The Entrepreneurs

Friends in the north

Urbanist Jan Gehl once said that if you want to bring a community together, you should burn down the school. The great Dane was speaking in jest but his message was serious: communities grow stronger by solving the problems that affect them. Residents in the Scottish peninsula of the East Neuk of Fife do not have a smouldering school to contend with but you hear the same gripe wherever you go: their fields and waters are teeming with incredible produce yet no sooner is it harvested or landed, it’s loaded onto lorries to be sold elsewhere.

People are increasingly aware of the environmental consequences of their food habits but they’re less aware of the social breakdown that occurs when farming and fishing communities are forced to compete on an international scale. The ties that bind people and place become unstuck.

The Anstruther family has owned land in Fife for centuries. Toby, founder of the Brompton Design District in London’s South Kensington, moved up to Scotland with his family in 2008 to take over the family estate at Balcaskie. Since then he has been sowing the seeds of regeneration to create, as he describes it, “a natural habitat”. This is quite literal: since 2016 Balcaskie’s farmlands have been converted to organic practices, with a mission to be totally organic by 2022. “Organic farming achieves a set of principles that we’re trying to re-establish more generally,” says estate manager Sam Parsons as he stands in a field of willowy heritage grains. “Environmental, economic and social capital – intertwined.”

Like in many other picturesque parts of Scotland, fishing and farming may have declined but tourism has grown in recent years. The latter may fill a void but it creates its own problems too: it encourages seasonal employment, so small communities suffer from the feast-or-famine effect. “It’s important that there is a diversity of opportunity,” says Anstruther. “We need to make sure we are attracting people to make their lives here. Whether it’s in the city or the countryside, the idea is the same: how much better does a place feel if people have chosen to live there for a reason?”

This fundamental principle has governed Anstruther’s approach at Balcaskie and beyond. Nine years ago he co-founded Food from Fife, a network to bring together, co-ordinate and promote all the region’s food and drink producers. “It was an initial building block to re-establish a bit of pride,” he says. “Food and pride are so inextricable, particularly in rural communities.”

Joining the dots is Anstruther’s forte: following the success of Food for Fife he recognised the need for establishing an environment in which small businesses could grow, process, make and sell their wares in person. This is what happens at Bowhouse, a collection of growing plots, production units and a monthly market where producers come together to sell to the community. Still only in its third year, it attracts about 5,000 people – an impressive number considering the population of the East Neuk is just 15,000.

At Bowhouse you’ll find suppliers of shellfish, meat, fruit, vegetables, flowers, beer and whisky. Andrew Whitley, founder of Scotland the Bread, has a flour mill and growing production base at Bowhouse. “We are trying to prove a concept that realigns the social contract between farmers and citizens,” he says. “Farmers need to make a living without trashing the environment – and consumers should be able to buy quality local produce at good value.”

A few kilometres inland at Comielaw, Anstruther has also repurposed another clutch of former farm steadings to house eight studios. Here the remit of businesses goes further than just food: there are graphic designers, a guitar and mandolin-maker, a photographer and a stained-glass-window designer, among other people. Everyone on site agrees that coming together has made their businesses greater than the sum of their parts. “Many of us were kitchen-table set-ups,” says Kirsty Thomas of graphic studio Tom Pigeon, whose clients have included some of London’s great cultural institutions, not least the v&a and the Tate. “It’s not just about having more space to grow our businesses – we all feed off the sense of community here. Food is a massive draw to the area but we’re also seeing an influx of creative folk who are hot on the heels of the foodies. There’s an exciting energy – it’s contagious. In a good way.”

As you can imagine, this is the sort of place where everyone knows everyone – but what’s more important is that everyone helps everyone. There’s an engine of goodwill that runs the gamut from recommending the ultimate compost ingredients to making up the numbers in a local band. Elsewhere we hear of people designing neighbouring firms’ websites as a favour and others dropping off 30kg of excess courgettes at a nearby hospice.

The East Neuk is proving to be a strong magnet. When Anstruther moved north from London in 2008 there were six jobs on the estate; today there are more like 100. It illustrates the fact that people are moving here to set up for life, not just escape for a holiday. “The more complex a community is, the more resilient it is,” says Anstruther. “But it needs to feel simple. Much of life feels complicated and unbalanced. I don’t claim to know what the balance should be but unblocking barriers can help restore a natural equilibrium. It’s not about the buildings – it’s about the people who occupy them.”

Revel in the details

Styling: Kyoko Tamoto

World at your feet

Miami ice
Alaska Ice Corp

Eric Goeres, aged 47, is the unlikely entrepreneur behind Miami’s Alaska Ice Corp, having bought the fledgling company in February after ending a successful 20-year career as a creative executive for several of the biggest names in print and digital media. He says he was seeking a “future proof” opportunity. “Ice is unique in that it is essential and elemental; its use cannot be replicated or disrupted by Facebook, shipped by Amazon or made in China,” he says.

It’s barely dawn in Miami and the temperature is already above 30C. At the Plaza Seafood Market, Sergio Yanez and his workers are busy arranging colourful rows of just-delivered red snapper, grouper, lobster, jumbo prawns and live blue crabs atop the beds of pure-white ice crystals that will keep them cool and fresh during the searing heat of the day to come.

If such a rich daily harvest from the waters around south Florida is the draw for shoppers at this lively Hispanic street-corner marketplace and café in the city’s Allapattah neighbourhood, Yanez knows it’s the ice that keeps the wheels of his business turning. It arrives in giant cloth bags, 500kg at a time, from Goeres’ firm which is a short drive across town. “The ice is crucial to the fish; we need these guys,” says Yanez, who processes and sells a range of seafood supplied by clients from Mexico to the Florida Keys. “Our ice-makers break down a lot. Whenever I need a big bag – which is often – they’ve always got one ready to go.”

Commercial ice is a big deal in Miami, where daytime summer temperatures average 31C. In such heat you might think that the bright-yellow sign on the wall at Alaska Ice Corp’s premises in Hialeah, warning visitors of falling snow and ice, is a joke. Yet just steps beyond, in a cavernous and freezing packing room, chunks of the stuff cascade down chutes from two giant ice-making machines on the roof. On busy days production can reach nigh on 45,500kg. Hard hats are obligatory.

From the packing room, Alaska Ice Corp’s general manager JC Pino uses a forklift to load the bags onto the company’s fleet of trucks, which shift it to where the ice is needed most: flower imports coming through Miami International; large-scale fish companies that import, process, repack and distribute South American tuna; smaller family-run operations such as Plaza Seafood; and Miami’s prolific teams of loncheros: food trucks driven around the city that deliver fresh fare including empanadas, cheeseburgers and ceviche to workers at building sites and offices.

“These workers are the backbone of the labour force building future Miami and our ice keeps the food and drink cool in the Florida sun,” says Goeres. Another growing line is “emergency” ice: for example, when a restaurant’s ice-maker fails and Alaska Ice Corp receives a late-notice call to stock up the freezer of the business in question.

“It’s not lost on me that what we’re selling is just frozen water,” says Goeres. “It’s not the internet, it’s not a ‘like’ or an Instagram post and it’s not a marketing ploy. It’s just a piece of ice. And that very tactile, hands-on nature is what appeals to me.”

Banking on start-ups
Getting a business loan needn’t be cause for alarm.

You’ve got a business plan, a few employees and a load of confidence – now what? Funding is often the most daunting aspect of setting up a business but never fear: some banks are rethinking their lending terms and helping entrepreneurs create interesting companies.

Traditional banks can be risk-averse but the better ones offer a helping hand in the form of advice and a network of likeminded businesses. For UK-based firms there’s Aldermore, one of the fastest-growing lenders; The Triodos Bank, which only lends money to businesses that pay social, environmental or cultural dividends; and Unity Trust Bank, which is aimed at charities, social enterprises, co-operatives and community organisations.

Technology-driven mobile banks such as Tide and Mercury are appealing for their ease of use but without physical branches it can be hard to get personal support. This is the niche that Bira has cornered. Founded in 1955, it is owned by the British Independent Retailers Association and is specifically built to serve their interests. It disburses about £10m (€11.2m) a year in loans, anything from £15,000 (€16,700) for a used car to a working-capital loan of £250,000 (€279,000) for a shop refit. Its expertise is coupled with speedy service. “If one of our members approached a high-street bank for a loan they might have to wait several weeks before they could speak to someone who can help with their particular application,” says managing director John Collins. “We try to turn it around the same day or within a couple of days.”

Its trade-association ethos means that it isn’t beholden to increasing shareholder value and can put money in things it believes in or thinks will benefit UK retailers. “The job is about putting our members at the heart of everything we do,” says Collins. Now, there’s an ethos you can bank on.

Don’t touch my base
Ditch the buzzwords and keep things simple.

Words are vital when it comes to communicating your company’s values so choose them wisely. Whether it’s a job title, company tagline or how you address your team by email, corporate jargon adds confusion and frustration. We’ve collected some of the lowliest examples of this lame lexicon in a glossary for getting beyond work-speak.

Synergy
People think it means The complementary interaction of two ideas
It really means Neither of the ideas was good enough to start with

Hot-desking
People think it means “I’m part of the creative elite”
It really means The company is saving money, starting with where you sit

Going forward
People think it means From now on
It really means The entire undertaking has been going around in circles until this point

Ideate
People think it means Generating solutions
It really means Some people are insolubly daft

Action
People think it means Activity; the act of getting something done
It really means Someone who rarely does anything is (or may be) about to do something

Touch base
People think it means Catch up
It really means To arrive at the foot of the Himalayas or smoke crack cocaine

Strategic
People think it means An important prefix for any occasion that adds impact to the proceeding word, such as “partner”, “decision” or, most amusingly, “reversal”
It really means Every decision that this person has made previously lacked any forethought

Granular
People think it means Detailed, nuanced and close-up
Really means Nebulous, irrelevant and far from important

Stakeholder
People think it means Anyone even tangentially involved in a decision
Really means A decorative item in a butcher’s shop for displaying meat

Innovation
People think it means Something new and exciting
Really means Nothing new and exciting has happened at this company for some time

Low-hanging fruit
People think it means Easy pickings; a simple win
Really means “We’ve given up aspiring to anything more clever, complicated or competent”

Succession story 1
BlattChaya, Beirut

Building a company involves knowing when to hand over the reins; across the following pages we meet three getting it right, starting with a Lebanese tile firm.

Cement-tile producer BlattChaya was founded 20 years ago after Edgard Chaya’s cousin gave him a chest of tile-mould fragments from a previous family enterprise (also called BlattChaya). The company is now a market leader and his four children, of which Karim is the youngest, are determined to continue that legacy.

Edgard Chaya, 90
“I’m proud that I managed to start something that my children want to continue. They caught the bug from me and love the creativity of it. Karim has changed a lot of things in the factory and it has improved the business – even if I wouldn’t have done it that way.”

Karim Chaya, 47
“I’ve learned a lot from my father but, above all, my dad is a great believer that the product is king, rather than the customer. If the product speaks for itself then the client will feel the perfection and be happy.”

Old job, new tricks
When wisdom and entrepreneurial verve combine

1.
Jaswant Kular, 69
Co-founder and executive chef
Jaswant’s Kitchen

Jaswant Kular (above) started out making homemade spice blends for her children. Years later daughters Simi, Roupi and Nimi convinced her that there was a market for her recipes, becoming co-founders of Jaswant’s Kitchen in 2010. Now the Toronto brand is stocked in the Ontario branch of Whole Foods and some in the US – and on Amazon. “My life is more rewarding now,” says Jaswant.

2.
Bryan Kravitz, 70
Owner
Philly Typewriter

For 15 years Bryan Kravitz repaired typewriters but, as their popularity dwindled, he was forced to stop. But in 2013 his partner noticed a vintage one on sale. “It gave me a hint that there was something there,” says Kravitz, 70, who opened Philly Typewriter in 2017. “It couldn’t have happened if I wasn’t this age. I had this skillset that was buried, then people got into retro; business is thriving.”

3.
Kemi Oloyede, 53
Founder and creative director
The Sew London Project

Having taught art and textiles in London for 20 years, Kemi Oloyede was ushered into early retirement at 50 after arts-funding cuts. She resolved to reboot her career and The Sew London Project was born in 2015, offering a bespoke fashion-design service; the company also offers sewing workshops. In 2020, Oloyede plans to open up her designs to other makers by producing patterns.

What’s at stake?
Why the smart money might not be on external investment.

Aisles of boring business books and hours of idle daydreaming are devoted to pitching that humble business you started to those most promising but precarious of potential creditors: venture capitalists. But why do it? Any savvy investor worth their tailored suit probably isn’t quite as excited about swimwear or a supper club as you. Instead they have shareholders to report to and dollar signs in their eyes.

