can still be achieved without a mirror image of oneself. But a plurality of entrepreneurial identities is lacking, and that undoubtedly affects individuals’ career choices and confidence. When success often hinges on small margins, seeing what’s possible can be the deciding factor that encourages a would-be founder to battle through self-doubt, believe certain skills can be attained and find courage to pursue goals.
SENDING THE ELEVATOR BACK DOWN Many women business leaders feel ambivalent about being foisted into the status of ‘female role model’, preferring instead to be defined purely by their work and values (like their male peers), rather than their gender. It’s understandable why many don’t want to be put on a pedestal.
‘I don’t like being held up as this person who’s incredibly successful, because I’m still learning,’ says our cover star Sharmadean Reid. ‘The responsibility I feel is to showcase how hard it is, and share the knowledge and information I’ve acquired.’
Nevertheless, there’s a compelling argument that it’s incumbent on successful women or people from minority groups to ‘send the elevator back down’. Carrying the responsibility of being a role model might not be sought after – or fair – but almost anyone who has achieved something owes at least some inspiration to someone they once admired.
Starling Bank is one of London’s most captivating modern businesses. Its founder is Anne Boden, a middle-aged woman far from the caricature of a tech startup founder. She says: ‘When people see me – a former banking executive, female CEO, ex-engineer – having a successful new digital startup, I hope it gives inspiration to other people [to think that could be me].’
‘You can’t be what you can’t see’
The power of the role model
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DEBATE
THOMAS BEAHON CASTORE
SHEHERAZADE GOLDSMITHLOQUET LONDON
The sheer volume of potential customers on Facebook is
unprecedented, so for any digitally-native brand, ignoring it is impossible. The granularity with which it allowed us to target consumers has made it more successful than any other form of customer acquisition.
At Castore we spent our first
six months building the core brand before hitting Facebook hard. Our target customer is aged 35-45, has an above-average income and is relatively senior in a professional career – traditionally a difficult market to penetrate. But Facebook has allowed us to hunt for customers with similar attributes on a large scale, and then be ultra-flexible in altering our approach to help convert those prospects into paying customers.
As we became more sophisticated, we trialled adverts in Hong Kong, Dubai and New York – regions that have been historically tough to enter – and slowly began to acquire overseas customers. Depending on the target geography, we’d alter the style and tone of our ads, which included interactive gifs, detailed
A few years ago, after steady growth in the US, we decided to
experiment with our marketing in the country. Our Instagram engagement had always been high, so we thought we’d take a year off from paying steep PR agency fees and invest in social media advertising.
Along with dozens of other entrepreneurs, I attended a conference run by Facebook in London, targeted at luxury business owners. But rather than look at medium-sized businesses, it was largely focused on Chanel’s very expensive campaign — a level of success that didn’t strike me or my peers as realistic.
Afterwards, the speaker confirmed to me that while Facebook advertising works well for very large luxury brands and also smaller brands with a lower price point, for luxury businesses operating in the middle there weren’t many magic tips.
I decided to see what a specialty social media agency had to say. We ended up hiring a US-based team that knew the US market very well and we invested £25,000, which for us was a weighty sum.
The result of that campaign: Zero. Our Facebook numbers didn’t go up. Instagram engagement didn’t rise. Sales didn’t increase. Nothing. So, what went wrong?
product videos and carousels of lifestyle imagery.
Our ads have highly specific end-goals. We’ve designed individual ads to engage customers, educate them on product benefits, move them down the ‘acquisition funnel’ and convert them through special offers. We’ll launch these into different audiences and within hours analyse click-through data and alter the budget-per-ad based on individual performance. Days later we’ll have a data set of granular ad and audience efficiency. This drives a positive feedback loop.
We’ve also effectively used a social media meets bricks-and-mortar approach. We build partnerships with premium gyms and hotels in each new market we launch in, so would-be customers on Facebook have a physical space to view the products.
Facebook has worked wonders for us, but of course it’s not a magic wand. Entrepreneurs have always had to work exceptionally hard to define what their brand stands for, why it exists and how customers will benefit from using their product. Those who think social media is a substitute for core brand building won’t last long.
Well, for a product and company like Loquet, I’ve learned the economics of Facebook marketing simply doesn’t work. Here’s why: We’re selling a luxury product. That means our customers expect a very high level of quality from our marketing. Our content needs to look and feel as expensive as our products.
But that requires a huge financial investment, which as a startup we simply can’t afford — yet.
It is therefore extremely difficult to create social content that competes with the likes of Cartier or Tiffany’s. Brands with a lower price point can get away with a more rough-and-ready approach to their marketing.
We reverted back to PR and our numbers are once again on the move. When Loquet brings in $5m (£3.6m) annual turnover, which we’re not far from, we’ll likely take outside investment and re-think our Facebook strategy. We might then have a chance against our well-funded competitors.
Facebook: Does it work for startup brands?Facebook has said it will reduce posts from brands and publishers. The news comes as many startups with small budgets are already debating whether Facebook advertising is all it’s cracked up to be.
FOR AGAINST
Ignore Facebook at your peril
Facebook didn’t work for us
‘Medium-sized luxury business can’t compete.’
‘Facebook works wonders, but it’s not a magic wand.’
b Sheherazade Goldsmith is co-founder of British jewellery brand Loquet London.
b Thomas Beahon is co-founder of British sportswear brand Castore.
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49
Sustainability and success don’t fitFashion brands find it harder than ever to meet pure sustainable credentials in today’s world.
The best way to grow sustainably is to grow organically. But that often means slowly, and in today’s consumerist, speed-obsessed world, slow is not desirable – slow is not ‘success’.
Defining ‘sustainable’Pinpointing what makes a fashion business sustainable is complex and relative.
It means producing a sustainable product – something designed to last a long time, using appropriate materials, and having an understanding and interest in where, how and under what conditions the product has been made.
But it also means having a sustainable business model – both financially and practically. This is key. You must be able to scale without compromising your product and keep investing in the people who make it possible – from the designers in the office right through to the factory makers and the farmers in the field.
Work in progressOnce you have this figured out, the work doesn’t stop. There will always be improvements to be made.
It’s an intense and exhausting way of working. Just when you think you understand everything about your product, something will inevitably pop up to challenge those views. In fact, I have found that the more I know, the more difficult it becomes to think of any product as sustainable.
When it comes to sustainability, if you’re
looking for perfection, I don’t think you will ever find it. There will always be something new to tackle.
What’s possible?This is why it’s so difficult to draw the line separating what is and is not sustainable. Running a small brand, I find it useful to think about sustainability in terms of attitude and taking action. For example, small manufacturers often can’t afford, or indeed are not eligible for, Fairtrade certification. Small labels don’t have the power to make demands on the transparency
and processes of their manufacturers in the same way a bigger player can.
It’s about working within your means and to the best of your ability. Making sure you manufacture responsibly – both ethically and sustainably – is just as important as designing a great product.
I admire brands like Patagonia and Veja because of the way they handle the issue of sustainability – with honesty, energy and a willingness to learn. What they have in common is that they share both their successes and their failures, and are open and transparent about where they need to improve.
Growing at a modest pace, instead of racing to produce as
I recently used a popular US ride sharing service. After settling into the car, the driver asked if I needed to charge my phone. ‘The app told me you do,’ he said. I looked at my mobile and, lo and behold, the battery was at a precarious 4%.
Immediately, I remembered a news story from 2016 involving Uber, in which it was revealed the startup giant may know when you’re low on power. It denied accusations that it uses this information to determine when to offer a surge (or inflated) fare.
When personal data is used to anticipate a customer’s needs, is it to benefit or exploit that customer? Either way, trust is a core concern for tech brands.
Big tech is suffering from an image crisis. Uber has faced public accusations of creating a toxic, corrosive corporate culture. Amazon is trying to get past your front door. Recurring infractions from the established players include proclaiming to be ‘neutral’ arbiters blind to what happens on their platforms, limiting the influence of shareholders and, of course, the predatory collection and misuse of data.
In any relationship, trust, once eroded, is nearly impossible to reclaim.
In 2018, there is an opportunity for the next generation of disruptors. The common characteristic these emerging brands share is the focus on the consumer.
To succeed, they must demonstrate a strong moral compass and consciously avoid the crass mistakes of their predecessors.
Founders should be aware that there will more scrutiny than ever, and they must truly go beyond lip service in the year ahead, lest the same cycle repeats itself again.
‘If you’re looking for perfection, I don’t think you will ever find it.’
much as possible as quickly as possible, gives new brands the time to build strong and lasting relationships with everyone in the supply chain.
Changing attitudesSustainability is as much about attitude as it is about certifications. You must constantly be curious and willing to discover more, even when – especially when – the consequences challenge you.
On a wider scale, legislation will play an important role, for example by protecting workers’ rights and banning the use of
harmful processes and chemicals in the supply chain.
But the law can only do so much. The kind of conscious attitude needed to tackle these global issues has to be in the brand’s DNA.
We will never have the perfect processes or the ideal materials, because our environment is constantly shifting. The question of sustainability is a never-ending challenge which requires people who don’t just shut the door on a problem that arises – but want to explore it.
ELEANOR O’NEILL STUDY 34
COLIN NAGY FRED AND FARID
Tech must win back trust
b Eleanor O’Neill is founder ofresponsibly produced knitwear label Study 34.
b Colin Nagy is head of strategy at global advertising agency Fred and Farid.
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Moonshots need dayshotsFulfilling that pipe dream is possible, if you start making small improvements, every day.
Everyone has a moonshot these days. Or so it seems. Alas, very few of us will ever reach it.
As it turns out, we are good at setting big goals, but less good at achieving them. Why is that? Was the goal too big? Or the endeavour too weak?
There is an argument that if you achieve your moonshot, you set the bar too low. I buy that to a small degree. Yes, a moonshot should be the ultimate test of your potential, as a person or as a company. So, you’d expect the failure rate to be correspondingly high.
If a moonshot had a job description, it would go something like this: ‘Your job is not to be sensible or logical. Your job is to be nigh on fucking impossible. To scare the holy shit out of you. To push you to the very limit of what you can achieve. To find what you are ultimately capable of and then push you beyond what
investment propped up the low cost of rides. And, let us also not forget, there was a litany of truly awful behaviour.
2017 was also the year in which social media became a threat to everything. Facebook stopped being the cute platform that allowed you to vaguely stay in touch with people you didn’t quite want to stay in touch with. Suddenly, it was an easily wielded psychographic weapon with countless low-cost ad plans through which foreign adversaries could launch their attacks.
Yet relying on Facebook to protect its users is like politely asking the Ebola virus to change its DNA. The company is full of good people who accidentally created something bad. However, they cease being good people when they don’t try and fix it.
POWER FOR GOOD OR EVIL?So, 2017 happened, and people in the Valley responded by doing one of two things: they doubled-down on libertarianism and said fuck it, or they did some serious soul-searching to rediscover their progressive values.
I’ve seen the money-driven switch to libertarianism plenty of times and it never stops being nauseating. Picture this: a nice, intelligent, progressive person arrives in the Valley, works hard and graduates from an engineer’s T-shirt to a CTO’s American Giant hoodie to a CEO’s zippered V-neck, a pair of Allbirds and a Japanese slim-fit Oxford shirt from Everlane. They’ve ‘made it’ and suddenly, with $8m in the bank, they begin extolling libertarian Nietzsche-isms, and buying Prepper bunkers and rounds of ammunition.
Libertarian. The word unnerves me. Despite knowing people I like and respect who identify with the philosophy, I can’t help but notice they’re either a rich person who doesn’t want to pay more tax or someone a rich person has paid to say that he or she shouldn’t pay tax.
It’s like neoclassical or trickle-down economics. Total fantasy. An intellectual farce in which wealthy people with no principles pay academics with no morals to write nonsense based on no evidence for an audience of people
who are fine with income inequality — so long as it’s not their income that’s unequal.
As for the soul-searching types? Some Valley titans are
now bowing their heads and heading down to Carmel or up to Mendocino. They’re turning to farm-to-table food and yoga as a way of processing the guilt. There’s a sense among the idealists that, for a while, we were all fooling ourselves.
I read a great article recently stating that Silicon Valley in 2017 is Wall Street in 2008. I only agree to an extent, as there’s still a lot of good in the Valley.
Scenes of billionaires forlornly considering their contribution to the greater good over hot-stone massages and fluffy white towels may invite ridicule, but at least they’re searching. Wall Street never had a soul. That’s the difference.
a David Bryant has worked on tech, design and strategy in Silicon Valley and New York.
