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Calypso Rose

In the game for 20 ish years. Born entrepreneur with a touch of the Del Boy. Bizfup master.

The Day Our Suit Company Offered Something Extra

The Day Our Suit Company Offered Something Extra

Adam King Co-Founder of King & Allen | Freelance Business Advisor So... I have a bespoke suit tailoring company, and a few years ago when the database was at about 20,000 and we did newsletters. We don't really do offers, but every now and then we would do

A Missing Zero Ruined my Dream

A Missing Zero Ruined my Dream

Charlie Hood | Founder Easy Days Studio. Last year I was approached by the European branch of a well-known denim brand to pitch to relaunch it’s footwear division. Great, I thought, a super fun job that’ll involve a nice amount of travel - and be good money. Then the

Lost in the Mail: Firebox.com's Christmas Label Catastrophe

Lost in the Mail: Firebox.com's Christmas Label Catastrophe

Tom Boardman | Founder of Firebox.com In the initial days of Firebox.com's outsourced warehouse during the bustling Christmas of 1999, we lacked a proper online system for dispatching orders to our warehouse in Wales. This resulted in the somewhat cumbersome routine of printing fulfillment labels in London,

A Warehouse Crisis: The Charlie Bigham Packaging Fiasco!

Perry Haydn Taylor | Chief Stoker big fish® Twenty odd years ago I redesigned Charlie Bigham’s tiny little cardboard sleeves without realising that by making them three times the size he would need an entire new warehouse to house them! Whoops. Got a call from Charlie saying an articulated lorry

Startup Anarchy in Selfridges: 40 Ukulele Players Crashed Our Event

Calypso Rose | Head of Everything at The Indytute My current business, The Indytute, launched in Selfridges (yippee) back in 2015. We did an ambitious 90 creative Christmas workshops in 90 days. We were meant to get sign-off for all of them but as start-up vigilantes (with a seek-forgiveness approach) we

Chaos in Cardiff and FHM Feature Frenzy. Michael Acton-Smith.

Chaos in Cardiff and FHM Feature Frenzy. Michael Acton-Smith.

Michael Acton-Smith Co-founder of Calm and Mind Candy Firebox’s first big hit was a Shot Glass Chess Set. We were selling about one a day and packing them in Tom’s Mum attic in a village outside of Cardiff. We had a feature in FHM and orders jumped way

From PR Pro to DIY No-No

From PR Pro to DIY No-No

Lallie Fraser | Managing Director at Polka Dot Elephant | Founder of The Forest Project I left a luxury travel PR agency where I was cocooned with the safety of a team, a finance director who dealt with all the accounting admin and a roster of clients that were all on mid