At Monocle we feel a little different about the purpose of businesses. Yes, they need to make money but what about building something that lasts a lifetime? Angel investors are fine if you just want to flip the company but think twice if you don’t. Luckily the tides of entrepreneurship are eroding the island mentality of making money for its own sake. Customers are wary of firms that ransack neighbourhoods, nations or the environment without giving back. This sense of responsibility is the advantage of family funding and it’s still the safest road to take. It can be precarious turning pals or parents into creditors but it also provides some clarity. Should you gamble grandma’s savings on that office upgrade? Does dad’s diligently gathered inheritance deserve to be squandered on a staff party? Your sister’s wedding savings on a website? It makes you think twice.

In the rush to run with the unicorns, many founders quickly forget what got them excited about owning a business in the first place. If you’ve got faith in your business then a venture capitalist isn’t always the answer, particularly if you want to pass along any of the proceeds to help your cousin get their fledgling firm flying.

Succession story 2
Ludwig Reiter, Vienna

Founded in 1885, this heritage shoemaker started out supplying the Austro-Hungarian royal army but these days produces everything from handmade Chelsea boots to briefcases. Fourth-generation Till Reiter runs the firm with his brother but will eventually hand over to his daughters, Anna and Magdalena.

Till Reiter, 57
“They bring so many new ideas to the table. I see the future in them, even if I have trouble understanding it: the importance of social media and online shopping.”

Anna Reiter, 31
“When the smell of leather is one of the first things you remember, it’s normal to sit and chat about shoes at the dinner table. I always knew I wanted to be a part of the business. It’s not a job I leave behind at 5pm, it’s my life.”

Magdalena Reiter, 29
“I’ve been working with my father for eight years and we understand each other really well now. He sends me off to meetings on my own these days; it’s a sign he’s letting go a little and trusts me. We have a lot to learn from him – they are very big shoes to fill.”

One man, two businesses
Hadrianus & Möbelkunst

On the east side of Budapest, two businesses are tucked away on a street in the Tenth District, Kobanya. The first is Hadrianus, a salvage company for unwanted and broken IT equipment. The second, Möbelkunst, houses the city’s foremost trove of mid-century furniture. At face value these businesses don’t seem to have much in common but their founder, 42-year-old entrepreneur Andras Fugerth, disagrees. “They share a very similar business model,” he says. “Except one is waste and the other is treasure.”

Aged 19 and still at university, Fugerth observed that, in an effort to remain in step with the latest technology, offices around the city were discarding tonnes of waste in the shape of computers, telephones and televisions. Someone was missing a trick: the discarded devices could be collected from companies for a price, then either recycled or repaired and resold. So he set up Hadrianus.

Fugerth was glad that his efforts were reducing the amount of waste that was finding its way into landfill but he always knew that there was more to it than giving new life to broken gadgets. As his wealth accumulated he developed an eye for modernist furniture. Among his first collections was a Hans J Wegner CH33 chair he found while living in Finland. As profits from Hadrianus continued to roll in, his home got so full of furniture that he was forced to rent a warehouse near his IT salvage facility and sell off a few items. But there was a problem: he was hooked on the buzz of discovery and continued to collect rare items from his favourite period. “Möbelkunst is now a business employing eight people,” says Fugerth. “It has costs so it has to be thought of as a business but it’s still run on the premise that it’s a good hobby – the thing I enjoy most is the sourcing.”

Wearing two very different hats might cause some people to feel overwhelmed. However, the variety that comes from flitting between his two businesses gives Fugerth energy and enthusiasm in spades. “I’m very busy but I also value my free time,” he says. “These two businesses keep me occupied as much as I want. If there was a new opportunity then I’d be open to it but not just to earn more money.”

My cabinet: Sharan Pasricha
Ennismore, London

The potted history of Ennismore reads like a business-school case study. Since the group acquired Shoreditch’s Hoxton Hotel in 2012 it has expanded at breakneck pace; Hoxton is now a brand with eight locations across Europe and the US, with a hotel scheduled to launch in LA in October. The purchase (and subsequent revival) of luxury Scottish grande dame The Gleneagles Hotel followed. Now Ennismore is turning its attention to the budget category with NoCo, a less expensive hotel option due in 2021.

Once you establish a location, sustained growth in the hospitality industry isn’t that tricky according to Sharan Pasricha, Ennismore’s founder and CEO. “If you look at our business, we are a hotel but we are also a living room for the neighbourhood,” he says. Pasricha is fascinated by the social mores that appear in different cities and how these manifest in hospitality spaces. When it comes to people’s behaviour, he is always taking notes: “When Italians have an espresso, for instance, they don’t sit down,” he says. “What I didn’t realise is that if they sit they get charged VAT.”

Ennismore is dedicated to sharing the wealth with the neighbourhoods surrounding its establishments. Pasricha talks with pride about his company’s work with charity Shelter from the Storm, a homeless shelter in London. Ennismore lent its hospitality nous to the initiative, helping with budgeting and negotiating low prices from suppliers. Chefs from the portfolio of hotel restaurants are regularly brought in to feed those seeking refuge. “Corporate social responsibility isn’t just a tagline on the bottom of the website,” says Pasricha. “Companies need to spend a lot more time reflecting on how they can add to the conversation.”

1.
Marcos Eleftheriou, Head of internal culture, “Only Marcos could rally enough troops to get out of bed to paint a homeless shelter on a Saturday morning.”

2.
Heather Pigott, Brand director, “Could sell water to a goldfish.”

3.
Hannah Cheston, Brand manager, “Han brings the team together to help us raise that dough.”

4.
Imran Bhatia, Senior legal council, “The one keeping us all out of trouble.”

5.
Luke Nurser, Project manager, “A ballbuster when it comes to keeping things on time. Great at beating down suppliers for the best price.”

6.
Kathleen Lee-Joe, Content editor, “Kath knows how to write a story. She’s done everything from establishing the mission statement, to documenting the journey online.”

7.
Sharan Pasricha, Founder and CEO

Sharan Pasricha cut his entrepreneurial teeth at an early age: fresh out of university he founded marketing agency Rush Media. Before long he was being enlisted by an uncle to reverse the fortunes of the family’s ailing leatherware business in New Delhi. Pasricha did just that, bringing the company back into profit in 18 months. Moving back to London in 2009 he founded hospitality group Ennismore. Starting with the purchase of a single hotel in a fast-gentrifying area of east London, he has since turned the company into a flourishing hospitality empire.

8.
Hannah Marsh, Head of learning and development, “Hannah gets the best out of our people. With Marcos she helped establish our apprenticeship programme so that we can continue to develop.”

9.
Harry Ashbee, Graphic designer, “With his eye for detail, Harry has worked with Shelter from the Storm on branding: telling their story, creating assets for social media and doing all sorts of hands-on jobs like sign painting.”

Help is at hand
Junction Triangle, Toronto

In 2016, when Halo Brewery opened in a two-storey, red-brick building in Toronto’s Junction Triangle, it did so sporting a homemade logo that, like the basement the brewery started in, no longer fitted its ambitions. Owner Callum Hay didn’t have to look far for help. The move to a new, bigger space in the city’s west end, which helped expand production to 2,400 litres of beer a week, also introduced him to useful neighbours: fellow small businesses.

Formerly an industrial area filled with warehouses and factories, the Junction Triangle fell into decline in the 1960s when passenger trains ceased to stop there. Today the area is home to cafés, movie studios, technology entrepreneurs and, just upstairs from the brewery, design firm Underline Studio.

Founded in 2005, Underline is run by graphic designers Fidel Peña and Claire Dawson, who met at another Toronto design studio, Concrete. Since moving to the Junction Triangle in 2012 they’d become regulars at Halo, so Hay turned to the designers for a new brand identity. “We knew Halo’s product and they knew us,” says Peña. “It was almost like a dream to be able to go downstairs to show them concepts.”

The resulting beer labels are modern and geometric, and have had a significant impact on bringing new customers to the brewery. They are also among Underline’s most publicised projects and potential clients often reference them.

Underline’s office is airy but small and doesn’t have a private meeting space. For that they head to another of Junction Triangle’s residents, Café Neon, owned by Niki Tsourounakis. Back in 2010, French video-game maker Ubisoft moved into the area and Tsourounakis, who cut her teeth working at her parents’ Greek restaurants, was hired to provide food for the launch party. She found out that Ubisoft expected to grow its staff upwards of 600 in five years and thought, “Where are these people going to eat? There’s nothing around here.”

Within a year Tsourounakis had opened Café Neon across the street. The menu features quiche, salad niçoise and falafel, all served to a hungry lunch crowd made up of workers from Ubisoft and other companies. And when Halo was looking for someone to make bar snacks for its new taproom? Café Neon was the natural choice.

This close-knit web of support, often overlooked in favour of digital connections and social media, offers unique opportunities. “They’re such easy relationships to navigate,” says Hay.

How do I… pitch?
Marie Perruchet on how to connect with your audience.

I lived in Silicon Valley for 10 years; it’s a world of its own. In the Californian sun you’re seeing 10 entrepreneurs pitching the same idea in the same hour so you have to perfect that pitch. I quickly realised that storytelling is essential. As a former BBC journalist I know how to make people talk, gain their trust and tell their story but, from my experience, that is not always the case with entrepreneurs.

Why do you want to tell a story? To connect with your audience. It should show loss, struggle and transformation – not unlike all those fairytales you grew up reading. When you think about your start-up, ask yourself this: what’s the issue you’re hoping to solve or the gap in the market you’re hoping to fill? Then explain how your product or service can fix the problem and point out why your target market needs this product.

In order to grab your audience’s attention in the first few seconds, tell them how your company has triumphed over adversity and how you are going to go about transforming people’s lives. You want to show that you are innovative and that your idea is going to make the world a better place in one way or another.

The guidelines
To simplify your story into a five-minute pitch takes a lot of work and practice. The process is important but never forget what you want to achieve. Aim for fluency while keeping these universal rules in mind:

1. Keep it short. Don’t wait five minutes to dive into it and don’t beat around the bush. Take the first 10 seconds to grab your audience’s attention.

2. Be clear and precise; make every word count. When you push people to be as precise as possible you can paint pictures in your listener’s mind to help them remember your idea.

3. Be authentic. You don’t want to sound like a clone of yourself. People want to see the real person behind the venture and make a connection.

Prepare your pitch
In Silicon Valley people often say, “Fake it until you make it.” As a former journalist I like to deal in facts but I would say prepare your pitch like you’d train for a sports competition. These are the things that you’ll want to take into account:

1. Research your audience and know who you’re addressing. Perhaps there is something that could help you create a connection.

2. Test your pitch in front of a low-stakes audience – a group of friends, perhaps. Ask your audience to reformulate your pitch to see what they understood and took away from it. Practice will help you gain confidence and when the day comes for you to pitch your business to an investor, you’ll be ready. I would recommend recording your pitch so that you can listen to yourself and make the necessary improvements.

3. Go with the flow; don’t script it. You don’t want your pitch to sound too rehearsed or robotic. It’s like driving. When you first start driving you’re so tense that everyone’s afraid to sit next to you but with some practice you relax and start holding conversations and doing all these things – that you probably shouldn’t – while you’re driving. When you’re pitching you should feel just as confident and relaxed.

4. Get the timing right. I always prefer to pitch in the mornings on Tuesdays to Thursdays. That’s because people are catching up with their emails on Mondays and they’re distracted by thinking about the upcoming weekend on Fridays.

Ace your pitch
A blossoming entrepreneurial mindset can be witnessed pretty much wherever you are in the world. That’s a wonderful thing – but it also means that your competition is stiff. Showcasing your passion is important when pitching, in order to differentiate yourself from others. When the shit hits the fan, how strong are you? How driven are you to sustain the difficulties and struggles that you’re going to face as an entrepreneur?

We’ve all watched politicians on stage and how they tend to deliver their top three messages regardless of the questions they’re asked. Figure out what you want to get out of the meeting and what three messages you want to get across. Make sure your top messages are conveyed and repeated so that they sink in.

We are stuck to our screens and constantly bombarded with information but at the end of the day, people just want to connect and engage with others. You can do just that by telling a great story.

Perruchet is an international marketing and communications director who has worked with the likes of Netflix, LinkedIn and Adidas

Running with it
Springresor, Stockholm

It’s an autumn morning in Djurgården park in Stockholm. A troupe of runners are being put through their paces by Lars Björklund and Lina Johansson, co-founders of Springresor. Their start-up offers group runs, personal diet plans and trips to locations from the Isle of Skye in Scotland to Hallstatt in Austria.

Just months ago, Björklund and Johansson were desk-bound healthcare professionals yearning to break free and work on their fledgling business full time. In May they did exactly that, embarking on a six-month sabbatical, powered by a government grant.