Silicon soul searchAfter tech titans gain wealth, they face a fork in the road: soul search for progressive values or take the path towards libertarianism.
What a year 2017 was for Silicon Valley. In an unexpected and poetic twist, a bubble finally
burst, but it wasn’t a financial one. For years the Valley has been inflating a
‘suspension of moral judgement’ bubble in which its mostly liberal, progressive values have been stretched to breaking point.
Well, last year it popped, and loudly. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. The list of companies exhibiting dot-com-level fuckwittery was troubling and pointed to a coming correction.
Generally speaking, there are three levels of failure for a startup. You can fail on premise, launch, or operations.
Failing on premise is the worst – it means the entire idea was bad from the outset. In the dot-com era, Pets.com was the poster-child for this species of fail. In 2017, we had Juicero (a $400, wifi-enabled juice-squeezer), Bodega (vending machine 2.0), Skedaddle (Uber for buses), and many more.
Indeed, this year Uber itself — a brilliant, amoral and hugely overvalued company — showed its true colours. A beautiful interface papered over the cracks of a flawed business model and heavy
‘Relying on Facbeook to protect its users is like politely asking the Ebola virus to change its DNA.’
DavidBryant
ON: SILICON VALLEY
DavidHieatt
ON: WORK
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The Old Vic theatre. Many of her friends had been caught unawares by the referendum and were too slow to realise what it meant. To their embarrassment, several hadn’t voted.
Rachael, who had been to the ballot box, noticed plenty of her peers had become politicised by the Leave vote. One consequence was the surge in support for the Labour party, seen as more sympathetic to the Remain cause.
But another effect was the exodus abroad, with Brits taking advantage of the last few years of freedom of movement or even planting permanent roots elsewhere in Europe. And many of them have ended up here in Berlin.
RIGHT ENVIRONMENTThe city’s appeal, of course, isn’t limited to those leaving London. In this age, when so-called ‘citizens of nowhere’ set sail for greener grass, they often look to fill a niche in the creative or business scenes.
One of Berlin’s most impressive new dreamers in this sense is Balazs Deme, who grew up in Transylvania and studied in Budapest and Houston before making his way to Germany. Though Balazs actually still views London as Europe’s primary startup hub, he chose to create his new cryptocurrency platform, Herdius, in Berlin.
Balazs told me he found the city’s business scene tough-going at first, given so much here is based on personal connections. But, as he explains, there’s something unique about Berlin. Because it’s so relentlessly social, with no end of opportunities to meet new people, most
ambitious types eventually develop enough connections to find success.
The day after I met him, Balazs was due to host a group of investors to discuss plans for Herdius’s initial
coin offering in 2018. After several weeks of dawn-to-
dusk meetings, it seemed his efforts were finally about to pay off.
Brexit might have sealed the deal for Berlin’s appeal but
common sense says you can do. That’s your job.’
And, if that’s the case, my moonshot does its job very well. Mine is to get 400 people their jobs back making jeans in my town. The first time I said it, it scared me. And as I write it today, it scares me. To be honest, I hope it always scares me.
I use the moonshot to guide and drive me. I think about it every morning. I picture what it will look like. But then the dreaming stops. I use dayshots to make the small steps towards that end goal. Every day.
Most people don’t achieve their moonshots because they don’t pay enough attention to the small dayshots. They just want to hit the ball out of the park. Take the big swings.
They don’t come into work each day asking these simple questions: ‘How can I get better today than I was yesterday? What tiny thing can I do today to push me closer to the finish line?
The overall impact of getting better by 1% everyday is huge. Compounded, it’s 3,800% per year. That’s 40 times better than where you started, in just one year. (Thanks to James Altucher for that piece of gold.)
So my simple advice is this: if you want to achieve your moonshot, you absolutely need to adopt a daily practice to make it happen. A routine of thinking that will inch you along each day. You need to come in every morning like it was your first day, and question everything. Why do you do it like that? What would happen if I did it like this? What if we stopped swinging for the big win which rarely comes off, and instead
‘Most people don’t acheive their moonshots because they don’t pay enough attention to the small dayshots.’
‘Brexodus’ and BerlinThe German capital is attracting a wave of young Londoners with its low rents and thriving startup and creative cultures. But can Berlin withstand the threat of gentrification they bring with them?
Berlin has long welcomed wide-eyed newcomers and dreamers. In recent months, though, it’s attracted more
than its usual share of arrivals. Local bars here are increasingly staffed
by fresh-faced transplants from Hackney and Dalston. And I now regularly receive Facebook messages from my British friends who say they ‘just want to check out the town’.
Much of this is likely due to the dual forces of gentrification and Brexit, the latter of which rumbles ever-closer and spells an uncertain future for creative souls hoping to make a long-term home in the UK.
LONDON’S EXODUSNot long ago I met up with my friend Rachael, an assistant director and choreographer serving her apprenticeship at
MusaOkwonga
ON: BERLIN
made all those little things much better?I was looking at our website recently
and wondering why it was taking so long to load. So, we spent the next
couple of days resizing every photo. It only saved a fraction of a second. But when you multiply
how many people visit the site by that small fraction, it suddenly becomes a huge number. Chase those dayshots. Everyday. Relentlessly.
a David Hieatt is the co-founder of Hiut Denim Co and The Do Lectures.
‘When citizens of nowhere head for greener grass, they often look to creative or business scenes.’
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some creatives had already been pushed to foreign shores by London’s high prices. It’s difficult for emerging artists to make a living in London, with monthly rents often flying north of £1,000.
And, of course, the ever-present problem of gentrification. Major music venues have been known to shutter when new residents move to the ‘hip’ areas and then promptly decide they don’t like the noise.
TROUBLE AHEAD?With Berlin’s new influx of immigrants, I’m not entirely sure how well the city will avoid the same fate.
Two new types of dreamers might be moving in – the artist and the entrepreneur – but whenever these camps move into close quarters the latter often wins. Look at San Francisco, where expensive accommodation has sent writers, painters, and dancers to the city’s fringes.
Already, one of my beloved local bookstores has been forced to close. The lease is up and the landlord stands to make much more money from richer tenants eyeing the area.
Ironically, those tenants are often the people like me, who moved to Berlin attracted by its high quality of life.
For selfish reasons, I hope Berlin finds a good balance. What makes this place so exhilarating is the mix of people; how, in a late-night bar, you can just as easily find someone working on their next epic poem as on their new mobile app.
For now, these newcomers have urged me not to become complacent about life in a town where, should I ever lose my focus, there will always be an endless number of dreamers ready to take my place.
a Musa Okwonga is a Berlin-based writer, musician and poet.
‘The artists and the entrepreneurs are moving in, and these camps are in close quarters the latter usually wins.’
Big city of dreams?Of New York, Frank Sinatra once sang: ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere’. Yet do these words still stack up for members of a new generation?
By this point you may have read your fair share of opinion pieces on Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial
debut, released to widespread acclaim late last year. It’s the coming-of-age story of the eponymous Lady Bird (Christine to her mum and dad), an eighteen-year-old who yearns to swap her religious school in Sacramento, California for a prestigious university on the east coast. In the film’s final scenes – spoiler alert! – she makes it. We watch as she emerges from the cocoon of a subway station onto New York’s bustling streets, weighed down by suitcases but giddy with awe.
Like many fans I enjoyed Lady Bird because it portrayed teenage girl-dom in a way that felt honest and relatable; and never more so than in this scene. In her Big Apple-eyed wonderment, I recalled my own first impression of New York, aged 17, fresh after landing a summer internship at a hip hop magazine called Trace. It was 2005 and New York felt like the centre of the universe. On my first – disgustingly sweaty – July day in Manhattan, I resolved to one day live there. There simply didn’t seem anywhere else to be.
Lady Bird is set in 2002, but I wonder if today’s 18-year-olds feel the gravitational pull of New York in the same way. It seems entirely tenable that our heroine’s odyssey, if taking place in 2018, might have instead propelled her to Los Angeles, where reasonable rents and a dynamic creative scene await (the same reasons I visited the city, instead of New
York, to enact my own US ‘soft launch’ in 2012). Or perhaps she’d be disillusioned by the US entirely, and dream of flying across to Barcelona or Berlin.
It’s too early to evaluate the domestic migratory patterns of Gen Z, given that the eldest of them are barely out of their teens – but stats suggest that a shift is underway. New York continues to draw the largest millennial population of any city in the country, but metropolitan areas like Pittsburgh and Baltimore are seeing much larger relative increases in the number of inhabitants aged 25-34. This redistribution is also reflected in the explosion of startup scenes in cities such as Seattle, Austin and Denver, where data indicates a steep upward swing in early-stage investment deals.
In an age of remote workers and pro-influencers, one can technically build a career anywhere the wifi connection is strong. Across the country there are cities — Portland, Chicago, Atlanta — offering plenty of distractions to 20-somethings seeking the trappings of city life, minus NY’s hefty price tag.
So will financially-cautious, brand- savvy, tech-fluent Gen Z continue to buy into the New York hype? With a sense of opportunism rather than optimism, perhaps.
When I was growing up in London, a move to New York was a signifier that you’d really made it: a working life without a stint in the concrete jungle was a working life unambitiously-spent.
Now the metrics of success have shifted and the American Dream
is being called to question daily. Since the 2016 election,
grown-up me has often wondered whether New York is the right place to
continue to build a career — and a life. But 18-year-old me is still really glad I did.
a Phoebe Lovatt is a New York resident and founder of the
Working Women’s Club.
‘Cities like Portland and Atlanta offer plenty of distraction to 20-somethings seeking city life – minus NY’s price tag.’
PhoebeLovatt
ON: NEW YORK
LOWDOWN
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VERENA VON PFETTEN GOSSAMER FOUNDER
New Yorker Verena von Pfetten co-founded cannabis lifestyle magazine Gossamer in 2017. Her business is one of an estimated 28,000 in this fledgling industry, capitalising on the legalisation of recreational weed. Eight US states have now legalised non-medical use of cannabis.
What’s the wisest thing someone’s told you? Assume the best intentions.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?Coat check at a fancy French restaurant in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I spent October through March getting fur coats chucked in my face.
What’s the best ever invention?Red lipstick, modern medicine.
Where would you like to go in our time machine?The next presidential election: 3 November 2020.
Who would be your three dream dinner guests?Meryl Streep, Michelle Obama and food writer Ina Garten, hosted by Garten at her home.
Does modern capitalism work? No.
Somewhere you visited recently that you’d recommend?The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria – a land art installation of 400 polished steel rods built in 1977 atop a plateau in rural New Mexico. The site was chosen by the artist for its propensity for lightning storms. Seeing the work involves an overnight stay in a wood-sided cabin with no cell service or wifi. It’s one of the most beautifully quiet experiences I’ve ever had.
If we hit ‘most listened to’ on your music, what would come up?‘Come Dancing’ by The Kinks, ‘XO’ by Beyonce and ‘If I Had A Million Dollars’ by Barenaked Ladies.
If you weren’t running this business, which one would you like to take charge of?Teen Vogue. Or ‘Drinks ‘n’ Snacks’, a bodega I’d open with my best friend, offering a mix of high-end sandwiches, tasty cocktails, and corner store staples: kitty litter, toilet paper, and the world’s best selection of 99-cent ramen.
How do you relax?A low-dose edible, long bath, and a good book.
Who’s your hero?Anyone with the conviction to make decisions every day that reflect their moral beliefs.
What’s your death row meal?A never-ending bowl of spaghetti bolognese; sea urchin sushi; and a two-cheeseburger meal from McDonald’s, Big Mac sauce on the burgers, large fries, four-piece nuggets, and a diet Coke. Raspberry rhubarb pie with vanilla ice cream.
Do you have any regrets?I am firmly anti-regret. It’s not worth the time or the energy.
What would you go big on if you became President?It seems obvious: legalise cannabis. More importantly, though, I would focus on reforming our criminal justice system, and pardon those who have served or are currently serving sentences for cannabis-related offences.
What would you outlaw?Civil forfeiture, which allows US police officers to take assets from people they suspect of wrongdoing without actually having to charge them with a single crime; pet stores; and the death penalty.
Sum up what you do in a sentence.I’m the co-founder of a lifestyle publication for the modern cannabis consumer.