In Sweden this story is a familiar one: employers must permit workers to take six months off if they want to start a new business. Though there are certain conditions; for example, if it creates a “significant disadvantage” for an employer’s business, they can decline. If things don’t work out, the would-be entrepreneurs are allowed to return to their old jobs. This safety net helps more people find the courage to set up shop alone; between 2007 and 2017 the number of limited companies in Sweden almost doubled, from 27,994 to 48,542.

Both Björklund and Johansson are hoping that Springresor will take off, allowing them to hand in their notice. Björklund says, “The best part is being able to decide what to do with our day; it’s made such a huge difference to our lives.”

In numbers

1. Stockholm has earned a reputation for being Europe’s start-up capital and is second only to Silicon Valley for the number of technology companies valued at $1bn (€907m) per capita.

2. Between 2007 and 2017 the number of limited companies in Sweden almost doubled, from 27,994 to 48,542.

How do I… design a brand?
Designer Lawrence Zeegen on the importance of look and feel.

The first time I really thought long and hard about design was when I came out of school at the age of 16 in 1980 and picked up the first edition of The Face magazine. For me that was the turning point, the moment I knew I was destined for a life in design.

I arrived in London three years later to study graphic design at Camberwell College of Art and then illustration at the Royal College of Art. But the time I spent hanging out in galleries, shops, street markets, bars and clubs opened my eyes to design as much as my time at art school. Even today, when I’m looking for inspiration, I head out. I go for walks, make handwritten notes, scribble visuals, take snaps and visit exhibitions and bookshops.

Why design matters
Design is often thought of as the icing on the cake once all else is complete. My view is that design must always be in the mix from the start; the best brands have understood this. Ensure that design is baked in to how you think and act as an entrepreneur and how you set up your business. Otherwise your audience will go straight to your competitor.

Designing a brand
Focus on differentiating your offer from the competition. Think from the start about how you’d like your brand to behave, what its values will be, where it sits in the market and why the relationship between your brand and your customers will be vital.

Designing a brand is about creating an experience for your clients. If you’re developing an app, for example, make sure that design is embedded into the technology; usability and functionality are key considerations and getting the user-interface correct is as vital as a strong user-experience.

Designing a logo
Your logo is the graphic manifestation of your company, product or service, and it needs to work perfectly on screen, in print, in advertising, on packaging and signage. Some of the world’s best logos are extremely simple. It should reflect your brand’s philosophy and transport the feeling that you want to inspire in people.

Professor Lawrence Zeegen is an educator, designer and illustrator

10 businesses we’d back

1.
An odd-hours hotel

No, not a Brazilian-style love motel but rooms available at times that cater to early and late landings – and don’t force you to sit in the foyer until the maid’s done at midday. Standard Hotels does a version for a fee but it only operates in four cities.

2.
A brimming hardware shop

Yes, because we all need a screw now and again. But also because we all miss the expertise and advice that should accompany the purchase of everyday items. There’s also a market for a less blokey experience, a scaled-down version of Japan’s Tokyu Hands shop that also hosts practical lessons for DIY dilettantes in the evenings.

3.
A rolling-stock maker

As the mood shifts to greener, slower travel we are banking on needing more and better overnight train services: carriages you can curl up in and well-equipped boardrooms for business on the move. Enjoy the journey as well as the destination. There’s also a case for adding a little romance and fun to travel, even at the lowest ticket price.

4.
A high-street haberdashery

Adept at hems, nicks and fixes – and with a button to match any blazer – this also chimes with the growing realisation that fewer and better made clothes is a sound alternative to fast fashion. How about a catchy, patch-based marketing campaign proclaiming a few slogans: “I’ll be darned” and “Holey spirit”.

5.
A high-minded allotment

Urban space is tight but what if city folk could sublet areas to grow? Picture an Appear Here (the service for people after a temporary store) for rooftops that would allow green-fingered city slickers space to cultivate a garden – or just a tan. We’d have a side hustle selling soil, bulbs and training for would-be gardeners.

6.
An estate agent

A competent one that’s got a black book of the best stock on the market, the owners’ and buyers’ priorities in mind and isn’t into the hard sell. The Modern House in the UK is a success but people haven’t cottoned on abroad. The firm shows the power of good images, interviews and a good editor to select great design.

7.
A fool-proof proof reader

A crack team of copywriters that can check your menu, shop sign or whatever you’re getting emblazoned on your van, window, or website. Remember, an injudicious apostrophe looks bad and undermines your mission – that can all be sorted with a few strokes of the pen.

8.
A mobile flower-market

Think of a farmers’ market but for flowers. It would pop up on school playgrounds at the weekend and fill the blacktop with rare blooms and the scent of the season. Behind the scenes we would also cater to the biggest and best corporate parties, helping to link local growers in the country to offices in the city.

9.
A travel agency

Booking online is wracked with unreliable tips, opaque offers and charlatans. Customers will save money in the long run by outsourcing their travel to someone with genuine know-how. Also, how about a TripAdvisor for nice people? Somewhere that helps travellers find pleasant places rather than vent their spleen about bad ones.

10.
A camp interlude

More than just bundling the kids off to camp, our institution takes its inspiration from the German model and teaches children about nature. Young attendees can climb trees, scrape knees and start fires without too much nannying. We introduce tots to camping, cooking, canoeing and a few life skills worth fostering.

Back from the brink
Samuji, Helsinki

Cautionary tales usually have unhappy endings; this one, however, has hope. It concerns Finnish fashion and homeware brand Samuji, which was founded a decade ago by Samu-Jussi Koski, the former creative director at Marimekko.

Over the years Samuji amassed a cult following for its clean womenswear silhouettes and punchy prints. It opened a New York flagship in 2016 and, at its peak in 2017, managed €2.2m in annual sales and had stockists from Tokyo to Oslo. It was going places.

Yet, as with so many independent brands, the cash flow soon dried up and, at the end of August this year, Samuji issued a plea on its website and social-media feeds asking the public to save it from bankruptcy. “As we sometimes do in life, when trying to grow a business, we misjudge some of the risks and find ourselves in an economic situation that challenges our business,” the brand wrote on Finnish crowdfunding platform Mesenaatti. It was a heartfelt appeal. “It was a bit frightening to be so open and candid about the overall situation but we felt that it was the only option at that point,” says Koski, reflecting on the campaign.

It worked. The brand was aiming for €400,000, although €150,000 would have saved it from immediate bankruptcy. In the end it made just over €200,000 thanks to some help from Stockmann, Helsinki’s leading department store, which promoted the campaign for free on its digital display screens.

For now it looks like Samuji will live to fight another day but the incident is a sobering example of the volatility of running an independent brand. “With the benefit of hindsight, we overextended the resources of a small company,” says Frank Svenfelt, Samuji’s CEO. “We grew the company aggressively and took risks; many paid off but some did not,” he adds, citing poor performance by the New York flagship and the fact that two of the brand’s biggest third-party stockists went out of business as key contributors to its downfall. From here on in Samuji will focus on its Helsinki flagship and its online business.

The fashion industry celebrates beautiful things but many of the small, independent brands that prop it up survive because they are canny with money and are hustling, always hustling, to get their goods in front of customers. “The industry in itself is a difficult one and it is going through very significant changes,” says Koski. “Focus and clarity on brand messaging – and also tapping into networks for experience and advice – is perhaps even more important than ever.” The fate of his brand, played out so publicly, reminds us of the perils of being an entrepreneur in this fickle retail game – and also of the danger of trying to expand, that very human thing to do. There is a lesson here for all of us.

Succession story 3
Sanyodo Shoten, Tokyo

Sanyodo Shoten is a small, family-owned bookshop that opened in 1891. It carries everything from bestsellers to a unique selection of children’s books and fashion magazines. The business is run by family members across three generations; Hideko Toyama is fourth generation and her nephew, Ryo Manno, the fifth.

Hideko Toyama, 59
“I learnt everything about how to serve customers from my late father: provide a chair to those who walk with a cane, chat to small children who look a bit lonely and pay a visit if you hear someone is not well. The next generation has brought a new perspective and network of people. Some of our customers have known us for decades through generations of their families and it’s important for us to keep the business in the family.”

Ryo Manno, 31
“Hideko taught me how to make progress while keeping tradition. Her decision to add a gallery to our bookshop created a new network of people and expanded our potential. My role now is to preserve Sanyodo Shoten and pass it on to the next generation.”

How do I… get funding?
Pip Jamieson has some sound advice on securing the dosh.

I had to build my network from scratch. I had meeting after meeting, slowly working my way up the ladder. My break came when someone introduced me to Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Lastminute.com. He loved what we were doing and introduced me to a number of my current shareholders.

The goal of my company, The Dots, is to take on LinkedIn, which was built for traditional, corporate careers. I want to create an alternative professional network that really works for the creative community. We call ourselves no-collar professionals. We’ve got nearly 500,000 members so far and I’m on a 10-year journey to become the next big professional network.

I had the luxury of selling a business and seed-investing The Dots myself when I launched in 2014. We’ve done two rounds of funding since, raising €1.7m in the first external round and €4m in the second. But just because I’ve approached VCs doesn’t mean that it’s right for you and your business. The first thing you have to ask yourself is whether you want to take on that money. Because the moment you do, you are not in control of your company anymore. You have other people who you are accountable to.

My advice would be to make sure you research all available avenues. If you’re going down a route like mine, realise that VCs either want a billion-dollar business or they don’t care if you go out of business. That’s the journey I have chosen but it’s not right for everyone because I’ve kind of given my life up to do this. Sometimes a loan is the best way forward and there are numerous start-up loans out there. What I’m also increasingly interested in is crowdfunding with the likes of Seedrs or Crowdcube.

I love the idea of raising part of the money from my community and having them benefit from any growth. If I could be fully accountable to my community and not shareholders, that would be my dream. But I’d want to make sure that there’s definitely a sensible cap so that no one’s putting in more money than they can afford to lose, because every business is risky.

If you do go down the VC route it’s about picking your investors carefully and making sure they align with your values. Raising investment is like going into a marriage but without the benefit of make-up sex! What I love is the diversity of my backers, whom I call shareholders (it gives you the sense that you’re all in the same boat). Communication is key for maintaining these relationships. We regularly send updates to them, in which we are very honest about the things that are going right and the things that are going wrong. We’re always open to asking for help too. Involving the shareholders on the journey is important but don’t overdo it. Push back when a shareholder is overstepping the mark.

Some of my best mentors are investors who have turned me down. They help with different areas of my business now, from tech to scaling. Don’t get upset when you get a no. If you like an investor, keep in touch and ask their advice when you need it. They might have turned you down in the last round but they might invest next time.

Recently we’ve been inundated with people wanting to invest in The Dots, which is a really lovely position to be in. But it has taken me three-and-a-half years to get here. You’ve got to be patient. It does happen, I promise, it just takes a while.

How to secure funding:
1. Build a network as early as possible. There are wonderful networks such as the AllBright, Blooming Founders and Angel Academe that can help you.
2. Build a portfolio of mentors. I can turn to them for advice and having that knowledge base is incredibly valuable.
3. Persevere. Every no leads to a yes and I’m living proof. If I can do it, anyone can do it.

Pip Jamieson is the founder and CEO of The Dots, a professional network for people in the creative industry

Follow suit

1.
Casely-Hayford
London
For architects, gallerists and entrepreneurs after a hit of cool

Some of London’s best-dressed men determine what their work look will be in a yellow-walled room in Marylebone that’s populated with armchairs, plants and photos of luminaries such as Jean-Michel Basquiat. The downstairs floor of Casely-Hayford’s central London shop was designed “to feel like your coolest friend’s apartment”, says Charlie Casely-Hayford, grinning. “When people are in this room they’re very open. And if they’re comfortable then they explain their job to us. It allows us to really think about what they need to do each day and what will work for them.”

Casely-Hayford co-founded the brand in 2009 with his late father, the esteemed designer Joe Casely-Hayford. It has a cool, refreshing take on tailoring: suits come roomy and coats in crunchy Japanese fabric, while crisp T-shirts are tucked into wide pleated trousers. Its ready-to-wear lines for men and women are popular, representing about 50 per cent of business. But the bespoke side, in which customers can have pieces tweaked in a choice of about 3,000 fabrics (from the UK, Italy and Japan), is growing. Many customers, especially men, are using this service when building their work wardrobe.

“We’ve carved out a niche for ourselves; we’ve attracted people from the arts and creative industries, and young entrepreneurs,” says Casely-Hayford. The 33-year-old cuts an enviable figure in a double-breasted suit in a brown checked wool. “The common thread among our clients is people who are seeking something different,” he says. One architect, for example, asked him to make an “ill-fitting” suit in a Holland & Sherry fabric that would create an insouciant look; another client, the founder of music-broadcasting firm Boiler Room, pairs a Casely-Hayford suit with Reebok Classics and a chain.