Why did you decide to get into this?Despite the fact cannabis is a daily part of millions of people’s lives, we felt there was nothing in the space that reflected the way most people really interact with it. It’s not all about getting high or researching strains: it’s about having a better experience. We want to offer that same quality of experience through our content.
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COURIER TALKS
InsightsCreativeEventsFilmsReportsModern Business
Courier Partners collaborates with brands who want to remain relevant amid changes driven by technology, disruptive new ideas and the attitudes and behaviour of a new generation of consumers. The insight and creative work we produce is informed by our position at the very heart of startup culture.
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We go behind one of 2017’s most successful podcast launches and the advertiser that took a gamble to get it off the ground on page 57. Plus: the brand creating shoppable content (page 67), and a tech startup enabling shoe makers to offer personalised products (page 63).
Workshop
MORE TIPS ON US SUCCESS Stuart Chapman, COO and investment partner at VC firm Draper Esprit, offers his advice:
Pick your time wisely. Expanding to the US is more successful if you go early, when you are still working out your market fit, or much later, when you can leverage your product reputation. Pretend you are an alien from Mars. The market, route to market and reasons buyers buy will probably be different to your home market. Do not have any preconceptions.
Hire in line with your corporate culture. Trying to keep two teams together in later years is difficult, but it’s far harder if they never shared the same DNA from the start.
It’s not an experiment. Go all in. Someone senior needs to lead the project in the early days, and commit to it.
INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION
The American dream Many British companies have attempted to leap across the pond – and drowned. The co-founder of Kano, a build-it-yourself computer kit, reveals his tips for success.
Alex Klein is on a mission to teach anyone – even kids – how to build a computer from scratch. Using Kano’s range of DIY kits, underpinned by an open coding platform, it’s possible to build everything from radios and Minecraft hacks to full games, PCs and more.
Founded in 2013, Kano is already a prominent player in the London tech scene as a maker of both hardware and software. The startup banked £21m in funding last year to propel its push into 4,500 retailers across the US.
Klein explains how pulling off a successful US expansion comes down to five key elements:
1. YOU NEED TO BE THEREPeople in the US like personal stories – just look at television advertising for startups over there. For example, the founders of smart doorbell company Ring and shaving company Harry’s have woven their personal backgrounds into their ads. Which shows that, as a founder, you have to be present. You can’t be somewhere via phone, email or Skype alone.
2. THINK ABOUT TURNSBuyers at US retailers will partly judge your business by how many times a given store has
INSIGHTAs a founder you know your product better than anyone else. Don’t rely on stores to convey your marketing messages.
to restock your product. Every buyer wants to see more ‘turns’.
3. THE ‘SELL THROUGH’ IS THE HARDESTIt’s you that has to move your product. In most US retailers, especially if you’re doing something unique, the staff will not have an extensive knowledge about each and every product they are selling. If you can get a store really excited, they might put you in a catalogue. By and large, however, the marketing needs to come from you. So once you’ve managed to sell your product somewhere you can’t relax because you’ve actually created a big problem for yourself. Suddenly you have tons of product on the shelf that you need to move with clever marketing and buzz.
4. AMERICANS LIKE CONTROVERSYAs we know, the US has an appetite for controversy right now, so use this in your advertising.
Our first ad carried the tagline ‘Monkey vs MacBook’. It features my MacBook, which I had left in the rain and which, unsurprisingly, stopped working. We gave the MacBook to
a monkey to rip apart with a screwdriver. Whereas people in the UK had a really negative reaction – ‘Why would you destroy this beautiful thing?’ – people in the US loved it.
5. DON’T BE COWEDYou will probably be much smaller than companies already established in the US but the reason retailers are meeting with you is because their industry is changing. For me, there hasn’t been a better time for startups to take on physical retail in the US in years. There’s uncertainty, and that brings opportunity.
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REINVENTING TRADITION
Tinkering with the tailor modelHenry Herbert set up as a tailor amid a challenging retail environment. Its answer to finding new clients? Scooters and Google.
At the same time, the financial crisis had ripped a hole through a major revenue source to Savile Row – banker clients. Many tailors were struggling to survive. Hong Kong conglomerates acquired some of the best known, including the iconic Gieves and Hawkes.
Suits were also becoming less popular. In 2016, JP Morgan changed its dress code – no longer were its bankers required to wear suits. Only a third of all office workers in the UK were regularly wearing a suit and tie to work anyway.
In short, a challenging environment in which to launch.
NO FIXED ABODERather than spending big on a Savile Row shop front, Henry Herbert founder Charlie Baker-Collingwood settled for an office space on the street with several other young tailors. He couldn’t bring clients there, so instead he went to them.
Baker-Collingwood took his scooter to visit clients at their offices or homes (and sometimes took the train to clients based outside London).
Although annual trips to the US for American clients has long been part of being a Saville Row tailor, such a local mobile service was alien to the prestige and grandeur of visiting a tailor ‘on the Row’.
The small amount of floorspace Baker-Collingwood opted for on Savile Row cut his overheads considerably. Exempt
from London’s congestion zone charges, the scooters were also cheap. Keeping costs down has enabled Henry Herbert to offer bespoke suits at a lower entry point than its neighbours (Henry Herbert’s suits start at £1,295 compared to, say, £3,500 at Gieves and Hawkes).
SAVILE ROW OUTSIDERLike many upstart tailors, Baker-Collingwood has a new way of thinking about his customers. He says men are increasingly turning to bespoke suits for weddings and, because they don’t need to wear a suit to work, buying one has become more special.
‘Google was our shop window at the time,’ he adds. He dubbed the service ‘Savile Row by scooter’, and promoted the fact his tailors could visit anywhere across the UK.
Today, a significant number of Henry Herbert’s clients come from outside of London; 15% are from the US, 10% from Asia and 5% from Africa.
In 2016, Baker-Collingwood opened a showroom in Bloomsbury. He says ‘a good
NEW GENERATION TAILORS Four tailors on Savile Row trying to shake off the stuffiness of the street.
Cad & The DandyFormer City bankers James Sleater and Ian Meiers provide bespoke tailoring at a more competitive rate than their Savile Row neighbours.
Kathryn SargentIn 2016, Sargent made history by becoming the first female master tailor to open a house on Savile Row.
Henry Poole & CoA long-standing tailor, Henry Poole recently collaborated with Adidas to produce two pairs of trainers and an exclusive suit fabric.
Phoebe GormleyIn 2014, the 23-year-old tailor launched Gormley & Gamble, the first brand on Savile Row to offer made-to-measure clothing solely for women.
IN-SEAM INSIGHT Famed tailor Richard Anderson shares the biggest changes to Savile Row he has seen over the years.
1. Younger clienteleCustomers were once ‘aristocracy coupled with captains of industry’. The average age has dropped markedly, with even 30-year-old customers buying bespoke suits.
2. New brandsDesign-led brands such as Alexander McQueen and Abercrombie and Fitch have controversially moved in. ‘On the one hand that’s good, because it brings in a different sort of footfall,’ says Anderson. Though it also means ‘fewer true tailors’.
3. Higher rents Big brands, however, push the rent up. ‘It obviously sets a precedent for us guys who are not in the same league.’
4. More apprenticesIn the 1980s, Savile Row struggled to hire young people. That has changed completely. ‘I now get at least 10 applications a week for work experience or apprenticeships.’
5. More global customersChinese customers are increasingly frequenting the Row. Anderson and business partner Brian Lishak now travel to America three times a year, to Japan twice a year, and have recently undertaken their first trunk show in Hong Kong.
50%’ of his customers still opt for scooter visits, and his team of tailors armed with measuring tapes, fabric swatches and scooters still whizz around London to visit clients.
When Henry Herbert launched in 2008 it didn’t have enough cash to open a permanent site on Savile Row, the home of British tailoring. Nor did it have the heritage of the tailors already there, some of which had been in business for over 100 years.
INSIGHT
When a rich tradition is part of the customer appeal for an expensive product, innovating with convenience can be risky. Henry Herbert has tried to balance the two.
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WORKSHOP
It’s a sign of how far podcasts have come. The departure of host, James Richardson, and producer, Ben Green, of the Guardian’s popular Football Weekly show ahead of the start of this football season created a social media storm as fans expressed shock and sadness.The show’s key protagonists were jumping ship after 10 years.
AD DEALSSix months on and The Totally Football Show is already eclipsing the audience size of the Guardian’s podcast. Muddy Knees Media, the company behind the show co-founded by Richardson (pictured, top), Green and Football Weekly-regular Iain Macintosh (both pictured, below), has also signed three big advertising deals, with betting firms Paddy Power and William Hill, and launch advertiser, shaving startup Cornerstone (see box).
A second podcast, The Totally Football League Show, covering the second tier of the English league, launched in September. Shows on Italian football, film and wrestling are also planned, with the idea that the flagship podcast will draw advertisers and listeners to the new ones.
COMMERCIAL WINNERSIt appears a well-timed move. Around 4.7 million Brits have now listened to a podcast, and advertisers are getting behind the medium. In the US, the largest podcast market, £88m was spent on podcast advertising in 2016.
There has also been a swathe of successful specialist podcast companies launched, such as Gimlet, Panoply and Pineapple Street Media.
One of the main challenges for Muddy Knees was finding a way to stand out from the estimated 330,000 podcasts on iTunes. It is already jostling with shows from the likes of Sky, the BBC and TalkSport on iTunes’ sports podcasts chart. (Apple controls 60-70% of podcast traffic and remains the best signal of success.)
LIVE SHOWSMuddy Knees claims to have a listenership of 500,000 per episode. But advertising isn’t the only way it is turning its audience into income.
In early November, the company hosted its first Totally Football Live show, at the Glee Club, Birmingham. A second show in London followed a few weeks later, and the company
THE RAZOR COMPANY THAT BET ON MUDDY KNEES A major breakthrough for Muddy Knees Media was landing its launch advertiser, Cornerstone.
The shaving startup was a regular sponsor on the Guardian’s Football Weekly show, but decided to switch to the new company. Cornerstone founder Oliver Bridge says being a startup made the risk possible: ‘We could take a gamble a big company couldn’t.’ Dubious claims Startups dominate podcast advertising, with brands like Casper, Blue Apron, Squarespace and Harry’s (another razor startup) advertising prolifically in the US.
Traditional advertisers have been dubious of the claims on audience size and have struggled to imagine how their brands translate to the medium. Startups, however, often work directly with shows in a bid to get presenters to talk about their brands rather than insert a traditional radio advert.
Natural fitBridge says Cornerstone, which has sponsored 20 podcasts to date, prefers to meet the presenters for drinks and allows them to talk freely and make jokes about the brand and razors in a natural style on the show, rather than put out a one-size-fits-all advert.
While this form of ‘native advertising’ is favoured by startups, Bridge says it’s impossible to imagine a more corporate or traditional company such as Gillette allowing ‘maverick football fans to talk about their product’.
Gillette, as it happens, currently sponsors the Guardian’s Football Weekly.
BUSINESS MODELS
In pod we trustLast summer the trio behind the Guardian’s hugely successful football podcast suddenly quit to set up their own company. Can they prove podcasts can make money?
THE GUARDIAN AND PODCASTS
The UK’s most famous liberal news brand was one of the first and fastest movers to podcasts 10 years ago.
It created its own studios and launched podcasts about politics, film, media, science, football and more.
The football one has survived, produced with little budget and drawing income from advertising and live events. Over 2,000 people bought tickets to an event it staged at The London Palladium when Richardson and Green were at the helm.
For many of the individuals behind the Guardian’s football podcast, its success was frustrating. They wanted the Guardian to pump profits back into evolving the format.
The lack of investment appears to have motivated the trio’s desire to go it alone. The gamble was whether the team could pull in listeners and advertisers without the Guardian’s backing.
has plans to host regular live events throughout 2018.
The formula is already proving successful for other podcasts such as My Dad Wrote A Porno, which toured Australia and the US last year.
Whether live or in a studio, Muddy Knees is building its business around sitting at a table, talking about football. Who knew that could be so popular?
INSIGHT
Smart podcast producers are increasingly making money from live events in front of an audience.
WORKSHOP
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While huge companies from Tesla to VW are frantically trying to design and manufacture battery-powered cars, several startups are getting into the business of charging. According to some estimates, the UK will need a network of one million charging points by 2020.
London-based Pod Point
NEW MARKETS
The electric gambit Pod Point is trying to get in early with electric vehicle charging. Has it got its timing right?
are currently electric vehicles (EVs), the company has also persuaded several corporate clients, including Sainsbury’s and Nestlé, to offer EV charge points to their customers and employees.