Others have a less clear idea of what they’re after. “We’ve had people say, ‘I want a uniform but I don’t know what it is. Can you help me?’ That’s such an exciting brief,” says Casely-Hayford. “For work, a lot of guys like to have a uniform, even if it’s casual. If you’re getting up at 6am and going to the gym, you don’t want to give a huge amount of thought to your outfit. Knowing that something works, and that you can have it in several fabrics and colours, is ideal.”

Given the relaxation of workplace dress codes, can any item now be considered office clothing or is there a certain ingredient that makes something suited to work? “There is definitely something specific,” says Casely-Hayford. “A lot of people say, ‘I want something to make me feel confident.’ You don’t necessarily seek that from your weekend clothes.”

What is it, then, that gives confidence? All Casely-Hayford’s suits have an easy nonchalance about them and the brand “is known for cutting its suits to be worn with T-shirts”, says the designer. The Hendricks double-breasted model is popular as the brand has moved one of the jacket buttons so that it sits half-open, creating a relaxed look. A more low-key bestseller is the shirt-jacket, which comes in everything from Italian suede to corduroy. Customers are advised to pair this with a navy T-shirt and tailored trousers. “Where people get confused is when they think, ‘If I want to feel important, then I need to wear a suit,’” says Casely-Hayford. “It doesn’t have to be as black and white as that. We’re trying to think outside traditional suiting. That’s where we’ve found a sweet spot.”
casely-hayford.com

2.
Buck Mason
Los Angeles
For men in the tech and creative industries after well-made basics

In the offices adjoining their shop in Hancock Park in central LA, Buck Mason founders Erik Allen and Sasha Koehn (both pictured, Allen on left) discuss the finer points of one of their signature pieces: the hoodie. “Our guy shops with his hands as much as his eyes,” says Koehn, running his fingers across the French terry. “He can feel that it’s thick but soft and already kind of broken in.”

Allen points to the twill tape along the side seams. “They might not see this nuance until they get home but that’s where people know that this is modern and not [the 100-year-old clothing brand] Eddie Bauer.” This is pure Buck Mason: taking a familiar item – a hoodie, an Oxford shirt, raw-denim jeans – and giving it a youthful injection.

Today’s work spaces – especially on the West Coast – are filled with those riffing on the tech entrepreneur’s outfit sported by the likes of Jobs and Zuckerberg. Buck Mason elevates the basics and is a favourite among men in the creative and tech industries. Since its inception six years ago, the brand now has nine shops across LA, San Francisco, New York and Plano, Texas.

Although Buck Mason has been sported by the likes of Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, Allen says its association with the tech wardrobe is a mere postscript. “We never thought, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this pared-down casual thing because the zeitgeist is shifting.’ Our lens has always been California.”

Nonetheless it makes sense that these sorts of folk took to Buck Mason; there is something distinctly uniform-like about its wares. The company began as an online start-up and, on its immaculate website, goods are divided into 11 neat item categories, from tees to polos and sweaters. Every product is available in an array of neutral tones so that customers can buy, say, five of each thing for work, play or both. “Erik jokes about this more than I do but you could walk into our shop blindfolded and pick up five items and chances are that they’ll all go together,” says Koehn.

In LA especially, work happens anywhere you’re not choked by gridlock. Luckily Buck Mason’s casual wardrobe can easily carry the busy worker from a café meeting to an off-site shoot to dinner in Silver Lake.
buckmason.com

3.
Prologue
Hong Kong
For dapper finance guys who are after a suit refresh

Chris Tang (pictured, second from right) is running late for a customer fitting at Prologue, a menswear shop in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district specialising in dapper made-to-order suits. He co-owns the shop, along with fellow suit enthusiasts Jerry Tong, Chi Wang Tang and Gareth Li. Although it’s 30C outside, Tang arrives not having broken a sweat. He’s pristinely dressed in a white shirt, burnt-orange knit tie, navy blazer, grey pleated trousers and mahogany Oxfords.

“Our perfect customer is someone who’s looking for separates,” says Tang, who attributes the brand’s success to its wide customer base from Hong Kong to Stockholm. “Seventy per cent of our customers would start with a pure wool navy or grey suit but otherwise we see a lot of people mix and match different patterns, colour and fabrics.”

While young professionals in other cities may be quick to embrace a new wave of casual dress in the workplace, Hong Kongers wear their suits with pride. Much of the tradition of formal work attire is kept alive by the city’s prevalent corporate culture. “It’s a suit environment but I tend to keep it business-casual,” says Pierre-Jean Françon, partner at the firm DHR International and a long-time Prologue customer.

While taking Françon’s inseam measurements, Tang warns him that suits made of light fabrics are prone to wrinkling. “We encourage customers to get something heavyweight but breathable – about 280 to 370 grams,” he says. “It helps that the air-conditioning is so strong in most offices.”

Hong Kong’s long history of tailoring has helped keep suits alive. “Tailoring is a very bread-and-butter thing in Hong Kong,” says Mark Cho, owner of menswear retailer The Armoury, which has branches in Hong Kong and New York. “People are willing to splurge on bespoke tailoring here.”

Prologue’s Jerry Tong (pictured, second from left) attributes his love of made-to-measure to photographs of his grandfather suited up for work in the 1940s. “You see 30 to 40-year-olds opening shops like ours in Hong Kong – people who want to modernise the traditional suit,” he says. “But we’re maintaining that classic touch that a lot of people are willing to forego.”
prologuehk.com

Smarter art

1.
The screen queen
Independent cinemas in Asia often struggle to turn a profit. But for one former real-estate investment banker, reconfiguring a disused cinema in Singapore into a thriving cultural destination has been much more than a personal passion project.
The Projector, Singapore

Singapore-born Karen Tan studied architecture and economics, then worked as a real-estate investment banker in London for several years before moving back to Singapore in 2010. That’s when she started Pocket Projects, a consultancy working to conserve Singapore’s heritage buildings by redeveloping and repurposing them for creative uses.

In 2014, Tan and her two business partners came across a disused cinema on the fifth floor of the city’s famous Golden Mile Tower. They decided to reconfigure it and turn it into what’s now The Projector. As well as showing a bold programme of films, the building also hosts a co-working space and a café, which ensures that the space is never underused.

“I wanted it to contribute to the city by creating a cultural space that is about openness and diversity,” says Tan. “In these days of increasing segmentation online, physical spaces where people from different interest groups can come together in a relaxed fashion are more important than ever.”
theprojector.sg

2.
The gallery go-getter
Making a success of a small gallery is difficult: low profit margins and a limited market of potential buyers mean that many ventures struggle. But by applying an innovative funding model, Pablo Berástegui has found an approach that works both financially and creatively.
Salut au Monde, Porto

Before opening photographic gallery Salut au Monde, Spaniard Pablo Berástegui held a raft of senior cultural management positions in his home country. As well as working as CEO of the San Sebastián 2016 European Capital of Culture programme, he spent four years heading Madrid’s cultural venue Matadero and seven years running the city’s annual PhotoEspaña festival.

“I was working on large, complex projects and felt that the moment had arrived for something more personal, where I have more control,” he says. “I was managing big teams and big budgets but I was moving further away from the artists. With Salut au Monde I’m involved in the whole process, from curating the exhibitions and installing the work to distributing the promotional postcards.”

The precarious nature of funding in the cultural sector means that even big-name institutions struggle with cash flow; Berástegui’s solution was to develop a strategy based on subscriptions rather than sales. He is recruiting 100 people to support Salut au Monde with an annual contribution of €400; in return they receive a print from each of its four yearly exhibitions. “The idea is that people who like photography, or share my values and want to support me, can get involved for a small investment,” he says. “It’s about being part of a community that supports something interesting.”

The model certainly has benefits from a curatorial perspective. “I can take chances on what I exhibit and show the work I really like, instead of worrying about what sells well or having to work with big-name photographers because they attract media attention,” says Berástegui. “I am focusing on up-and-coming photographers rather than established names so we can help people get their work seen.”

His advice to entrepreneurs is to be patient. “You need to give things time to blossom. It’s taken longer than I expected but it’s important not to be too nervous about success. Important things take time; if you are committed and believe in your vision, success will come.”
salutaumonde.info

3.
The culture vultures
The Cultivist is an art-lovers’ club where members pay an annual subscription in return for access to exhibitions, private tours, tailored trips and visits to artists’ studios. We meet the co-founders who will stop at nothing to grant people’s cultural wishes.
The Cultivist, US & UK

Marlies Verhoeven and Daisy Peat (both pictured, Verhoeven on left) had been working on auction house Sotheby’s vip programme for years when they realised that there was a wider public who wanted to enjoy similar privileges to top-level collectors. The Cultivist, the company they founded in 2015 after raising $1.5m from private investors, is a membership-only club devoted to meeting art lovers’ needs.

For $2,500 a year (€2,200 in Europe), members get fast-track entry to more than 150 museums and institutions around the world – from the Guggenheim to Lacma – and access to more trade fairs than they could feasibly fit into a travel schedule. Then there are the extras: members can call in and request private tours of exhibitions led by experts at as little as a day’s notice. A roster of more than 200 Cultivist-organised events in New York, London, San Francisco, Brussels and Paris every year provides ample networking opportunities, while members can also visit artist studios in whichever city they happen to be visiting.

For the first year the pair capped the number of members at 1,000 but the community has now expanded to include a few more thousand. “We wanted slow growth,” says Peat. “We didn’t want to grow too rapidly and didn’t want to advertise.” Yet what began as a six-person team has evolved into a 20-person operation with offices in London, New York, Shanghai, Los Angeles and Brussels with a network of 40 collaborators on the ground in various cities around the world.

While most members are collectors, some artists and curators are also on the list. “These people are time-poor so we do the homework for them,” says Peat. “We often say that they don’t need us but we do make everything a lot easier.” The fact The Cultivist does not have a commercial edge also allows the team of programmers to recommend whatever they feel is best, without pressures to encourage any sales.

Despite relying primarily on membership fees for revenue (some corporate partnerships are in place too), the model took off pretty quickly. Activities have also expanded to provide art-trips (pre-organised or bespoke) to less-explored art cities from Bogotá to Beirut.

“If you’re going to Rome, let us know the dates and we will let you know what exhibitions you should go to, whether they are at museums or commercial galleries,” says Peat. “But we’ll also tell you what little chapel you should visit to see an amazing fresco.”
thecultivist.com

4.
The host with the most
By going without government support and refusing to collaborate with brands that don’t align with her mission, Anastasia Yefimova has pulled off quite a feat with Richter, her culture centre-cum-luxury hotel that’s right in the heart of Moscow.
Richter, Moscow

“It’s about a collective vision and collective action,” says Anastasia Yefimova, founder and co-owner of Richter. It’s easy to see what she means. In a city where setting up a truly independent cultural centre is no easy feat, she’s embarked on a mammoth project. Located in a stately 19th-century mansion in the heart of Moscow’s historic city centre, Richter (named after the building’s original architect, Fyodor Richter) combines a library, magazine shop, recording studio, contemporary-art gallery and print shop with a luxury hotel, restaurant and vermouth bar.

“We want to create a community of people who realise that you must pay for good art and good service,” says Yefimova. That’s a radical departure from the way that cultural institutions normally work in Russia: even independent museums and galleries often depend on the authorities for their survival and have to toe the official line as a result. “Most people simply didn’t believe we could pull this off without government support, corporate money or connections in high places,” she says.

But Yefimova dug into her savings and managed to draw together a small group of investors who believed in her idea. Several big brands, including bathroom specialist Laufen and Dornbracht and Italian furniture company Zanotta, donated furniture and art objects, while a handful of architects and designers helped out for free during the building’s extensive remodelling and renovation. “All this assistance really slashed our costs but when we had to pay for something ourselves, we didn’t skimp,” says Yefimova. “Part of Richter is a five-star hotel – but it’s also a platform for artists to create and communicate. And good design stimulates creativity.”

Above all, Yefimova says, Richter is about creating “a self-contained experience”. Because Richter’s hotel guests tend to be artists and creatives, they take advantage of the in-house facilities.

This marriage of hospitality and culture is Yefimova’s driving principle. Her other project in town, the Brick Design Hotel, features paintings by Soviet-era artists in its rooms and lobby. With Richter she decided to take things one step further. Most of the complex’s revenue comes from the hotel and restaurant but this helps sustain a cultural programme that includes concerts, talks, performances, DJ sets and exhibitions. Art manager Daria Kravchuk recently curated an exhibition by photographer Katya Turkina in the backyard. “Let’s hope that Richter will create a dynamic new ecosystem of creative spaces in Moscow – an ecosystem that will be rooted in the creative economy in this time of political and financial uncertainty,” says Kravchuk.

That uncertainty looms large over Russia’s cultural sector but Yefimova says she’ll never collaborate with brands or organisations that clash with her mission. “We know our audience and we know where we are headed. We are the first such space in Russia and I’m sure we’ll continue to attract like-minded sponsors and donors.”
richter.moscow

5.
The melody maker
When musician Jack Conte blew all his money making a YouTube video, he hit upon an idea for a crowdfunding platform to finance artists, writers and musicians. Six years on, Patreon is helping nigh on 100,000 creators around the world to make a living.
Patreon, San Francisco

In 2013, Jack Conte (pictured, seated on left), who was then a musician with a sizeable YouTube following, maxed out two credit cards. He had spent three months and more than $10,000 staging an elaborate music video. “I had a horrible feeling when I realised I was going to upload the completed video on YouTube, get a million views and make $150 in ad revenue.”

Nowadays the 35-year-old is CEO of Patreon, a membership platform that allows fans (“patrons”) to finance artists, writers and musicians with a monthly payment. Patreon, in turn, takes 5 to 12 per cent of the donations as a fee. “People in Silicon Valley see art as information and they think all information should be free – but it’s not free to have ideas and execute them,” says Conte. “What if I asked my fans for $5 or $10 a month, in return for my music, to be members of me?”

Patreon now has a roster of more than 100,000 creators, three million patrons and 200 employees; the team are integral to the business’s success. And the collective goal? “If we don’t figure out a fair system to pay the people who fill the web with the stuff we read, listen to and watch then everybody’s going to lose,” says Conte.
patreon.com

This is what success looks like

1.
Niclas Ahlström
Made by Choice
Hosting dinners at home for colleagues – and clients – can keep you hungry.

Home is where the heart is but for Made by Choice founder Niclas Ahlström it’s also a space for moving his furniture business forward. He often, for instance, brings colleagues home to continue their work in a more relaxed setting. “We envision new products and ideas during dinners with the team,” he says. “We innovate together and inspire each other.”

Ahlström says that these dinners help the team to build purpose and passion, and to appreciate each other’s integral roles in the production process. “A good team that works well together is so important,” he says. “Someone envisions the chair, someone designs it, someone builds it, someone sells it – you need everyone involved to work with the same goals from the start to arrive at the best possible results. And I like to show my appreciation to every single person involved in that by having them in my home.”

He also sometimes organises meals there with people from outside the company. “It’s nice to get feedback and ideas from people outside the design sphere. They see things differently,” he says. “This is why we like to do cross-disciplinary projects, such as combining art and fashion with product and furniture design. Dialogue between people from various sectors helps us to build a culture of innovation.

“Made by Choice has drawn attention with its minimalist Nordic-inspired pieces rooted in Finnish woodworking traditions. It made a number of best-in-show lists at this year’s Salone del Mobile and will soon be expanding to shops in the UK. The company has grown 50 per cent in the past year and has a turnover of €5m. For Ahlström there’s a direct link between quality time at home, the quality of the product and success.

“I do a lot of thinking at home,” he says. “Without that time and space to think you can’t create anything.”

2.
Marta Brandão & Mário Sousa
Mima Housing
Designing for life – and work.

Portuguese architecture practice Mima Housing takes a modular approach to its homes: it creates elegant, contemporary, pre-fabricated dwellings based on a grid system, enabling simple customisation. At 18.00 on Friday you’ll usually find founders Marta Brandão and Mário Sousa at the office but it’s not about spending hours chained to a desk. “For us, success is loving what we do and feeling good at work,” says Brandão. “We attract clients who understand our concept and architectural language and that means we believe in what we do.”

They came up with the idea for their business while studying in Switzerland in 2007 and realised their first project in 2011. Success came swiftly: that year the practice won a best building award and today it has 12 employees, 45 completed buildings and 83 projects in the pipeline.

The pair designed the homely Mima Housing office themselves. “Being here doesn’t feel like work,” says Brandão. “We have a swimming pool and balcony with great views; we eat lunch together; and in the evening we watch the sunset.”

3.
Max Bonbrest
Ayr
Start-ups are not all plain sailing.

“Being able to work from a place like Sag Harbor on Fridays is a dream,” says Max Bonbrest, co-founder of Ayr, a womenswear brand that makes clothes designed to be worn all year round (hence its name). If Bonbrest isn’t closing the shop in Sag Harbor on a Friday evening, she’s venturing out to sea on her Cape Dory sailboat. “Being able to leave work, drive to a place I love and get on a sailboat with the people I love – that’s success.”

Ayr now has flagship shops in Los Angeles and New York, a pop-up in Denver and a seasonal store in Sag Harbor but getting there hasn’t been smooth sailing. Bonbrest launched the brand in 2014 with two other co-founders under the Bonobos umbrella. But in 2016 all three broke away, taking a handful of employees with them. “We had three months to spin out, incorporate, replatform our site, find an office space and learn all the things we didn’t know about running our business.”

Despite opening five shops in three years, with two more in Chicago and San Francisco to come, Bonbrest still finds time to get away. “Being able to steal moments of peace at sea is magic.”

4.
Pascal Blum & Mathieu Caudal
Unu
Savouring the view from the top.

Changing the way people move through cities is one of the central challenges of our times. Six years ago, Mathieu Caudal, Pascal Blum (both pictured, Caudal on left, Blum in centre) and Elias Atahi decided that they wanted to play a part in this transformation so they founded Unu, an electronic-scooter start-up.

Friday evenings see staff members climb a shaky improvised ladder up to the roof of their Berlin-Kreuzberg HQ for sundowners. It is as an apt summary of their journey towards becoming a company with 120 employees. “Nothing was laid out and we are constantly adjusting,” says Blum.

Today more than 10,000 Unus fill the streets of cities such as Berlin and Paris, earning €10m in revenue last year. But talking about success doesn’t come naturally. “Founding a company is a rollercoaster,” says Caudal. “We became resilient; it helps you go through the hard times but it makes it difficult to enjoy the small achievements on the way.”

The makeshift rooftop bar, however, offers sweeping views and the chance to talk honestly about their ambitions. “It might sound like megalomania but we want to leave a mark on this city.”

5.
Adam Lewenhaupt
CQP
Step in the direction of your passion.

In 2013, Adam Lewenhaupt came to a crossroads in his life: he could either continue down the path he had embarked upon in corporate finance or throw himself into something new that he felt truly passionate about. One year and a launch party later, Lewenhaupt had set up cqp, a brand selling handmade leather sports shoes with fresh colours and neat silhouettes.

Friday evenings are a chance for him to focus on the creative side of his job. The brand has grown steadily year on year and now boasts eight models of shoe sold by more than 30 stockists worldwide. But Lewenhaupt still likes to keep up with the design side of things. “I was able to pivot from being a junior finance guy who was unhappy with life to setting up a business that works,” he says. “Now I can combine my job with doing the thing I enjoy.

“The moments I love the most are in the evening at the end of the week when the phone has stopped ringing, the kids have gone to bed and I can forget about time and just draw and think of ideas,” he says. “I suppose being able to call that work is, in itself, a success.”

6.
Daisuke Amada
Megane Rock
Whether your business is big or small, keeping everything in focus is key.

Daisuke Amada, founder of Megane Rock, is a rarity in Japan’s eyewear industry. He designs, cuts, polishes and pieces together every part of every frame at his small workshop in the city of Sabae, the country’s eyewear-manufacturing capital. “Typically you specialise in one part of the production process,” he says.

Amada left his career in fashion retail to embark upon a stint in an eyewear factory. He has been running Megane Rock for the past five years, making just 150 acetate frames a month, focusing on one design at a time from 25 different shapes.

On a Friday evening you could find him pulling a batch from a polishing machine, sketching new ideas or packing a shipment of frames. “I’ve reached a point where I can work at my own pace in my atelier,” he says. “I’m happy that I make a product that puts me in contact with so many people. Success for me was never about money; I feel fortunate that I can spend time with people who wear my frames.” Amada’s reputation has mainly spread by word of mouth. As a result he is kept busy travelling for trunk shows and filling orders from 20 retailers in Japan. It gives people who wear Megane Rock frames a chance to meet the man behind the brand but it also energises Amada. “Most producers don’t get to talk with customers,” he says. “I do and it motivates me.” His disregard for trends partly explains the enduring appeal of his designs. “I ignore fads and I never intentionally design something new,” he says.

He’s also busy planning his next project: preserving the methods of eyewear-makers in Sabae who are nearing retirement age and have nobody to pass on their skills or equipment to. Amada worries that their knowledge and expertise will be lost. “This place helped me find my calling and now I want to help preserve these techniques,” he says. “That’s my next focus.”

Follow the leaders

1.
Narrative tricks
by Will Storr
Storytelling is a fundamental part of human communication and the best way for brands and businesses to connect meaningfully with their audience.

Most organisations aren’t trying to do business with everyone – they’re trying to connect with a specific market. But who are these people? What’s their tribe? What are the values that bind them together? And how can you tell a story that connects with this tribe? Answering these questions successfully – and creating the right story – can be critical to the success of your company and its campaigns.

Back in the early 1980s the Texas Department of Transportation found itself spending more than $20m every year on clearing up litter. It tried to fight the scourge with an advertising campaign revolving around a Native American shedding a tear at the mess. It didn’t work.

To try and understand why, advertising executives Mike Blair and Tim McClure researched the kinds of people who were doing the littering. What was their tribe? What were their tribal values? The litterers were, as McClure later told The New York Times, “bubbas in pick-up trucks” – not a cohort likely to be moved by the sight of the weeping indigenous person. The executives then made a campaign that was tailored to that tribe. In 1986 they hired Dallas Cowboy players Ed Jones and Randy White to make the now iconic Don’t Mess With Texas ads that appealed to their intended audience’s patriotic love of their state. Within a year littering had declined by 29 per cent; four years later it was down by an extraordinary 72 per cent.

Over the past few years it’s felt as if everyone’s been talking about the value of storytelling. Bankers, technologists and strategists at global ngos have all been thumbing copies of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces or Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! and trying to incorporate their teachings about myth, literature and blockbusting screenplays into their working lives. By now the idea is beginning to feel like an annoying fad that’ll inevitably pass – but nothing could be further from the truth.

Storytelling isn’t going anywhere; it will be just as crucial for entrepreneurs to understand it in 100 years’ time as it is today. This is because story is the natural language of the human brain. We think in stories. We’re raised on stories. Stories help define our culture, our values and our moral lives. Stories orient us. They define us. If we want to talk to other people so that we connect with them and influence how they feel and behave, it’s critical to understand some of narrative’s basic rules. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that if we’re not communicating with stories, we’re not communicating at all.

Successful pieces of corporate communication, like successful story plots, should be structured in an elegant sequence in which one point leads to the next. Yet a lot of companies tell their stories in dense paragraphs that are more like lists.

But there’s more to effective storytelling than elegant structure: it’s also vital to communicate your values. We are a strange species: we’re tribal and the stories we tell each other often communicate the rules that bind our tribes together. It’s partly thanks to these stories that the members of the group discover how they should behave and what the group stands for.

Even a fledgling firm should have a clear understanding of what it wants to say and who it’s trying to say it to. By building a company you’re creating a tribe and it should be one that other people want to join. The stories a company tells about itself and the world should connect subconsciously with the stories that their customers tell. The price of admittance is the price of a purchase, which will then be displayed with pride. This is why storytelling is no fad. To understand its power is to understand how humans think and behave. What could be more valuable than that?

2.
Return to form
by Sarah Balmond
A firm’s founding values can be brought to brilliant life through design, helping to promote differentiation and brand awareness. There’s no need to be daunted; harness design’s power.

The argument that design can build better and more successful businesses has already been vindicated: Apple Inc. Need I say more? Design can be everything from a well-considered brand through to a clean, intuitive website, professional communications, meaningful products, streamlined services, intelligent processes and, of course, stand-out environments, interiors and architecture. Wield it in the right ways and design can be immensely powerful.

Don’t be intimidated. It’s important to remember that design is above all else a human process, deeply linked with emotion. Design is experience. Start with questions: how do you actually want people to feel when they see your logo? What do you want them to experience in your shop? What memories do you want them to take away from a night at your hotel?

Integrate a design approach from the very beginning. And if things are going wrong, design can sometimes be the fix too. You want more people in your restaurant? Lay down a gloriously crisp, clean tablecloth (yes, it could be that simple). Footfall slow? Take a hard look at your shop front. What more could you do? Revisit your business regularly and use design to steer it. Turn to common sense and intuition. Design could just be the glue sticking your entire operation together.

3.
All together now?
by Fiona Wilson
Stirring company anthems used to be a morning staple in Japan – is it time for a comeback? Probably not. But the workplace harmony they coincided with is a more lamentable loss.

As if Monday mornings weren’t bad enough, imagine how much worse they would be if instead of the usual latte and light banter you had to join in with a rousing ode to your employer. And yet a chorus of the company song, or shaka, was how the day used to start in factories and offices across Japan.