‘Vehicle charging attracts wealthy customers to their store,’ explains James McKemey, Pod’s head of insights, in the same way that petrol stations currently draw people in and drive grocery sales. He adds that most supermarkets even offer car charging for free.
EV charge points will soon be ‘a benefit you expect’ at hotels, shopping centres and workplace carparks, says McKemey.
FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGEPod now needs take-up of battery-powered cars to happen quickly to make its investment pay off. In the next few years the company is aiming to get as many long-term corporate partnerships as possible to protect itself from competitors such as Chargemaster.
‘Intangibles such as your brand can become critical,’
McKemey says, especially for winning corporate contracts. Persuading consumers is less important in the short term, as they will prioritise convenience. McKemey says: ‘We’d be naive at this stage to think people would hunt out Pod Points.’
MULTI-SKILLING
Learning on the jobWhy the director of watch company Fears taught himself new skills instead of hiring experts.
started spending his lunch breaks plotting in cafes
and eventually took two days off work
to sit in a library and write a
business plan. ‘On
reflection, it was a crazy
time,’ says Bowman-Scargill
(pictured), who is the great-great-
great grandson of Edwin Fear, who
established the company in 1846. Lunch breaks were spent learning book-keeping, and weekends on trips to Europe to meet potential suppliers.
NIGHT COURSEWhile it’s not uncommon for founders with limited budgets to try their hand at essential jobs, Bowman-Scargill went much further. He attempted to learn specialised skills rather than hire expert help, a move that cut costs but risked overwhelming the new founder.
Manufacturers in Geneva demanded thousands of pounds for precise drawings of a watch dial. By learning how to use Adobe Illustrator, Bowman-Scargill reckoned he could do
the job himself. He enrolled in a night course at a local university.
‘I think everyone else in the room was doing some sort of arts degree,’ he says. ‘Then I turned up in a suit, saying I needed to learn this to do technical drawings.’
DESIGN, PHOTO AND WEBHe soon added a course on Adobe InDesign so that he could create his own catalogues and brochures. He took a one-day lesson in product photography using his father’s DSLR, learned Photoshop chops from YouTube videos, and gained HTML tips which he used to build the first Fears website.
Learning multiple new skills takes time, but Bowman-Scargill says he wouldn’t have been able to progress the business without them.
‘I feel pleased that I at least understand the mechanics,’ he says. ‘While I won’t ever know how to build an entire car, I’m glad I know how an internal combustion engine works.’
INSIGHT
Pod Point wants to be the default choice for the EV revolution. However, early movers risk over-estimating interest or betting too heavily on still-changing technology.
When Nicholas Bowman-Scargill’s mother joked about relaunching the family’s 170-year-old watch business, he was fixing watches for Rolex. Despite working in the industry, this was a piece of family history Bowman-Scargill knew nothing about; Fears had, after all, been dormant for around 50 years.
In 2014, working around his full-time job at Rolex, he
wants to spray the country with chargers ahead of that in a bid to be the first and fastest mover. But has it gone too early?
BIG COMPANIESPod’s primary source of revenue will come from selling chargers to car-owners. However, as just 1.9% of new cars sold
INSIGHT
Courage and an open mind can help founders get the basics of services that would break a startup budget if a specialist is called upon.
2015 2017*201600
2%5000
UK electric car registrations
*Jan-Nov 2017
Total electric car sales
Market share
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LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION Wight and Arntson knew opening a shop would be a gamble, so they made sure their product was up to scratch before committing.
The co-founders began selling their high-veg, low-meat lunch pots to other businesses working in Ministry of Startups’ Spitalfields building, asking for feedback along the way.
But as well as a solid product, they soon discovered the importance of location of a site. ‘The [Broadgate Circus unit] needed nothing done to it,’ Wight explains. ‘We could get trading quickly for a very low cost. We were blinded by that.’
Unfortunately, the unit turned out to be just where workers congregated for cigarette breaks. ‘You could only learn that by spending a day sitting outside,’ Arntson says. As a result of the experience more time will be set aside to scope out locations in the future.
SHIFTING FOCUSHiLo was still selling its pots in co-working spaces, which is how it started out in 2016. In the summer of 2017, HiLo lunch pots were also sold for the first time in retailers, such as independent deli chain Sourced Market, which began stocking the pots after the founder saw Wight eating one at the Ministry of Startups in Spitalfields, where both businesses were based.
Wight crunched the numbers and realised that while HiLo was selling about 20% more through the Broadgate Circus site, it was three times more expensive to run compared to selling in Sourced Market and the co-working spaces combined.
THE OTHER OPTIONS Shutting the shop seemed like an obvious option. The founders don’t rule out opening in another location in the future, but have decided to focus on selling via co-working spaces and exploring more opportunities with third-party retailers such as Sourced Market.
‘We stopped [our own shop] before it stopped us,’
says Arntson. ‘On paper that could be seen as a failure, but we know people love the product because they
keep coming to us.’
CHANGING STRATEGY
Shutting up shop How a bricks-and-mortar misfire pushed HiLo away from opening its own shops to sell healthy lunch pots.
HiLo is one of many new food companies attempting to sell healthy lunches to office workers in London.
After 10 months of planning, prototyping and testing, HiLo opened a tiny shop window in Broadgate Circle by Liverpool Street station in July 2017.
It didn’t last long: three months later, co-founders Tiffany Arntson and Jasper Wight (pictured) pulled the shutters down for the last time.
FEEBLE FOOTFALLArntson and Wight had decided to open the Broadgate Circle site – signing an 18-month lease – following a successful week-long pop-up nearby at Old Street tube station in May.
But they quickly discovered the format at Broadgate
wasn’t working for HiLo. Local workers walked past the kiosk in favour of more familiar options (see box, left). ‘At Broadgate we
discovered a small group of really loyal customers who were nuts about HiLo,’ Arntson reflects. ‘But the reality was they were a niche audience in a mainstream location.’
INSIGHTThird-party retail may mean giving away some of the profits, but the captive audience allows a startup to focus on refining product, packaging and pricing.
WORKING AT THE OFFICEBloomberg’s new European headquarters opened its doors in late 2017.
The development contains 10 commercial units. Independent operators like Caravan, Bleecker Burger and Homeslice have moved in to the spaces – giving them the opportunity to tap into city workers’ wallets.
Luring corporatesThe Bloomberg example is particularly ambitious and indicative of how developers are using retail as a tool to entice corporate tenants into their office blocks.
Workshop Coffee opened its first inside-office unit at the White Collar Factory in September 2017.
It shares the building with tenants such as Adobe, credit lender Capital One and a variety of freelancers and small companies.
Habit formers‘One of the biggest arguments for running a unit like this is [the] captive audience,’ Richard Frazier, Workshop’s head of retail, says. ‘You’ve got hundreds [of people] coming in every day, and you have the ability to form a part of the fabric of their daily lives.’
Like every bricks-and-mortar location, Frazier says it’s important to consider the footfall. He says units situated in office developments that also have a public-facing element are ideal. ‘It’s an old problem with a different set of clothes,’ he adds.
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Brewing delicious coffee at workWhat’s in the pot? The London Coffee Festival suggests four brewing devices to make the perfect cup at work.
1. Cafetière Also known as the French press, it’s ideal for morning stand-up meetings.
Difficulty: Quick and simple – almost fool-proof.
Tools: Cafetière, 60g coffee (medium to coarse grind), 1 litre of freshly boiled water (ideally 91-94°C), a grinder, digital scales, a spoon and a timer.
Method: Place the cafetière on the scales and measure out the coffee. Gently pour in water to achieve the right ratio. Leave the coffee to steep for three to four minutes, stirring half way through; this will make it fall back down. Scoop off the floating grounds (if necessary), before plunging. Enjoy.
Insider tip: ‘Play around with how long you let it brew for; a shorter time will result in a sweeter taste.’ – Ozone Coffee Roasters.
Recommended Coffee: Colombia Matambo, Ozone Coffee Roasters.
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2. AeroPressA single-cup brewing device for solo coffee drinkers.
Difficulty: Simple; it’s also great to travel with.
Tools: AeroPress coffee maker, AeroPress filters, 16g coffee (fine grind), 250ml freshly boiled water (91-94°C), scales, stirrer, timer and a pouring kettle (optional).
Method: Lock the filter into the cap and rinse with hot water. Place mug on the scales, and sit the AeroPress on top, filter side down. Measure out the coffee. 30 seconds after the kettle has boiled, add the water and start the timer. Stir vigorously for a few seconds. Insert the plunger to create a vacuum and after a minute, remove from the scales and slowly press down for 30 seconds.
Insider tip: ‘If the coffee is too weak, grind [it] finer, or if it’s too strong, grind it more coarsely.’ – Caravan Coffee Roasters UK.
Recommended Coffee: Special-Bru, Caravan Coffee Roasters.
3. ChemexA slick brewing device ideal for meetings with clients.
Difficulty: It’s all about practice; the grind, contact time and weight of coffee are key.
Tools: Six to eight cup Chemex, Chemex filters, 40g coffee (coarse grind), 680g water (91-94°C), scales, stirrer, timer and a pouring kettle.
Method: Insert the filter and place the Chemex on the scale. Measure the coffee. Start the timer, add just enough hot water to cover the coffee (approximately 50ml) and let it ‘bloom’. After 30 seconds, slowly pour the remaining water in a circular motion, avoiding contact with the filter. Leave to drip. The whole process should take under four minutes.
Insider tip: ‘Once you’ve poured your water, stir to avoid “high and dry” grounds for a more balanced taste.’ – Square Mile Coffee Roasters.
Recommended Coffee: Hartmann Estate Geisha, Colonna Coffee.
4. Espresso machineOne for those who’ve attended The London Coffee Festival espresso masterclass to tackle.
Difficulty: See above – or leave it to the pros.
Tools: A good quality espresso machine (such as the La Marzocco Linea Mini), 18g coffee (fine espresso grind), water, a tamper, scales and milk (optional).
Method: Clean the espresso basket with a dry cloth. Place the portafilter on the scales to weigh the coffee, then ‘tamp’ until even. Flush water through the machine and add the cup on top of small scales. Lock the handle in and brew for around 28 seconds.
Insider tip: ‘If you want to add milk, the trick is to stay controlled when steaming it; be sure not to heat above 65°C, then swirl the milk in a circular motion to blend into a silky-smooth texture.’ – La Marzocco UK.
Recommended Coffee: Sweetshop, Square Mile Coffee Roasters.
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The UK has more coffee shops than ever before. According to Allegra Strategies, 1,215 new outlets opened across the country in 2017, bringing the total number of coffee shops to 24,061.
‘After nearly a decade of growth in the London specialty coffee scene, it is exciting to see the continued flurry of innovation and, of course, so many new artisan coffee shop openings throughout London and the rest of the UK each year,’ Jeffrey Young, CEO and founder of Allegra Group says. ‘London is now recognised as a true centre of excellence for the high quality craft coffee industry and [is] why The London Coffee Festival attracts thousands of trade visitors and “coffee tourists” from all over the world.’
MEET THE MAKERSThe London Coffee Festival, Europe’s largest event of its kind, will take place from 12-15 April at the Old Truman Brewery, just off Brick Lane in east London.
Launched in 2011, the 2018 festival is expected to be the biggest yet. This follows on from a successful gathering of coffee lovers at 2017’s event: more than 30,000 people attended, 40% of which work in the coffee industry. On Friday night, the Espresso Martini Party will give guests the chance to mingle with these insiders.
LATTE ARTISTS AND COFFEE MASTERSThe London Coffee Festival is an experience for the senses. Find your new favourite coffee with the guest roasters, learn how to create artistic masterpieces in a cup at the Latte Art Live event, where some of the world’s best latte artists will reveal their tips and tricks, and watch top baristas battle it out for the title of Coffee Master. There’ll also be an opportunity to sample some of the capital’s finest food
concepts, on show at the Street Food Market.
THE COFFEE BUSINESSA host of workshops are also scheduled for each day of the festival, including coffee tasting sessions with the likes of Caravan Coffee Roasters, a home-barista workshop, where visitors can learn to pull their own espressos with Italian coffee machine manufacturer La Marzocco, and classes on everything from brewing styles and bean varieties to how to open your own coffee shop in The Lab.
Courier will also be hosting its own talk at The Lab on 12 April, looking at the innovators in the business of coffee.
Thursday and Friday sessions are reserved for trade only. On Saturday and Sunday, there are brunch, lunch, teatime and VIP full-day sessions. To purchase tickets, or for more information, visit londoncoffeefestival.com
The business of brewing coffee
Five must-see talks and workshops
THE TRUE ARTISAN CAFÉ
The beating heart of the festival, with three bars each hosting a rotation of different coffee shops from across the UK, each serving up their own signature drinks.
ESPRESSO MARTINI PARTY
On Friday night, the London Coffee Festival kicks off with a round of espresso and flat white martinis, with Sandows Cold Brew and Baileys serving up drinks.
LATTE ART LIVEYou’ve seen it on Instagram,
now you can watch the masters create their beautiful latte artworks in real time. Ozone Coffee Roasters’ latte artists will also be on hand to teach guests how it’s done.
THE ROASTERY London’s own Union
Hand-Roasted Coffee team are back to host The Roastery once again, where they will be roasting beans live, and walking visitors through the entire process as they go.
COFFEE MASTERS20 world-class baristas
will compete for the prestigious Coffee Masters crown across seven disciplines. Over four days, they will go head-to-head in a series of knockout rounds, for the grand prize of £5,000.
londoncoffeefestival.com
Demonstrations at The Tasting Room, which has an exciting tasting workshop programme.
EXCLUSIVE FOR COURIER READERSTwo standard tickets to the London Coffee Festival purchased in advance cost £25 with this special offer.
Mention code: COUR18. Valid through 12/04/18, subject to availability.
The London Coffee Festival returns in April to celebrate the capital’s growing coffee scene.
1
2
3
4
5
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Tech startup Shoesie wants to enable footwear brands of any size to offer their customers personalised products.
Its platform lets brands plug in every single fabric and colour from their inventories. When a customer has chosen a combination they like, materials are picked and manufactured into a pair of shoes.
If Shoesie can sign up enough brands, it could democratise a market Nike has monopolised for the best part of two decades.
Of all Nike shoes purchased online, around 35% are personalised under its Nike ID brand. Some 15% of shoppers in the UK have purchased customisable footwear, according to Deloitte (see box).
SELLING PERSONALISATIONIt sounds promising, but Shoesie has found it tough to convince brands to add personalisation to their offerings.
The perceived complexity, along with the small trickle of income from selling one-of-a-kinds (compared to the cash injections bulk orders provide)
partly explains why some brands haven’t been tempted.
THE CUSTOMER COMES FIRSTWhen pitching the platform to brands, Simeon Bird, Shoesie’s co-founder, says he was initially emphasising the benefits of customisation from the buyer’s point of view.
‘As much as this is a retail opportunity, it’s a marketing opportunity for brands to connect to customers on a deeper level than just clicking “purchase” on ready-made products,’ he adds.
Marketing teams were keen on the concept but, according to Bird, their colleagues in strategy or e-commerce were resistant. ‘For them, it’s all about numbers at the end of the day,’ he says.
NEW TACTICSShoesie soon realised it would need to change the way it presented the service.
Now, instead of pitching the service as a brand engagement tool, Bird communicates the tangible benefits brands themselves can expect.
FOUR COMPANIES ENTERING THE PERSONALISATION SPACE
COSMETICSFunctions of BeautyHaircare company Functions of Beauty claims its shampoos and conditioners can be made in up to 12 billion different formulas. The company has raised over £6m since launching in 2016.
FASHIONShoes of PreyAllowing customers to alter the shape, height and colour of their heels, Shoes of Prey has designed more than six million shoes since launching in 2009.
WELLNESSVitlAfter a few minutes answering questions about diet, lifestyle and general health, Vitl offers customers a personalised dose of vitamins, posted out on a one-off or monthly basis.
FOODVita MojoVita Mojo lets customers adjust the protein, carbs, fat and calories in their lunches. Launched in 2016, it has two Central London outlets and plans to lease its tech to other restaurants.
PERSONALISED FASHION
Custom kicksBig brands such as Nike are increasingly offering custom-made products. Shoesie wants startups to do the same – but can it convince brands that the numbers stack up?
‘You can improve your average order value, you can get customers to visit your website more often, and [they’ll] stay on it for longer,’ he says.
Shoesie can also collect data on how customers are using the platform, which could sway brands keen to get better at forecasting. ‘We can see popular colour combinations for that specific brand, and across the industry as well,’ he says.
Bird is also quick to point out that products don’t need to be 100% customisable – it’s just about providing enough options so customers feel like they’re creating something unique.
LAUNCH CLIENTIn October 2017, Shoesie went live with its first client, ethical footwear brand Po-Zu.
Having a solid example of a happy customer using the platform has helped with its sales pitch. Since the launch, Shoesie has lined up meetings with Dr Martens and one of the UK’s largest footwear retailers to discuss whether they can use the platform.
Bird also says that the same day as launching with Po-Zu, Shoesie was approached by another personalised shoe brand, Shoes of Prey, about a partnership (see box, left).
Shoesie now has access to Shoes of Prey’s manufacturing facility in China. The deal appears to be a win-win for both companies: Shoesie can now take care of manufacturing for smaller brands, charging £1,100 to set up a new product, with deliveries fulfilled in eight days, while Shoes of Prey can use Shoesie’s tech for its own range.
Bird hopes speed will give its platform an edge over bigger brands dabbling in personalisation. ‘Nike takes as much as three months to get a product online,’ he points out.
PERSONALISATION’S POPULARITY Have you purchased a customised product or service in the past?
Source: Deloitte, Made-to-order: The rise of mass personalisation
Yes
53% No/can’t recall
47%
?
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SMALL-BATCH PRODUCTION
Wood from the trees Furniture startup Grain has found it difficult to buy timber in small quantities.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
A case of mistaken identityWhen news broke of a cosmetics company treating its staff badly, The Soap Co became an inadvertent target for angry consumers.
IDENTITY CR-ISIS Since the rise of the violent extremist group known as Isis, hundreds of companies sharing the moniker have faced the risk of customer backlash. Here are four that chose to rebrand completely.
DrugsFollowing a drop in its stock price after the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, the California-based Isis Pharmaceuticals rebranded to Ionis Pharmaceuticals.
TechIn 2014, mobile banking app Isis Wallet rebranded as Softcard to ‘avoid confusion and association with a violent Islamic militant group’.
EducationIn 2015, language school Isis Education became Oxford International Education Group.
SweetsIn 2013, the Belgian chocolate manufacturer Italo Suisse, founded in 1923, unluckily renamed itself Isis. Following a drop in sales it rebranded to Libeert.
Grain started producing made-to-order chairs, benches and tables with little start-up capital from a space in north London in 2017 around the size of a one-bedroom flat.
In order to get around the challenge of a tiny workshop
and tight funds, Grain has been making its furniture ‘on demand’. The format allows the team to only order materials when they are needed, and finished products are sent out as soon as they are ready, meaning little storage space is
needed. The company’s cash is also rarely tied up in inventory.
The ‘just-in-time’ model was pioneered in the 1970s by Japanese firms such as Toyota, and later became popular with western businesses. For Grain, however, using this model was born out of necessity.
QUANTITY CONFLICTBut this strategy did cause a new challenge: wood suppliers aren’t keen to sell materials in such tiny amounts – timber is generally sold in half-ton pallets from wholesalers.
To get its hands on smaller volumes of timber, Grain has had to adopt a personal approach, travelling out to importers’ offices in vast suburban industrial yards in the hope of persuading them to dismantle palettes.
‘It’s a hell of a lot of legwork,’ says Robin Tyler, Grain’s co-founder (pictured, left). ‘We’ve had to sell the fact we have very ambitious growth plans, and that [it’s beneficial]
to build a relationship now.’ Moving big planks of wood to London is another issue.
An articulated delivery lorry once blocked the street outside the workshop for 20 minutes, Tyler says. To avoid such scenarios now, Tyler usually transports timber in a Zipvan.
FROM PLANKS TO PALETTESTyler thinks Grain is paying around 40% more for timber than it would be if it was buying in bulk. The company is planning to use growing profits to move into a bigger space which can store more wood.
Once order numbers are large enough, the company will jump from ‘just-in-time’ to batching orders together.
WAKE-UP CALL ‘A friend messaged me at 7am saying, “Have you seen this article?”’ explains Camilla Marcus-Dew, co-founder of The Soap Co. ‘From then on it was all action stations.’
It was, of course, a case of mistaken identity.
The Soap Co’s staff started receiving angry emails and phone calls.
Meanwhile, Marcus-Dew instructed the company’s
PR representatives and lawyers to get
in touch with journalists to clarify the situation.
At 10am a pop-up appeared on the company’s home page with
an explanation. ‘We didn’t get
a lot of negative emails after that point,’ says Marcus-Dew.
The PR team also
managed to get news sites to state that The Soap Co was not connected with the offending company featured in their stories.
‘[The PR people] were in disaster recovery mode, which was strange because we hadn’t actually done anything wrong,’ Marcus-
Dew says.
GENERIC NAMESThe impact has been hard to measure. Marcus-Dew says a story on The Soap Co for Stylist magazine was nearly pulled over concerns about the company’s ethics. And she doesn’t know what other journalists’ reactions have been.
Marcus-Dew reflects that part of the reason the issue arose was because of The Soap Co’s generic name. But despite that, she’s unwilling to change the name of the company she’s built up, and believes the misunderstanding was a ‘one-off’.
She says the company is currently considering a slogan to clarify its ethical position.
The Soap Co doesn’t seem like the kind of company to pay its staff just £2 an hour – after all, it built its brand around ethical credentials, hiring blind or otherwise disabled people and refusing to test on animals.
But in July last year it found itself at the centre of a furious backlash: ‘Workers “exploited” at UK cosmetics chain Soap and Co’, ran a BBC headline.
INSIGHT
Startups reliant on a particular commodity for their product have to ensure they are able to buy at a competitive price, guarantee sufficient supply and not take on expensive shipping.
INSIGHT
A sober appraisal, allocating tasks, and a speedy reaction were critical to minimising the impact of the mix-up regarding The Soap Co.
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THE PROS AND CONS OF THE TINNY
In recent years many independent beer brands switched from glass bottles to cans. In August 2017, Nielsen reported that cans accounted for more than a quarter of take-home craft beer sales – an increase of 327% on the start of the year.
Pros Cans cost less, are easier to store and cheaper to move. Crucially, they also block out more light than glass bottles, making them more suitable for unpasteurised, more volatile beers. Cans also provide a better branding canvas because the entire surface can be printed on.
ConsCanning equipment is expensive. For example, Beavertown Brewery spent £500,000 on its canning line. Bottles still tend to be perceived as higher quality and command higher prices, especially by restaurants.
SUPPLY CHAIN
Crafty cannersWhy Deya Brewing is one of many independents choosing to package its own beer.
Standing in an industrial unit in Cheltenham last year, Theo Freyne, founder of Deya Brewing, cracked open a tin of freshly brewed beer.
It was part of a batch worth £2,000 which had been brewing for three weeks on the company’s
premises. It tasted good but, for Freyne, something wasn’t quite right: the packaging had been done by another company. He decided it was time to bring all aspects of production in-house.
‘We weren’t particularly happy with the quality we were getting. Nor was it very cost effective,’ says Freyne, who started with a basic malt extract starter kit but soon moved on to full-grain brewing.
TRAVELLING TINS Deya’s beers – typically ‘soft, intense, hoppy’ – have been sold in 16oz ‘tallboy’ cans since it opened its taproom and brewery in June 2016. It’s one of a growing number of craft breweries choosing tins over glass bottles (see box, right).
Outsourcing packaging is often the default choice for food or drink startups, and breweries are no different. Constrained by money and eager to focus
CAN-DO BREWERSFive UK breweries that have invested in their own canning lines.
BrewdogIn 2015, Brewdog purchased a canning line with a top speed of 34,000 cans an hour. Cans accounted for 17% of its sales the following year.
Magic RockMagic Rock began canning three of its core beers in 2015. The Huddersfield-based brewery now offers all of its beer in can form, and recently struck a deal to be sold in Marks and Spencer.
Moor Beer CompanyBristol-based Moor purchased a £400,000 German canning line in 2015. Soon after it ran a promotional campaign in bottle shops across the UK with the tagline ‘Candemonium’.
FourpureLondon brewery Fourpure briefly trialled bottles when it launched in 2013, before switching to using cans. The brewery can pack up to 12,000 cans per hour.