Businesses large and small had company songs; somewhere between a school song and a national anthem, they were bellowed out by workers and management alike. There are some painful dirges among the classic company anthems and more than a touch of the North Korean collective. But in more paternalistic job-for-life days, when a young recruit could see a straight path to retirement in the same company, workers readily embraced the communal spirit. Some even played the songs at their weddings.

When a New York Times reporter took a look at the Japanese company song in 1972 the practice was still in full swing. Foreign visitors, says the piece, “can never quite believe the spectacle of hundreds of workers at, say, the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, whose sales exceed $2bn, bursting into song”.

The first company song dates back to the early 20th century but the high point for the genre was during the postwar years when Japan, having been destroyed by conflict, was rebuilding itself. Turning the country into the economic behemoth we know today was an epic effort that required everyone to be facing in the same direction. Stirring company songs helped to bond workers and give a shared sense of purpose.

The lyrics were positively nation-building. Fujifilm’s employees would sing “Fuji! Fuji! Fuji! Ah, with one voice let us sing a prosperous future!” Matsushita Electric’s song had such lines as, “For the building of a new Japan, let’s put our strength and minds together, doing our best to promote production.” You get the idea.

In recent years the company song has faded into obscurity. Working habits have changed and people don’t expect to be in the same company their whole life. Karaoke has replaced corporate hymns with pop hits. That said, there have been brief shaka revivals. Nihon Break Kogyo, a demolition company, scored an unexpected hit in 2003 with a soft-rock tune that was accompanied by a hilariously un-rock video of workers tearing down buildings. For all the publicity that it attracted, the song wasn’t enough to save the company from bankruptcy in 2009.

Some companies have tried to jazz up their songs; Panasonic went so far as to hire the services of distinguished film composer Joe Hisaishi. Three years ago Dentsu, one of the world’s biggest ad agencies, set up a new shaka competition; an exercise in branding, its purpose was to boost the profile of small companies that were lagging behind their larger counterparts.

A company song has a heavy load to bear: it has to be something timeless that can last for decades, bringing together management and employees while conveying a corporate philosophy at the same time. The cheery rap by office-supplies company Kurabun – a recent winner of the shaka trophy – doesn’t quite do the same job.

4.
Hustle and flow
by Alain Sylvain
Just because a business has found success doesn’t mean it has to stick to the tried and tested. Greater rewards lie in wait for those organisations that embrace the entrepreneurial spirit.

We’re drunk on entrepreneurialism. And it’s not just because it’s entered the mainstream: entrepreneurs give us the feeling that we too can do anything we set our minds to. They symbolise vision, agility, hustle – values that society holds dear. They challenge the status quo by exploring new ideas and taking risks. They’re inspiring. It’s also the reason that so many big businesses try to emulate that start-up feel, either through office design or company culture.

But with big organisations comes lots of red tape. Rapid growth means that responsiveness and agility diminish. The freedom to fail and start again, something that is quintessential to the start-up mentality, is lost. But most importantly the “hustle” becomes unnecessary – and a seeming liability as it flirts with disrupting what has worked well so far. Big businesses are “safer” and the much vaunted qualities of entrepreneurial employees become muted.

The good news is that it’s possible to restore that mindset; it’s also crucial to do so. The drive to challenge the way things are, to reach for the future and create new ideas, is important to the soul and integrity of any progressive organisation. It’s ultimately what unites people and helps you stand out in a competitive market. So how can large organisations authentically channel entrepreneurialism within their walls?

Find unusual partners. Entrepreneurs network tirelessly and collaborate all the time; the best know the value of integrating alternative thinking into their own ideas. The same should go for big business. Find and secure partnerships with different communities that inspire you, be it customers or, potentially, competitors.

Prioritise invention from the inside out. A lot of big companies, from technology to food, use in-house accelerators, incubators and venture funding to promote invention. That’s commendable but the challenge is doing it in a way that is authentic and properly intergrated so the results are felt across the company.

Don’t rest on past success. Every move by an entrepreneur could make or break them, while big businesses have the resources to play it safe. Lose the safety net and get the hustle back. Allow staff to take risks, fail, learn and start again, and motivate them to share failures. This will allow for new lessons and experiences, and leave everyone with an open mind for unforeseen opportunities.

5.
Put to the test
by Sarah Hernholm
There’s no textbook for teaching entrepreneurship but steer students to success by getting them to execute their ideas in the real world and become more familiar with failure.

Since the launch of WIT (Whatever it Takes) in 2009 [see “About the writer” panel, below] I’ve been asked multiple times about “how to teach entrepreneurship”. People in the education space want a curriculum, set modules and detailed outlines for how to teach the masses on the subject. Ten years later my response remains the same: “Focus on the doing.” There’s no textbook for becoming an entrepreneur – it’s about giving young people the space to have a go. Provide them with opportunities and time to try out their ideas, create prototypes, take those prototypes to market and use the feedback to do it all over again. Becoming an entrepreneur is messy; there’s no straight line.

That’s where people usually get stumped. Because in a traditional classroom the approach is one of “getting it right” and perfect scores. Entrepreneurship is about trying and failing over and over again. The work is never “perfect” because the consumer changes, technology advances and change are inevitable, which means that the work will never be done.

I don’t want to discourage people from creating entrepreneur classes and programmes at their schools, I just want to suggest a different set of metrics and scoring. At WIT we don’t grade on whether the business is successful (ie, making money, scaling and so on), we grade on execution, hitting deadlines, using customer feedback, prototyping, and – that word again – failing.

Yes, we give points for failing. Why? Because many young people come to us with a great fear of the concept. They aren’t comfortable taking risks or stepping outside their comfort zones. We reward them every time they fail since that’s when they gain valuable feedback on their ideas. Our goal is to take the sting out of it and get our students as comfortable with talking about their misses as they are about their wins.

If you’re thinking of designing your own entrepreneurship programme, here are a few more things to consider.

Hire entrepreneurs. So often I see people with zero real-world experience running classes. If you haven’t wrestled with the fear and insecurity of being an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t be teaching others on the subject.

Celebrate setbacks. Set aside time for students to talk about their mistakes and let them use their experience to inspire and encourage the other students. Remind them that it isn’t personal, it’s just feedback that will stand them in good stead.

Focus on the doing. So much learning comes from taking action – students learn from actually doing it. Many entrepreneur programmes culminate in a “shark tank” type moment. I used to attend these events until I noticed that most of the pitches were theory-based – they hadn’t actually taken their ideas to market yet. So here’s the lesson: please ensure that your students execute their idea or product and test it thoroughly. Remember, it is that real-world application that results in students ultimately becoming successful entrepreneurs.

6.
Mind the mindful
by Ronald Purser
The wellness industry promises to make us less stressed and better, happier workers. But are some firms using this trend to a sinister end?

Work, deadlines and the daily grind are stressful and our collective anxiety has buoyed a spate of mindfulness start-ups to help – at least, we hope so. In the US, corporate wellness firms will rake in an estimated $8bn (€7.3bn) this year. What’s less helpful is that the responsibility for happiness is being bundled onto the individual rather than the company or bosses that overstretch them. The exponential growth of the wellness industry has coincided with increasing “employee disengagement” and a rise in chronic workplace stress. HR departments are alarmed by the fact that seven out of 10 employees report feeling “disengaged” from work, resulting in staggering annual losses estimated at $550bn (€499bn) according to a Gallup study.

Although employees clearly do experience stress in the workplace, what is less certain is that the cause of their distress lies solely in their minds. Yet this is exactly the convenient, albeit faulty, diagnosis that is made by corporate mindfulness trainers. David Gelles, author of Mindful Work, is a vociferous cheerleader for mindfulness at work. He makes a bold claim: “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves.” The workplace mindfulness movement has built a whole new industry by pointing the finger at the mindlessly distracted and stressed employee.

But is stress really self-imposed? What about toxic, sociopathic work cultures such as that at Amazon? In a New York Times exposé a former Amazon employee was quoted as saying that he saw nearly everyone he worked with cry at their desk. Would Gelles offer his advice with a straight face to these employees? Tell them that they have imposed stress on themselves? That they could have chosen not to cry? And it isn’t just at big corporates: a recent CBS News report revealed that eight out of 10 employees admitted to crying at work due to toxic work conditions. And start-ups, as fast-growing companies where employees are required to put their lives on hold in order to execute the founder’s vision, can be particularly susceptible to such problems.

As the latest wellness remedy, company mindfulness programmes promise to fix the employee-disengagement issue by making staff responsible for managing their own wellbeing – becoming calmer, more focused and resilient. If we are miserable at work it must be our own fault; we only have ourselves to blame. This victim-blaming philosophy is integral to the mindfulness ethos and doubles as a cheap substitute for real organisational change.

Company-sponsored mindfulness is the new capitalist spirituality that poses no threat to the status quo. When you feel stressed, it preaches, just practise mindfulness. Pay attention to your breath and let go of any mental ruminations that might interfere with the smooth functioning of you carrying out your job. Rather than paying attention to the internal voices of dissent or feelings of anger and frustration with regards to bad bosses or just plain corporate stupidity, we are instructed to constantly audit and self-regulate our internal states as a surefire pathway to wellness, happiness and human flourishing. Everyone wants fulfilment from their job but telling staff to focus on their problems “from within”, rather than fix the faults of their employer, is less than enlightening.

The New York Wardrobe

Scott Birnbaum is the founder of New York-based venture-capital firm Red Sea Ventures and he’s betting his money on the shift in how we dress for work. Two of Red Sea’s successful investments are in Allbirds and Outdoor Voices, known, respectively, for a Merino-wool shoe-slipper hybrid (that has become the darling of Silicon Valley) and matte athleisure. “The boundaries between personal and work life have become so blurred, they’re almost invisible,” says Birnbaum on the phone from Manhattan. “As a result we’ve normalised the concept of casual wear across all environments.”

When it comes to work, those environments now include the traditional office but also hotel lobbies, cafés, the park and, for me on this call, a kitchen table at home in Japan at 23.00. I’m wearing pyjamas and Birnbaum is none the wiser. Not that he’d care. “Thanks to the internet, a lot of meeting time and relationship work can be done by email, phone and video conference,” he says. “That frees you to dress to make yourself happy and not necessarily anyone else.”

The “computer geeks” (AKA founders) of the first dot-com boom are credited (or blamed) for ushering in a relaxed approach to workwear. It was their adoption of khakis that shamed white-shoe financiers into embracing the concept of “casual Fridays”. The trend has picked up again as the second dot-com boom (led by social media and e-commerce) reverberates around the world.

Over the past five years the United States Society for Human Resource Management has found an 18 per cent spike in employers who permit casualwear any day of the week. In a 2018 survey by the workplace research firm XpertHR, of 477 employers in the UK across all sectors, 89 per cent said a short-sleeved shirt was acceptable – and more than half thought the same of jeans and T-shirts. Meanwhile relaxing dress codes in the western world has led to a noticeable decline in the sale of neckties over the decade, according to data from American market research firm IbisWorld; the firm has also tracked the demise of dry-cleaning shops for the same reason.

Despite the many reports of trainers in C-suites, especially in the technology industry, there’s another story to be told: in many sectors, norms haven’t changed all that much. Laura Thomas, a Sydney barrister, wears much the same thing from Monday to Friday. “My billable rate is hundreds of dollars an hour, thousands of dollars a day,” she says. “I have to look like I get paid this much money so I wear suits.” Women in finance and government also say that they wear a dress or trousers with a jacket and heels every day – and that they find plenty of ways to express themselves. Elizabeth Broderick, who was the Australian sex-discrimination commissioner from 2007 to 2015, says there’s more choice in suiting than ever. “When I think about my life as a junior lawyer in the 1980s, it was very much a case of women dressing to say, ‘We’ve arrived,’” she says. That meant power colours and padded shoulders. She loves that the look has softened. “There’s a lot more feminine energy now.” This idea is echoed elsewhere: in Thailand, for instance, female executives are known for wearing polished, ultra-feminine ensembles.

Of course, ever-proliferating options can also lead to anxiety. In March of this year, Goldman Sachs (following other corporate giants such as JP Morgan) announced that it was relaxing its dress code for all employees. Yet its company-wide memo was slightly cryptic: it said that employees must dress “in a manner that is consistent” with client expectations, which does not always mean casual gear, and must “exercise good judgment” in determining what is an appropriate wardrobe (which just seems to be piling pressure on employees to demonstrate their grasp of a particular work occasion through their clothes).

Facebook, meanwhile, with its hoodie-wearing CEO, doesn’t have a code at all – or at least, not officially. Unofficially it definitely does have a uniform: Allbirds trainers, white T-shirts (likely from a brand such as Everlane) and jeans. You could even argue that the informal tech-bro uniform is just as prescriptive as suits once were for bankers; casual should not be confused with flexible.