BeavertownTottenham-based Beavertown started canning its beer in 2014. Initially the brewery canned 50% of its beer, with the rest sold in glass bottles. Today, it exclusively packages its beer in cans.
on the taste of the beer, companies from Crate Brewery in London to Vocation in Yorkshire have left packaging to specialists.
STILL NIMBLE Freyne rejects the notion that a company with its own production facility is less agile than one which isn’t weighed down with the fixed costs of packaging. ‘We actually have more flexibility now. We can change the process, we can release when we want to, and there are no minimum order quantities,’ he says.
More than anything, however, Freyne explains what really motivated the decision. ‘Pursuing the best possible product pushed us to invest [in bringing packaging in-house].’
INSIGHTWhile bringing every facet of a business in-house can make things more complicated, it also brings more control and scope to be different from rivals.
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In a bid to find the business model of the future, publications are increasingly introducing ‘shopping functionality’ into their stories. Food blogs such as ‘Serious Eats’ have teamed up with Amazon to sell ingredients, while tech magazine Wired’s online gadget reviews are now largely shoppable.
Consumer brands, meanwhile, tend to do the opposite. The mattress company Casper recently launched its own print magazine, Woolly, and companies from Net-a-Porter to Asda publish widely read magazines attuned to their target customer.
Semaine is aiming to be something in between: a digital publication that happens to sell items it features in its stories. Or alternatively, as it likes to call itself, ‘an online magazine-meets-concept store’.
According to Semaine’s co-founder Michelle Lu: ‘What we saw in the competitive landscape was publishers and brands trying to retrofit the aspect they didn’t have. We thought, why can’t we make this whole ecosystem genuine?’
TASTEMAKER STORIESLu and co-founder Georgina Harding (pictured), who met while working for fashion photographer Mario Testino, wanted Semaine to publish aspirational stories based on people’s lifestyles, with shopping plugged into it from the start.
Each week Semaine invites a ‘tastemaker’ to share behind-the-scenes insight into their lives and the products they love. Previous contributors have included the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese and the footwear
BUSINESS MODELS
Shoppable stories of the rich and tasteful As more retailers move into publishing content as a brand extension to engage customers, startup Semaine is flipping the tactic on its head.
THE ’GRAM AND INFLUENCER SHOPPING
Semaine is going up against an enormous and powerful army of Instagram influencers, which brands are increasingly turning to as a means of gaining endorsement and awareness.
When Semaine launched, its twist was to feature a carefully curated lineup of influencers, and to make it easy for readers to purchase featured products.
However, in late 2016, Instagram began trialling shopping functionality with a selection of US brands – and in doing so provided a similar service to Semaine.
‘Instagram is incredibly agile in terms of knowing what the customer wants,’ Lu says. ‘But we also do really believe in slowing things down. We present someone we believe is interesting enough to hold your attention for a week.’
Lu is counting on users trusting Semaine’s deft, human editorial touch when it comes to finding interesting people with particular tastes and discoveries, rather than Instagram’s algorithm.
designer Charlotte Olympia, who have recommended products ranging from vintage lamps to Saint Laurent coats.
The concept has been inspired by the popularity of Instagram influencers (see box).
MECHANICS OF SHOPPABLESemaine launched in 2015. After getting brands on board, the next step was figuring out how to integrate products from dozens of retailers into one website.
Semaine has yet to hit on a one-size-fits-all method. ‘A lot of these little brands have just three people working for them,’ Lu says. ‘Integration is not necessarily that easy.’
At first Lu and Harding were keen to make shoppable videos but scrapped the idea as the films failed to resonate with readers.
Now, products are sold largely via affiliate links, which take the reader directly to the brand’s website for purchase. Semaine receives a fee for each purchase made this way.
STAYING ON SEMAINEWhile the affiliate sales model has allowed Semaine to get its business off the ground, it’s not a long-term solution.
‘I think the Semaine customer wants a lot more than being chucked off to another page to buy a product they found,’ says Lu.
She is currently meeting with tech providers to work out a ‘one-click’ solution which will allow customers to purchase items without leaving Semaine’s website. ‘Customers are
incredibly frustrated by the fact they can’t store their payment details or actually pay on Semaine,’ Lu adds.
She’s still on the hunt for the right provider.
NOT A STOCKISTSemaine enjoys the benefits of being a retailer which doesn’t carry stock: it can sell anything that is already being sold online, and it is never beholden to stock not selling.
This leaves it with just two jobs: keep producing stories its audience wants to read, and make the buying process as simple as possible.
INSIGHT
Making engaging content is expensive and laborious. Semaine has a creative and stylish format for its shoppable content. It now has the challenge of coming up with clever tech to make purchasing simpler and faster.
WORKSHOP
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and being led through a maze of labs and conference spaces, I entered a room filled with about 15 managers (I was expecting no more than four people).
The NHS has a fund specifically for innovative tech companies. But it’s still early days for them. It’s a huge organisation with many layers of decision makers.
The due diligence is the trickiest part (and when it comes to healthcare, that is crucial), but it will also take some time to integrate Lysa into their current technology stack.
After that first interaction, the NHS’s digital team contacted us – we’ve now been asked to come back and present to the wider team and I feel like we’re making progress. Thankfully, after months of pitches and presentations, I’ve got my public speaking skills down.
INVESTOR UPDATE
A quick update on our fundraising push: I’ve had around 20 meetings with investors in the past few months, and more are in the pipeline.
It’s taking longer than I expected, and our goal is to close a round by June this year. Thankfully my co-founders and I all have enough of a personal financial runway that it’s not a problem.
So now we have a new plan for making money: corporates can pay for extra features for their employees. We noticed our users were telling us that it was much easier to be healthy at home, but they were struggling at work.
We’re in the very early stages of working with a handful of companies on integrating Lysa with the food being offered within and around a given office – the cafeteria, the snacks and nearby restaurants. The company will foot the bill for the user.
The reality of implementing this is tricky at our size. The algorithm is there, but to learn what foods are in an office, we have to physically rifle through their cupboards, which takes about half a day at a time. It’s not a method that scales well.
NHS INTEREST
I’ve slowly been making inroads with the NHS. It started back in August 2017, when we met with Oxford’s NHS trust to discuss how Lysa could help patients to eat better.
The meeting went nowhere. After arriving at their campus
In this issue’s Startup Diary, Anne-Laure Le Cunff talks mission statements, monetisation and the NHS.
‘Our nutrition advice has to be made accessible to everyone.’
GO BACK TO THE MISSION
In November it struck me: the year was almost over and we had too much to do. I was with my colleagues, Jay (our CTO) and Katerina (our head of nutrition), planning our company roadmap, and feeling totally overwhelmed.
There are currently just three of us, so it’s tempting to prioritise things which make money quickly with limited manpower. But long-term, it’s not good for the business.
We needed to take a step back and define what Lysa is all about, why we created it and what we’re pushing for.
I went back to the original premise, the reason why I set this up. Lysa is a chatbot that helps people to eat better.
A key principle was that our nutrition advice had to be accessible to everyone.
That idea has meant it’s impossible to think of any scenario in which Lysa isn’t free for the end user.
Having this mission statement crystallised in the business makes it easier to make decisions and decide on strategy and even which companies to partner with. Looking back, I’ve definitely wasted time discussing partnerships that don’t align with our mission. A fitness brand that wanted to offer nutrition services was one – I’m not sure why I agreed to that phone call now.
MAKING MONEY
Focusing on our mission in this way has had a big impact on our monetisation plans.
Our original idea was to make money through advertising: the chatbot would send promotions to users. We also wanted to give users the option to pay for live nutritionist consultations. Potential investors have had ideas too; a lot are keen on subscription models in the style of Spotify.
On reflection though, none of these quite fits with our mission. Advertising felt like a conflict of interest – what if we didn’t agree with our partners’ messages?
And with live nutritionists or subscription services, even if we could get the costs down, users would still have to pay. Health should be for everyone; not just people who can afford it.
Lysa Health is a Facebook Messenger chatbot. Using artificial intelligence, it becomes ‘smarter’ the more users interact with it. Advice is tailored to a user’s lifestyle, physiology, goals and personal tastes.
PARTNER CONTENT: COURIER FOR HUCKLETREE
Huckletree’s first international location is based at the heart of Dublin’s tech hub. The new Huckletree D2 site offers unrivalled connectivity to London’s tech community, and the 30,000 sq ft site is designed to accommodate up to 400 members.
Located in the iconic Pearse Street Academy in Dublin’s city centre, the
19th century landmark building now houses private studios, resident businesses and hot-desking spaces. D2 is a space for inspiration and recreation, with a zen garden for meditation and yoga sessions housed alongside event venues and meeting rooms for interviews, workshops, pitching and product launches.
HUCKLETREE
DUBLIN D2
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How has your vision for Huckletree evolved since launching the business four years ago?In any business, lots of things are in a permanent state of evolution, but our vision has remained true to what it was when we started. We want to build communities around exciting businesses and content, and offer workspaces with great amenities and offerings to companies of all sizes.
You recently launched a Power Parents Membership at Huckletree West. What inspired this?Now that Andrew (Huckletree co-founder and COO) and I both have children, our daily needs look very different to what they did less than three years ago. Power Parents Membership gives parents the choice of morning or afternoon access with a dedicated space to work alongside their children – something we didn’t have at Huckletree before.
Membership at Huckletree is carefully curated – what are you looking for in members?I’m passionate about the way shared working spaces bring interesting businesses and passionate people together under one roof. We've always taken that approach, either through a strong curation policy or by building our spaces around themes. Huckletree West, for example, is home to 50 businesses that we classify as 'Digital Lifestyle’.
Who are the latest additions to the community? Samaipata Ventures, who invest in early stage businesses across Europe, recently joined us at Huckletree West. Butternut Box, a company offering human-grade food for pups, also joined recently and can lend a wealth of advice to any members building subscription-based businesses.
Find out more at: huckletree.com
Huckletree co-working spaces build communities of the most disruptive start-ups, solopreneurs and innovation teams.
Huckletree believes that curiosity and a renegade approach is the road to success, and that putting your business in the midst of an ambitious community leads to the utmost in innovation, conversation and collaboration.
Huckletree members share and engage on a daily basis with businesses in different stages of their lifecycle, thereby leveraging the expertise and experience of their peers. Whether you’re finding your feet or rapidly expanding, Huckletree spaces adapt for your team’s growth journey.
Membership plans are flexible. Whether you’re a freelancer, entrepreneur, a start-up, a bigger business, an agency or an investor you’ll find the support and inspiration you’re looking for.
Housing a unique mix of resident businesses and thought leaders sets Huckletree apart from its co-working competitors. Your team is at the centre of an inspiring eco-system of changemakers, supported by a culture of entrepreneurship and an ethos of workplace acceleration.
THE HUCKLETREE COMMUNITY Gabriela Hershman
Co-founder, Huckletree
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Burger chainsHiringDigital doctorsIce creamSunglassesModern Business
STORIES OF MODERN BUSINESS
UK £5 US $9
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+ Spotify — Travel startups — Unbound — Istanbul — US expansion — Peanut butter
New workspaces, funds, events, academies and members’ clubs created by women, for women.
They’re changing the startup scene ... and dividing opinion.
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STORIES OF MODERN LIFE
A design-fuelled journey through Morocco, p86
FEB | MAR
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TRIP
Design in Morocco
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FEATURE Alternative co-working
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PROFILE Opening a darkroom
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WORKSPACE
A roaming doodler
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HOW I EAT
Jessica Skye
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LUNCHBOX
Salon’s winter salad
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BRAND Spotlight on Satisfy
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Founder, Fat Buddha Yoga
Jessica Skye is a proud yoga moderniser. She founded her roaming studio, Fat Buddha Yoga, in 2013 aiming to make classes more accessible.
She’s swapped earnest spirituality and singing bowls for fun and deep house. Her classes take place in the likes of Ministry of Sound, the Leadenhall Building and The Hoxton hotel.
Skye is also a DJ and has, thanks to a hefty Instagram following, built a lucrative side business as the kind of lifestyle figure consumer brands pay to be associated with. Her clients range from brands such as Nike and Beats to global tech companies including Amazon, Apple and Google.
It’s all a long way from yoga’s austere origins, but she offers an alternative to tradition, arguing instead that yoga ‘has the ability to improve both physical and mental health, can give you a banging body and make you a better person’.
She believes eating healthily is necessary for her hectic lifestyle, but doing so on the road can be a challenge: ‘You’ve just got to make healthy decisions. My view is to listen to your body; sometimes it’s good to fill up on carbs, especially if you’re feeling run down,’ she says.
‘Your body will naturally crave fresh food when there’s been an absence of it, so when you’re off the plane, train or car, load up on fruit, salads and fresh juices. I’m obsessed with turmeric, so always stock up on it in juices or shots.’
HOW I EAT
‘I picked this recipe up from a flatmate when I was at uni. It’s the perfect self-employed/recession-proof/I’m-too-hungry-to-wait-to-cook meal. It’s fast, cheap and healthy.’
Ingredients: 1 serving of fresh udon noodles; 1 tbsp coconut oil; 1 tbsp sesame oil; 2 tbsp teriyaki sauce; 1-2 grated carrots; 2 handfuls of greens (cabbage, spinach, or pak choi); 1 egg; 1 red chilli; sesame seeds.
Directions: Heat the coconut oil in a wok, add udon noodles and stir fry until they start to soften. Crack an egg in and mix, then add carrots and greens. Cover for a few minutes until the egg is cooked. Drizzle in teriyaki sauce and sesame oil. Pop in a bowl and sprinkle with sesame seeds.
SKYE’S TOP SPOTS
‘No two Sundays are ever the same. Usually, I wake up at home before teaching a FBY Sunday Rehab class. I set an alarm for 10:30am, snooze for half an hour, then swing by Perky Blenders [in Leyton] for an oat milk latte and pastry before heading into Shoreditch for the class. If I don’t have a class I’ll make my favourite brunch – toast, scrambled eggs, griddled asparagus, feta, tomatoes on the vine and pomegranate seeds. If I’m DJing I’ll often be in a hotel; I’ll wake up just after breakfast is meant to end and then have to talk my way in for eggs on toast and a coffee the size of my head.’
OAT, FRUIT & PLANT PROTEIN SMOOTHIE
‘JESS SPECIAL’ NOODLES
Eating out
Quick eat
Go to dinner
PLANT PROTEIN
The Hoxton London
Passion Cafe Ibiza
Le Panoramic Tignes
Yin Yang Koh Tao
‘Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day. I usually head to The Hoxton hotel in Shoreditch (I pretty much live there). You can’t go wrong with their menu, juices and proper coffee.’
‘I rarely go to Ibiza without stopping at Passion Cafe. There are a few of them on the island. I head there for a smoothie, juice and plateful of goodness.’
‘Le Panoramic can’t be missed when skiing in Val d’Isère or Tignes. It’s up on the glacier so the views are incredible, and the food and wines insane. It comes with a weighty price tag but it’s worth it.’
‘I discovered Yin Yang on my last trip to Thailand when I waded knee-deep at high tide to the strip of food shacks it’s part of. It does some of the best (and spiciest) Thai food and hot chicken wings I’ve ever had.’
ItineraryMY SUNDAY
Skye is an enthusiast for plant protein powder. Supplements like plant protein have been moving from pharmacy to fashion or even luxury product. Skye chooses the £53 jar from The Nue Co, a startup founded by Brit Jules Miller, which raised $1.5m (£1m) in seed funding in December 2017.
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Satisfy District Vision’s Max Vallot chooses the French running brand, Satisfy.
Max Vallot on Satisfy ‘Satisfy captures a very specific subculture in running that none of the bigger brands have touched. For me, it’s what makes it such an interesting brand.
Inspired by founder Brice Partouche’s love of music and background in alternative apparel, it’s a brand that delivers high fashion and high performance. The running gear it produces uses some of the best technical fabric out there and pairs it with a rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic.
Our personal connection goes back a while. My co-founder Tom first met Brice in Stockholm, through our friend Max Schiller, who runs trainer brand Eytys. Tom and Brice’s girlfriends live in Stockholm; we’ve all since met there a few times.
It was in Paris that I first met Brice. He took Tom and I through his blueprint for what would soon become Satisfy. Having already started developing our running glasses brand with a focus on style and performance, we were
My favourite brand
SatisfyFounder: Brice PartoucheFounded: 2015Location: Paris, France Sector: Running apparel
immediately excited that someone with a serious creative background was planning to launch a line of running gear.
As a business, it’s been great to see Brice build solid retail partnerships with Barneys, Ssense, Opening Ceremony and many more.
I’ve kept in touch with Brice over the last few years. We’re both inspired by the communities around us and our products are designed with the people we run with in mind. They are on the ground, really taking the sport to the next level.
I think Satisfy will only continue to grow. It’s captured a great following around its combination of running and music, on top of the style and technical design. The key to continued growth will be refining the narrative to open up the project to a broader audience.’ Max Vallot is co-founder of running sunglasses firm District Vision.
District VisionFounders: Max Vallot and Tom DalyFounded: 2014Location: Paris, France Sector: Sunglasses for runners
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‘When we met Brice he had already set up his jeans brand April 77. Before that he was a musician in bands like Rodeo Massacre, which explains the rock ’n’ roll aesthetic.‘
The shorts‘The Satisfy product Tom and I use most are the shorts. They perfectly encapsulate how the company merges technical specifications with style: the shorts are very lightweight, super comfortable and there’s an intelligent waistband system with integrated strings.’
The founder
Design & productionThe garments are designed and prototyped in Satisfy’s Paris studio and produced in Portugal. The fabrics come from suppliers in France, Switzerland, Italy and Japan. Some are developed in-house, such as the ‘Justice’ fabric, a collaboration with a traditional French silkmaker, which is 35% lighter than standard technical fabrics.
www.elephant-gin.com
Handcrafted Made with African botanicals
And in support of Africanelephant conservation.
The first step to changing the worldis having the right spirit.
eg_ad_courier_195x208_1.indd 1 19/01/18 13:46
SALON
FRESH HERBSDILL, CHERVIL,
PARSLEY
Winter spelt salad with herbs
APPLE1 OR 2 SPICE SELECTION
CUMIN, CORIANDER, CARAWAY, FENNEL, NIGELLA SEEDS, SALT, CHILLI FLAKES
CHICKPEAS200G
NICHOLAS BALFE Head chef and co-founder, Salon In 2013, Nicholas Balfe launched Salon as a pop-up above a Brixton deli. Three years later, he acquired the whole venue. The restaurant recently closed for a refurb, to add a wine shop and bar to the space. The ever-changing menu is built around seasonal local ingredients, with a limited amount of meat used. For this salad, Balfe foraged for crab apples in nearby Brockwell park, picked bay leaves from a staff member’s garden and harvested veg from the restaurant’s own allotment.
PREPARATIONHeat the oven to 180ºC. In a saucepan over a medium heat, sweat the chopped shallots and garlic with the oil, fresh herbs and a pinch of salt. Rinse the spelt then add to the pan, topping up with 750ml water. Cook until soft, adding more water as necessary.
While the spelt cools, toast the dry spices – cumin, coriander, caraway, fennel and nigella seeds – then grind with a pestle and mortar or coffee grinder. Toss the vegetables with the spice mix, olive oil and salt, then roast for 20 minutes until nicely caramelised.Combine all the ingredients for the dressing, then toss with the spelt and the vegetables. To serve, fold through the lettuce, fresh herbs and sliced radish.
Lunchbox by…
DRESSING:50G DIJON MUSTARD, 100G RAPESEED OIL,
30G OLIVE OIL, 20G CIDER VINEGAR,
50G CRAB APPLE JELLY
ROOT VEGETABLES1KG CARROTS, PARSNIPS,
BEETROOTS
RADISHES THINLY SLICED
LETTUCERADICCHIO, ROCKET,
CHICORY
PEARLED SPELT 250G, PREPPED WITH
2 SHALLOTS & 2 GARLIC CLOVES
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YOU ARE WHERE YOU WORK
When life comes into the workspace
Co-working is transforming office buildings, and work culture more generally.
So far, almost all shared workspaces have adopted a rather universal aesthetic of inoffensive, functional furniture with touches of forced quirkiness.
As shared spaces continue to expand, freelancers, startups and corporates will increasingly work side-by-side. The phenomenon is set to grow as 80% of UK co-working spaces plan to expand in the coming months.
It’s not all vanilla workspaces, however. Courier visited two which have built their environments around how people want to live.
One is a church-like sanctuary set between Old Street and Shoreditch, a stone’s throw from the largest WeWork in Europe. The other, a space in Margate aimed at creatives, is a world away from the bustle of the City.
42 Acres has transformed a Victorian school between Old Street and Shoreditch into a temple of zen, complete with a crystal altar, dedicated to the age of co-working.
The light-flooded venue aims to bring to city-dwellers a bit of the countryside calm of 42 Acres’ first venture, a wellness retreat in Somerset, founded by brother-and-sister partnership Lara and Seth Tabatznik.
The London site was set up by their cousin Jeya Lorenz (pictured, top right), after she mentioned the idea of starting up a wellness-linked workspace to the Tabatzniks.
The space opened its doors late last year and hosts weekly meditation sessions, plus yoga classes and a range of wellness-related events. But members aren’t only there to chant ‘Om’. It is a workspace, even if most people walk around in their socks and some of the seating is on the floor. Many of the members run businesses concerned with wellness, although 42 Acres doesn’t exclusively focus on this industry.
‘It’s a conscious space that provides entrepreneurs looking to make a positive impact with a nature-infused haven in the midst of the city,’ says Lorenz.
TH E WE LLN ESS SPACE
Shoreditch42 Acres
66 Leonard St, London, EC2A 4LW
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MargateResort Studios
50 Athelstan Rd, Margate, CT9 2BH
Dan Chilcott was working in the public sector and living in Peckham when he decided he wanted a change. He originally studied textiles but hadn’t pursued his own creative work beyond university. It was time to go back to making stuff. He also wanted a decent-sized house and a change in pace of life. The dream of quitting his job to pursue a career as an artist, whilst moving into a larger house, was an absurdity in London, so Chilcott (pictured) joined the migration of creatives to the Kent coast.
‘I wanted to move to where I could afford a property and be part of a creative community. [Art gallery] Turner Contemporary had just opened so Margate looked like a good option,’ he says.
Yet Chilcott arrived to find there wasn’t the buzzing scene he expected. He did however meet a few local artists and fellow London refugees in cafes, who had noticed the same problem. So, in 2013, four of them decided to open a space together. They found a large disused warehouse, the likes of which are littered across the Kent coast, and signed a six-month lease.
‘It was just a big empty room,’ he says. ‘We made the studios out of reclaimed materials by going around skips and window framing places, getting what wood we could. That was our first wave.’
Three members built shed-like structures in the middle of the warehouse, which still survive today. A year and half later, the team received EU funding for regenerating derelict space to become creative hubs, and opened up a second floor to increase capacity.
The extension was designed and overseen by then new members RL-Architects, who had also recently moved down from London. There are now 40 members. Never intended exclusively for artists, members also include writers, furniture designers, photographers and product designers, as well as film makers and a resident arts charity.
For Chilcott, opening the space has been transformative. Along with serving as managing director of Resort Studios, he’s pursued his own creative work and started taking on commissions. ‘Moving here enabled me to set up the studio with friends and have the space, time, money and support to start my own creative work,’ he says.
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‘Your legacy is the print’ In south London, a photographer and filmmaker are bringing the darkroom back to life.
ROLLEIFLEX T ‘A people magnet: anyone who sees me shooting with it comes up to talk. The distance between you and the subject
gives a really distinctive feel to pictures.’
MAMIYA C330‘My favourite. Robust, utilitarian, and it lets you shoot super up-close and
personal because of the bellows. I use it more than any other camera.’
SNAP HAPPY: DAN FONTANELLI’S FAVOURITE CAMERAS
Some photographers describe the first time they watched a print reveal itself in a darkroom in the same way others talk about their first kiss. For Eddie Otchere, ‘it’s a moment you never forget’. Dan Fontanelli, meanwhile, calls darkrooms ‘mysterious, even magical’.
It’s a weekday morning at Brick House cafe in Peckham. Otchere and Fontanelli – a professional filmmaker, respectively – are talking Courier through their plans to open ‘a darkroom for the 21st century’.
Otchere’s career long predates photography’s digital revolution. He’s best known for his pictures of artists from hip hop’s golden age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, shooting everyone from Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls to Aaliyah, as well as his critically acclaimed series of Wu-Tang Clan photos.
Fontanelli, meanwhile, is a professional photographer and a filmmaker specialising in documenting arts and creativity.