Dina Scherer, the owner of Modnitsa Styling, a New York-based styling company, says that the casualisation of work dress-codes “can be both good and bad”. Scherer generally advises female clients, many in creative fields, to assemble a work wardrobe that is “a more elegant version of their weekend one”. Still, she concedes that “creating a wardrobe that’s equal parts appropriate and put-together is becoming a challenge”.

For men the corporate uniform is no longer a given. Italian tailoring brands such as Boglioli, Orazio Luciano and Barena have built their businesses on the sort of unstructured blazers that young CEOs can throw over a T-shirt. Marco Pagani, creative director at Neapolitan tailor Orazio Luciano, told us that there has been a big change since 2010: now his brand sells far more individual blazers than full suits. Meanwhile, at the recent shows in Milan, Italy’s king of luxury menswear, Ermenegildo Zegna, presented a suit that could be broken down into different permutations with varying degrees of formality. The designer, Alessandro Sartori, said his intention was “to give people who have never worn tailoring a reason to”.

The late, great fashion historian Anne Hollander predicted this when she wrote that the suit runs contrary to “current millennial impulses tend[ing] towards disintegration, in style as in politics”. The suit is, she argued in Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress, “neither postmodern nor minimalist; multicultural nor confessional”.

Perhaps because the suit is none of these things, it’s an item of clothing that has proven tenacious in parts of northeast Asia, where conformity with the group is often prized. The Japanese office worker’s uniform of navy suit and a white shirt is still so ubiquitous – and so inextricably associated with high status, white-collar work – that last year a Tokyo-based plumbing firm introduced a lightweight, quick-drying uniform that looks exactly like a business suit, all to attract more employees. “After our engineers wore the workwear for a year, we received a number of young applicants,” the firm’s spokesman told the Japan Times.

The insistence on suits in all work contexts can even be a health hazard. In 2005 the Japanese government launched the Cool Biz campaign, which allowed its bureaucrats to work without ties and jackets on hot summer days. Japanese women, too, pay a price for rigid dress codes. Yumi Ishikawa made headlines in June when she submitted a petition to the Japanese Labour Ministry with more than 18,000 signatures, demanding the government ban edicts from employers requiring women to wear high heels to work. Ishikawa, who worked at a funeral home in Tokyo, was tired of standing for hours each day in the black heels required by her employer. This kind of rule is not unusual in Japan but the pain, which radiated up Ishikawa’s calves while her male colleagues strode around in brogues, spurred her to action. Although the government has not yet announced any reform, the movement Ishikawa started on Twitter, #kutoo (a portmanteau of the Japanese words for shoes, kutsu, and pain, kutsuu) continues.

The conservatism of Japanese women’s workwear is reflective of the structural barriers they face: Japan is ranked 110th among 149 in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 gender-equality rankings. But another reason for the prevalence of formal clothing might be that the gig economy is yet to take over in the way it has in the West. Japan is known for its tradition of lifelong employment, reinforced recently by an extreme labour shortage as its population ages. By contrast a 2018 Gallup study in the US revealed that 29 per cent of all workers there are in an “alternative work arrangement” as their primary job. Including multiple job holders, 36 per cent have a gig work arrangement “in some capacity”. This amounts to about 57 million Americans.

Flexibility and freedom are often touted as benefits of independent work, along with the ability to wear whatever we please. When Birnbaum talks about “dressing to make yourself happy”, that sounds good. But when he says that the rise of athleisure in professional settings is partly because of our neverending workload and the need to “prioritise movement at any time”, it starts to sound a tad dystopian. Tailored dresses and buttoned-up jackets serve a valuable purpose: they delineate, physically and mentally, between work life and life-life.

As for men, they may be done with ties but Don Draper in a Patagonia fleece doesn’t have quite the same cachet. A sharply-tailored ensemble – a suit or separates – exudes professionalism. Yet time will tell whether yoga pants moisture-wick their way to sartorial supremacy. “We are going to see an emergence of a new style paradigm,” says Birnbaum. He adds that as it becomes even more popular, easy-wear clothing will become more elegant and “the idea will not be comfort at all costs but a better integration of comfort and style”. As he says this, your writer looks down at her bathrobe. It’s not stylish. But the fact that it can be worn to work, assuming the internet connection complies? That suits just fine.

Images: Getty Images, Shutterstock, Alamy

Born to do it

1.
David Neeleman
Co-owner, TAP Air, Portugal

In the cavernous maintenance hangar of TAP’s headquarters in Lisbon, the airline’s co-owner David Neeleman is standing beneath its latest delivery: an Airbus a330-900Neo. He tries to hop onto one of the engines; the turbine’s edge proves too high on first attempt but with a final boost he’s up. He has been even more nimble when it comes to running Tap. He bought into the Portuguese carrier during its 2015 privatisation and has been key to its turnaround. It’s his latest project in a career built on founding successful carriers, including JetBlue. Now he’s creating turbulence in the industry again having announced the launch of a new US airline in 2021.

“Exceeding expectations creates buzz,” says Neeleman. “So that’s what we do. We have to be efficient and we have to keep our costs down but we have to have really excited and motivated people serving customers and then be really innovative on where we fly and which planes we use.”

Neeleman is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in commercial aviation. Over his 35-year career he has co-founded Canada’s WestJet, Brazil’s Azul and aviation-technology firms that have shaped the industry. His reservations business Navitaire, which he sold to Amadeus for $830m, was responsible for some of the first steps into electronic ticketing. When he launched JetBlue in the US in 2000 it shook up the industry with its use of technology.

Here is a serial entrepreneur in a famously volatile industry in which start-up airlines rarely last more than a few years. “It’s an exciting business if done right,” says Neeleman. “It can create a lot of misery if you don’t do it right – you need to have a lot of things working in your favour to be successful.” But, he adds, the upside is the industry’s huge potential. “If you take JetBlue, add that to Azul and add that to Westjet, their value is more than $15bn [€13.7bn], which is more than Lufthansa’s trading at today. That was all created from scratch.”

Neeleman got his start in 1984 when, aged 25, he co-founded a small charter airline with June Morris, owner of a travel-agency business. Morris Air Service was based in Salt Lake City and eventually bought by Southwest in 1993; the deal netted Neeleman $25m.

Under his leadership Tap has replaced old planes, instituted a Portugal stopover programme and enhanced its reputation for customer service. Key to its comeback is segmentation of its product into offerings from budget to premium. As for the danger of diluting the brand with low-cost products, he says that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. “The segment of the population that wants a low fare doesn’t really care about anything else,” he says. “Having choices is important. There’s a mix and match, a menu of items that technology allows you to offer.” If you don’t address that part of the market, he says, the Ryanairs of this world will eat away at your market share. Another game-changer, he says, is the new single-aisle airplanes that can fly long-haul. These are opening up new possibilities: costs for TAP’s Porto to Newark flight on the new Airbus a321lr are 50 per cent lower than on a widebody. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a small airplane that has a lower fuel burn per customer than a bigger plane.”

When it comes to his new US airline, Neeleman is coy. The plan is to run another new single-aisle plane, the Airbus a220, with lie-flat seats in the front and extra fuel tanks. Airline consolidation in the US, which has resulted in carriers concentrating on major hubs, has created an opening for direct flights between under-served cities. Neeleman says that the a220 will allow them to offer compelling fares on routes that no one else serves.

“There are a lot of cities that have been forgotten,” says Neeleman. “There’s one place in the US that’s got really great houses on a beautiful beach and there’s almost no air service there. My daughter said, ‘Dad, it’s a five-hour drive from where we can fly to; why doesn’t anyone fly here?’ So we started looking into it.”

Here lies perhaps the most important piece of advice for anyone wanting to start a business. “I don’t start airlines just for the sake of starting them – there has to be a reason for being.”

Monocle comment: Look for a gap in the market and plug it with a worthy product or service.

2.
Nada Debs
Founder, Nada Debs

Growing up in Kobe, Japan, where her family ran a textile business, Nada Debs felt detached from her Lebanese culture. However, upon moving to Beirut aged 38, she was charmed by the craft heritage of the Middle East and incorporated the design aesthetics of Japanese clean lines and Middle Eastern patterns into one brand. She opened her studio in 2013 in the Beirut neighbourhood of Gemmayze and now her designs can be found across the region and beyond, from the lobby of the Bekaa Valley’s famed Palmyra Hotel to the homes of Jordan’s royal family. We visited her studio-cum-gallery space, where she showcases her furniture and product designs, to talk identity and inspiration.

Monocle: How is your dual identity reflected in your work?
NADA DEBS: I grew up in a society where craft is revered and the aesthetic is minimalist. The Japanese, when they want perfection, they meditate, removing all distractions. But in the Middle East it’s the opposite: it’s about repetition. So I take those two opposite principles and say, ‘How can we express that craziness through repetition but in a concise way?’ I created these very linear pieces and then I would apply the patterns onto them.

M: How does your studio factor into your business model?
ND: What I did was bring a gallery feeling into the central space – but it still feels homely. It’s a working studio so you can understand the process. There are some stores you don’t want to walk in to because they are intimidating and I wanted the opposite of that.

M: What is a key quality to have as an entrepreneur?
ND: There’s a lot of emotional intelligence in business. It’s not enough to just have knowledge; more than 50 per cent is about human relations.

Monocle Comment: Every business needs a USP; make sure yours is authentic to who you are.

3.
Mette Lykke
CEO, Too Good to Go

A bit of a legend has sprung up around how Mette Lykke got into the start-up game. When she decided she wanted to have more independence and make a bigger impact than her job at McKinsey allowed, there was an appealing offer to work for a former client. There was also the exciting –but less secure – prospect of striking out on her own. Which to choose? On the day she had to give her answer to the former client, she was on the street in New York and a fortune-teller ran over handing her a postcard printed with the words, “Whatever our wildest dreams may be, they only scratch the surface of what’s possible.”

She chose her own path. It turned out to be the right decision: Endomondo, the company that she co-founded with two friends in her native Denmark, produced the first fitness tracking and sharing app. It became a huge success: in 2015, when it was sold to US sportswear brand Under Armour for $85m, it had 20 million users. Two years later, Lykke became CEO of Too Good to Go, a Copenhagen-based platform that allows restaurants and supermarkets to reduce food waste by connecting them with consumers eager to purchase their surplus food. Under her leadership, Too Good to Go now employs more than 400 people in 13 European countries, works with more than 28,000 supermarkets, restaurants and other partners, and is looking to expand globally.

Monocle: Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
METTE LYKKE: I grew up in a family that had its own business – my grandfather started a lumberyard chain in 1947. It probably impacted me in the sense that I saw it as normal to have the lifestyle that you have when you work for yourself. But Endomondo kind of just happened.

M: When did you know that the company was going to be a success?
ML: There wasn’t really a turning point, there was just a lot of hard work. It was just every day: come in, do your thing, get some sleep and do it again. The first three or four years were quite tough because the technology hadn’t caught up yet. Once the iPhone came out and Android started taking off, then we started to see traction.

M: You were one of the first two investors in Too Good to Go and then you came on as CEO. What was it about the project that spoke to you? ML: At Endomondo we had a strong purpose. The passion around that, for me, really was the driver. With Too Good to Go it’s a different kind of purpose because it’s small on a macro level but it’s such a big problem that we waste a third of all food. It just made sense to be a part of helping to solve it – and realising that we could do that in a way that leaves everyone winners. Both the stores and the consumers are better off and it’s a sustainable business model as well, which is quite rare.

M: Is Too Good to Go a disruptor?
ML: I think we are innovators. When you disrupt something you kind of mess it up a little bit. We don’t do that. It’s not like anyone needs to rethink their entire business model. It’s all positive.

M: You used to compete as an equestrian. Has that mindset carried over to being an entrepreneur?
ML: Yes, definitely! Business is a competition. You compete with whoever thought it couldn’t be done because you want to prove them wrong. That’s always been part of my motivation – that and the passion to see things happen.

Monocle Comment: Success doesn’t just rest on winning ideas. Tap into your most competitive instincts to get your business growing.

4.
Nobu Okada
CEO and founder, Astroscale

Nobu Okada credits a midlife crisis for the birth of his company Astroscale. Back in 2013 he was 39 and a high-flyer with a stellar CV: elite Japanese university, finance ministry bureaucrat, mba, founder of two IT firms. “I started asking myself, what should I do in my forties?” Okada says. Then he remembered going to a Nasa camp as a student and falling in love with space.

After attending a space industry conference in 2013, Okada found his calling: cleaning up the estimated one million objects orbiting Earth that endanger satellites. Within days he had launched Astroscale with $200,000 of his savings. “No resources, just me.”

Since then he has raised more than $140m in five rounds of funding from the likes of Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment, All Nippon Airways, incj and a University of Tokyo innovation fund; he’s also opened offices in Tokyo, Denver and Oxfordshire in the UK. Astroscale is preparing a 160kg satellite for an upcoming test mission in 2020 – and there’s a lot riding on it. The firm is vying for business from governments that want to sweep up defunct satellites and private ventures such as SpaceX, Planet Labs and Blue Origin, which plan to launch thousands of satellites in the coming years.