Their new darkroom venture, Bright Rooms, is due to open in February 2018 at Peckham Levels, a food, drinks and arts hub set across seven levels of a former multi-storey carpark in south-east London.
Together, the co-founders travelled 1,100 miles across the UK, collecting photographic equipment for the studio. ‘Cult classics, strange half-framed cameras, vintage TLRs: we’ll have a whole range on deck,’ Otchere explains, sipping green tea.
Going dark Otchere built his first darkroom in Waterloo in the late 1990s. ‘Soon enough Dan started coming along, hijacking the space, and we started putting on shows together, building a community,’ he says.
There aren’t many spaces quite like the photographer’s darkroom, partly because it’s quickly becoming confined to history. The numbers aren’t pretty. In London alone there were several hundred darkrooms a decade ago; today there are fewer than 10.
‘Analogue was so heavily stamped on and beaten up, and along the way darkrooms were decimated,’ says Fontanelli. But for
CONTAX T2‘A high-quality point and shoot that gives
you lots of control – it has its own aperture setting and focus. It’s cheap, yet I’d feel
confident using it on a professional shoot.‘
PROFILE: EDDIE OTCHERE AND DAN FONTANELLI 5
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FROM THE ARCHIVE OF EDDIE OTCHERE
POLAROID LAND CAMERA 1,000 ‘The photos you get from polaroids are other-worldly, painterly as opposed to
photographic, and the beauty they produce isn’t matched by anything. This one’s been passed around my family since I was a kid.’
Don Letts ‘I took this in his back garden last year. Out of shot is his man shed, filled with Bob Marley portraits, turntables and the smell of weed. Letts played an important role in the birth of punk and he still carries the spirit of that era. I used a relatively new wave of film from Kodak for this; it produces much punchier, super-rich colours with higher contrast and lower grain.’
Jennifer Lopez ‘I hung out with her for a week in 2000. This was taken in a London hotel room. She had the largest entourage I’ve ever seen – around 100 people – yet she was [a lonely] person. I had a roll of film but took just one shot; I knew I had what I wanted straight away. There aren’t many shots of her that are so personal.’
Method Man ‘I’ve taken lots of pictures of Wu-Tang Clan, including their first UK visit. This was taken in 1997. Stardom had gone to their heads. ODB was completely [paranoid], thinking the FBI was following him. Method Man was in a bad mood, but always cheered up after smoking a blunt, so I told him to light up. This shot captures everything hip hop represented then: it’s colourful, bold and full-on.’
NIKON F3‘My first proper camera. I got it in the 1990s
from a provincial auction house. This was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro – along with
Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, and a pasta shape, the “Marille”.’
ZENIT E SPECIAL EDITION ‘Built like a tank, there’s not an awful lot of design going on. But I love vintage Olympic memorabilia, and this one was created for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. My mum
found it at a junk shop in France.’
purists, the development process is all part of the art.
‘After you’ve spent time in a darkroom under the red lights, smelled the chemicals and felt the texture of the paper in your hands, you’re hooked,’ says Otchere.
Analogue revival‘We’re past the point of people saying “film is dead”. Film is alive and well. But if photographers aren’t printing, they aren’t getting the full experience. Your legacy is the print,’ says Otchere.
A resurgence of analogue is sparking a rise in film photographers seeking to go the extra mile and complete the development in the darkroom, Fontanelli says. ‘We’re tapping into that. We’ll give photographers an edge, so that their work doesn’t look like it’s been photoshopped to death.’
Community interestThe idea behind Bright Rooms is for a modern-day darkroom that’s more than just a space where a bunch of photographers can occasionally pop up and develop their film. Rather, it’s meant to be a venue where people can take open access courses and workshops, and attend events and exhibitions on top of using darkroom facilities.
Creating a tight community is key. ‘Photographers need to come together offline. We all need to squad up,’ says Otchere. ‘We aren’t being nostalgic or romantic, but it’s easy for photographers to feel isolated, out there shooting alone all the time.’
Visiting the few remaining darkrooms across the country revealed to the pair how badly the status of the darkroom had fallen. ‘They were all man cave-y,’ says Fontanelli, ‘and especially intimidating for the younger generation – the opposite of what we’re looking to achieve.’
‘Plus,’ adds Otchere, ‘only when you develop your own film do the
contrasts really start to pop.’
Few would disagree that Morocco is one of the great artisanal centres of the world. In this northwestern corner of Africa, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, wherever you look people are making stuff, from tiny workshops in souks to out-of-town factories and rooftops in ancient cities.
The spirit of creativity is far from rarified or elitist here. Rather, design is instinctive, with many traditional craftspeople preferring to make it up as they go along. Rugs are made by the eye and intuition of
The makers of
rural women working from home, each taking around two months to complete. It’s also how the pottery in the Ourika Valley south of Marrakech is made and how, in the coastal city of Essaouira, artists like the modernist Berber symbol painter Houssni produce their work.
INSPIRATION Ask Moroccans where their inspiration comes from and many of them will mention traditional Berber practices. Most designers
From inner city to coast, via the mountains, Courier Life goes on the hunt for the country’s best craft and design.
are untrained. And most will struggle to articulate their inspiration other than pointing to within.
The veteran designer and maker Wafaa Kiran (see p77) is no different. Despite founding her business, Zine Zwine, in 1993, and going on to employ a team, she still handcrafts many of the company’s metal tables and wooden chairs herself.
Many of the savvier makers of rugs and kitchenware, in particular, are adjusting their designs for European tastes. The evidence
MOROCCO shows there is increasingly demand for muted products, which the most ambitious brands, many of them based in the big cities, have been quick to pick up on.
RAGS TO RICHES Some designers start out because they simply love being creative; others take to design as a means of survival.
The story of 28-year-old Othman Hibatallah, who went from selling straw hats to becoming a design polymath, is impressive. After his father’s business went bust in 1998, Hibatallah, then aged 10, left school to start making and hawking straw hats across the more affluent cities of northern Morocco. Later on, he built out a string of shops selling Moroccan crafts which over time became increasingly high-end, including products such as Berber baskets adapted into a range of lamps.
Two years ago he opened Essaouira’s coolest eatery, Mega Loft, and is now building
a huge design studio, gallery and home on the city’s main strip, with plans to develop furniture and interior design under his Othman Chic brand.
OUTSIDE INFLUENCES Increasingly, swathes of French (and to a lesser extent British) migrants have started to set up brands and spaces based around traditional Moroccan design, in turn influencing the native aesthetic.
‘The growing collaboration between international designers and traditional craftsman has dramatically transformed creativity in Morocco over the past decade,’ says Mathilde Lemoalle, co-founder of Some, a boutique in the Gueliz district of Marrakech. Lemoalle, who is French, stocks items from
a variety of French and Moroccan makers based around Marrakech. The interest from outside Morocco has prompted more locals to take up design and craft, she says.
Although a cloud of cultural appropriation can sometimes linger over some of the more highly priced, Moroccan-influenced pieces created by expat designers, they have helped promote Moroccan design, bringing it to a wider audience.
The work adds to an incredibly rich landscape of independent designers and makers spread across the country. Here, Courier Life looks at three of its centres, discovering traditional and modern, from rock-bottom bargains through to price tags which wouldn’t be out of place in a London boutique.
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Tourists still swamp the souks of Marrakesh, but the design districts of Guiliz and Sidi Ghanem are increasingly becoming some of the most important sites to visit in the city.
The souks Sifting through the tourist traps and cheaply made tat to find high quality arts and crafts can still feel too much like hard work. While the souks are awash with mats, some of the best can be found at rug shop Les Nomades. Prices range from £600 for a large but thin rug, up to £2,000 for one you can lose your toes in (and that will typically have a staggering 365,000 knots per square metre).
The best value Moroccan glassware can be found in the boutique connected to the legendary bar Terrasse des Épices. It’s located adjacent to Le Jardin Secret, a fully restored grand riad and garden that shows Moroccan architectural design at its best, and a nice spot to escape the mayhem.
POPULATION: 900,000ELEVATION: 466MFLIGHT FROM LONDON: 3.5HR
GuelizFor many years taxis and coaches have dropped packs of tourists off to explore the famous Yves Saint Laurent-restored Jardin Majorelle. More recently, the street alongside the gardens has become lined with a string of shops with a contemporary twist on Moroccan design.
Antinan, founded by the Casablanca-based designer Faïza Lahlouis, is located here with its own original products, some of them similar to those sold in souks but with fewer embellishments and a minimalist style.
The popular 33 Jardin Majorelle has beautiful products elegantly presented, but remains over-priced compared to (often identical) items in the souks. Some, in Gueliz’s centre, is also worth a visit. It’s expensive but pulls together the work of some fine Marrakech craftspeople.
Sidi Ghanem Increasingly pitched as Marrakech’s ‘design district’, Sidi Ghanem has an industrial feel, with warehouses and shops side-by-side. The area attracts more serious buyers than the souks. Smaller vendors buy wholesale quantities, others come to fit out their homes, while many tourists head there with something more specific in mind. The highlights are Henry Cath lighting and larger pieces of furniture from Zine Zwine.
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Roadside ceramicists line the roads around the beautiful mountains.
The valley emerges after taking a winding 60-minute drive from Marrakech through the Atlas Mountains.
Ceramicists line the way, with an array of tagines and plant pots at every twist and
turn. Many are even fired on the roadside in improvised kilns. Across the valley, the mountains at Imil offer some incredible scenery. The region is also famed for traditional Berber jewellery and artefacts.
Rug store La Source du Tapis is similar to Les Nomades in Marrakech. One hidden highlight is wood-furniture maker Akhbach Mustapha’s original garden pieces (which DHL offers to collect and ship to the UK).
POPULATION: 25,000ELEVATION: 825MDISTANCE FROM MARRAKECH: 40KM
The atmosphere in this laid-back surf town couldn’t be more different to that in Marrakech, but the offering of food, stylish riads and shopping is strong enough to rival the larger city – and everything is half the price.
Given how small ‘Essa’ is, it’s remarkable how many ornately designed riads and restaurants there are. Local designer and well-known figure Othman Hibatallah is the founder of the design store and restaurant Mega Loft. He also managed the renovation of British-owned Salut Maroc, one of the best riads in town.
Colourful throws and decorated ceramics are the main attraction for shopping. Koulchi Boutique does the best throws, while Poterie
des Fes and Grand Exposition Artisinal both sell beautiful ceramics.
The newly opened Elizir gallery has an extensive collection of mid-century vintage furniture in excellent condition.
Little shacks by the harbour sell piles of deliciously grilled fish, freshly plucked from the sea. Locals and tourists congregate here for a lunch short on frills but big on taste, sitting around a space not entirely dissimilar to a seaside car park.
Dinner in Essaouira is an altogether different affair. The food in restaurants such as Caravan, Umia, Loft and Gusto Italia is arguably better than anything served up in Marrakech, while as much care and attention has gone into the design.
Some exquisite homeware can be found in this Bohemian coastal town, better known for its surf spots and live music than its arts and crafts.
POPULATION: 75,000DISTANCE FROM MARRAKECH: 40KMFLIGHT FROM LONDON: 4HR
Local artist Houssni has been creating work since 1993. Self-taught, he creates striking patterned pieces with intricate Berber-inspired symbols. His canvases are made from goat skin and ink is home-made from walnuts (incidentally, a pigment also used by Rembrandt and Da Vinci).
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Australian illustrator Chaz Hutton has gained a sizeable Instagram following for his wry observations and cartoons of everyday life, all drawn on yellow sticky notes. In 2016, Harper Collins published his first book, A Sticky Note Guide to Life.
Hutton (aka @instachaaz) quit his day job as an architect when he secured the publishing deal, and his hobby of drawing and sending sticky note cartoons to friends had become more interesting than designing buildings.
He’s now often on the road — anywhere from London to Berlin to Melbourne — so his workspace changes constantly. His bare necessities: 700mm x 450mm desk space, abundant coffee, and a place with an early opening time in which he doesn’t feel bad staying for the entire day. ‘I enjoy working early, so anywhere I can sit down from 6:30am is preferable,’ he says.
Sometimes that means a cafe. Often, it’s a co-working space. Though Hutton can do without the latter’s more forced creative trappings (colourful furniture, table tennis, etc): ‘I don’t need an orange beanbag to tell me I’m creative. Just give me a flat surface in a naturally lit space.’
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Sticky situation
CHAZ HUTTONIllustrator, global
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