Monocle: How bad is space debris?
NOBU OKADA: More than 95 per cent of objects in orbit are garbage: 34,000 of these bits of junk are 10cm long or larger and if you count all the smaller pieces of debris, the number jumps to one million. There are 2,000 functioning satellites flying around Earth and more satellites are needed. But if 10 per cent become defunct, how many new pieces of garbage is that?

M: Did you face scepticism when you started Astroscale?
NO: At a conference in 2013 I told people that I wanted to clean up space by myself. They said, “Nobu-san, there’s no proven technology; space agencies have started r&d and it’s not something a start-up can do. There’s no market. Who will pay the money? The regulations are too complex.” But now we are talking with high-level people. Before, we were thought of as an extraordinary outsider; now we are seen as a unique insider. That’s a big difference.

M: A rocket-launch failure doomed your first mission in 2017 but you’ve managed to raise more money since then. What lessons did you learn?
NO: Launch failures happen. I always think about risk now. I was worried that my team would lose motivation. But we are still alive and our team were robust enough to handle it. The 2020 mission is crucial – the space industry is watching us.

Monocle comment: There’s no avoiding risk so bring real passion to the endeavour.

5.
Scott Sternberg
CEO and founder, Entireworld

It’s not easy to build a fashion brand, particularly one that swiftly achieves a cult-like following. Yet designer Scott Sternberg, founder and former creative powerhouse behind clothing company Band of Outsiders, is a singular force when it comes to building an entire world around a brand. For more than a decade the label inspired loyalty among cool kids – Spike Jonze, Greta Gerwig – and fashion royalty alike.

But success can bring tough lessons as Sternberg found out when Band of Outsiders ran into financial trouble; he left the company in 2015. (clcc, a Belgium fashion fund, assumed ownership and relaunched the label with new designers.)

Sternberg is back with Entireworld, a democratically priced label rooted in high- quality basics. He invited us to his Los Angeles home on the hills above Silver Lake to talk about his vision for the industry and what he’s doing differently this time.

Monocle: What makes a brand work?
SCOTT STERNBERG: The ones with a singular vision, with a human vision behind them, are the ones that are pervasive; they become part of people’s lives. These days it takes longer to break through because there’s so much noise.

M: At its height, Band of Outsiders did $15m in wholesale. What went wrong?
SS: We took on investment a little too late and didn’t have a great infrastructure to scale. Every dollar we spent was so vital and some of it just wasn’t spent right. What’s really one of the larger points is that fashion is brutal.

M: What did you learn to do differently with Entireworld?
SS: So many things. Firstly, starting this company with investment partners from the beginning and with a small number of employees that are all participants in the business in terms of equity. I started Band of Outsiders as a one-man show so the founder’s syndrome was heavy in that case.

M: Do you consider yourself an ‘entrepreneur by birth’?
SS: I’m a specific type of entrepreneur by birth: it’s about having an idea and also having a little bit of arrogance and drive to get my hands dirty. I’m not the type of entrepreneur that has a sort of ‘new economy San Francisco, venture capitalist’ vibe. It’s much more personal to me.

M: What’s your brand-building advice?
SS: You have to figure out how you’re reaching people. How are you using this platform in a way that is unique to you and your brand? You have to be able to win people over, either their hearts or their minds – pick one. If your product is really good, maybe you’ll get both.

Monocle comment: Failure happens. Heed the lessons from the past while retaining what works.

They found a gap

1.
Tajfuny
Bookshop bringing Asian literature to Poland.

As a travel writer, Karolina Bednarz developed a deep interest in literature and society in Asia, particularly Japan. Returning home to Poland she discovered that she wasn’t alone and realised that there was a captive market for Asian titles translated into English or Polish. So in October last year she launched Tajfuny, a bookshop and publishing house that broadens the horizons of the literary scene in the Polish capital.

Recruit the obsessed.
Unless new recruits have a fervour for Asian literature that matches Bednarz’s, they might not be the best fit. “Tajfuny is about sharing a passion,” she says. “If you are not crazy about Asian literature and do not see yourself reading, editing and talking about it for years, this is not the job for you.”

Substance over size.
Tajfuny stocks just 200 titles for good reason: every book on display is loved by at least one member of staff. This means that the selection isn’t overwhelming for visitors. “Publishers send us books hoping we will stock them,” says Bednarz. “But if they are not good enough, we won’t.”

High-quality publishing.
For Tajfuny’s publishing arm, print quality is paramount. “We strive to make our series pop,” she says. “We also value long-term business relationships, working with the same printers and editors so that our books do not differ in quality.”

Connect with a community.
Bednarz built on her following as a writer to draw customers but she wasn’t satisfied with just doing so online. “Before opening Tajfuny I covered east Asia as a journalist and had a blog, so many of our first customers knew me,” she says. “Now we organise book-club meetings and other events.”

Be consistent in design.
Tajfuny has a unique aesthetic: Bednarz enlisted the help of her favourite Japanese design studio Tegusu. “It’s important that people know who we are,” she says. “The design has made it easier to plan our books, promotional material and website.”

What success looks like.
Tajfuny has published six Japanese books in Polish this year and currently stocks titles from 12 east Asian countries. Its mission is to bring Asian literature to a western audience. “People who visit for the first time might be a bit lost but they return and ask for another book,” says Bednarz.

2.
Great Dane
Airline helping Aalborg to take flight.

With a population of 205,000, Aalborg is Denmark’s third-largest city but its airport suffers from a lack of connections – certainly when compared to Copenhagen, which is 45 minutes south by air or five hours by rail. Great Dane, founded by aviation-industry veteran and former pilot Thomas Hugo Møller, intends to rectify this and prove the power of regional carriers.

Think small, be nimble.
Great Dane chose to fly Brazilian-built Embraer 195s, which seat about 100 passengers, after tour operators flying from Aalborg explained their difficulties in filling larger aircraft. “The Embraer was an important part of the business model,” says Moller. “It was the only aircraft that had the range but with the smaller load capabilities.”

Listen to customers.
Flying Embraer 195s has allowed Great Dane to forestall a common complaint: that nobody likes a middle seat. Embraers have two seats on each side of the aisle. “Scandinavian people are quite tall,” says Møller. “They wanted a longer pitch than normal airlines have.” Great Dane offers 79cm rather than the more common 74cm.

If there’s a good national brand, embrace it.
It’s not just the name that ties Great Dane to its homeland: its aircraft fly the Danish flag on their tailfins. This is an attempt to embrace the country’s generally positive image. “I want that ‘Made In Denmark’ feeling on the airline,” says Møller. “Those Danish values of a high-quality product with high-quality service.”

Have a back-up.
“I’ve been in the airline industry my whole life so I know that it’s important to have a plan B,” says Møller. For a while, Great Dane toyed with the idea of offering full service on only one of its two aircraft so that they could keep one in reserve; any perception of unreliability could doom a fledgling airline. Instead they instituted measures such as having a mechanic on board and nailed down agreements with workshops at airports.

Buy good kit.
Great Dane looked at Embraers being sold by a Russian operator. “They were in Warsaw but they had been there for nine months, which is not good for the aircraft,” says Møller. It eventually bought its jets from Stobart Air in Ireland; the planes had previously seen service with klm and Flybe. “We prefer to own the aircraft ourselves rather than lease them: it gives us more control.”

What success looks like.
The airline business is unforgiving: the past few years in Europe alone have seen the grounding of Flybmi, Monarch, Wow, Air Berlin, Primera and NextJet, among others. Survival is a clear benchmark. “We want to be a stable product that is still here in 10 or 20 years,” says Møller. “We’d like to have good profits, of course. But the fun part is getting the puzzle right. It’s also fun for me to see the employees taking pride in the new airline. It’s nice to feel like it’s not just a job for them.”

3.
Anna Money
Financial firm with animal attraction.

Entrepreneurs don’t usually leave salaried jobs to pursue their own ambitions because they want to spend more time doing admin. But owners of start-ups are often surprised by the amount of time they need to spend on invoicing, chasing payments and filing tax returns when they’d rather be getting on with the task at hand. Financial-technology start-up Anna Money (Anna is an acronym for “absolutely no-nonsense admin”) is a bank card and app that automates these tasks so that business-owners can devote more time to the fun stuff. Daljit Singh and Eduard Panteleev (pictured, Singh on left), who co-founded the company with four others, are banking on the rising numbers of freelancers and small firms in Europe and the US.

Know what differentiates you.
From the start the four co-founders were clear that Anna had to be design-led, which would help them to stand out from the competition. “Design is not something you associate with financial products,” says Singh. Everything from the user experience to the branding was designed to be memorable. Build a team of outsiders – and insiders.

Build a team of outsiders – and insiders.
While Anna has a core team of financial professionals, Singh and his team sought employees from different backgrounds and disciplines to avoid falling into a group-think mentality. Anna’s staff includes people who previously worked in fashion, film and even stand-up comedy. “This breadth of experience has helped us create something that feels different to how a traditional banking service would operate and speak to its audience,” says Singh.

Think laterally and evolve.
Anna started as a personal assistant for small creative businesses. But the team realised that its business accounts and invoice-management services could be used by others too. From gig-economy workers to “mumpreneurs”, the team has begun to consider how to cater to wider demographics.

A little humour can’t hurt.
Banking is notoriously straight-laced. “It has to be when you’re dealing with people’s money,” says Panteleev. But that doesn’t mean that your products must be staid. When customers pay with an Anna card, the accompanying app miaows.

Look to other markets.
Anna was inspired by the increasing number of people striking out on their own, either as freelancers or launching new small businesses. Two of the co-founders, Panteleev and Boris Dyakonov, had founded similar banking businesses in Russia before recognising that it was a global trend – and one that was growing quickly in the UK.

What success looks like.
Since launching its debit card and app in 2018, Anna has grown to 10,000 accounts; it now has 70 employees based in London, Cardiff and Moscow. Its initial campaign – “the world’s first miaowing debit card”, which included an audition video of cats trying to be the official miaow – received two million views on social media, resulting in a 72 per cent increase in sign-up rates.

4.
InGamba
Cycling tours with the perks of the elite.

In 2010 Portuguese professional cyclist João Correia was winding down from a gruelling season. So what was the antidote to a surfeit of lactic acid and too many jolts to the collarbones? Jumping back into the saddle, of course. This time though it was for a leisurely ride around Chianti, with stops for food and wine. After an impromptu invitation via a tweet, four others joined him. Correia had unearthed a market for affluent cyclists craving a high-end, high-performance experience. InGamba now runs tours in Europe and North America from its Sausalito HQ. A seven-day, €7,000 tour includes everything from bikes to Lycra.

Prove the concept.
Correia tackled logistical problems as he would when preparing for a race: by getting help from soigneurs. “I never wrote a business plan,” he says. He spent two years fine-tuning the formula to ensure that participants would have an experience similar to professionals, with top hospitality thrown in. “I wanted to share the incredible places I had visited as a professional. We ran three trips over two years before the business formally launched.”

Know who you are and what you do.
“We were the first to have the same infrastructure as a pro team for recreational cyclists: professional soigneurs and the same equipment as the pros, including $15,000 [€13,500] Pinarello bikes,” says Correia. Support cars stop to repair flat tyres; clients wear the same high-end kit to instil camaraderie; and every ride ends with a rub down from expert masseurs. Stages retrace major road races and pro riders sometimes join in. “Once we cycled a Giro d’Italia stage a few hours before it began.”

Hire right and make sure people buy into it.
“You can teach skills but you can’t teach character and work ethic,” says Correia. Given his links with cycling – he is also a sports agent representing 25 pro cyclists – he is able to hire a crew with experience drawn from races such as the Tour de France. Clients have their racing kit and bike washed daily, with expert mechanics on hand for repairs.

You need to be authentic.
“If you provide an authentic experience, it connects with people,” says Correia. For lodging and eating, he and his staff look for places with genuine warmth: hotels such as rural retreat São Lourenço do Barrocal in the Alentejo or a meal at Castello di Ama, a Tuscan winery with a private art collection. “We go where we have great relationships with owners – one osteria has my jersey on the wall,” he says. “We are greeted as old friends.”

Start giving back from the start.
Seeing the positive impact that his excursions have had on his clientele has encouraged Correia to help people outside his target market benefit from the joys of cycling. “We started working with World Bicycle Relief, a charity that places bikes in Africa to increase mobility for students and others,” he says. “Getting to school quicker, bringing home water by bike, helps everybody.” Ingamba donates a bike for every guest and organises fundraising rides.

What success looks like.
InGamba is seeing double-digit growth and operates 50 week-long trips a year. Correia is particularly proud of the fact that 55 per cent of participants are return clients. His firm’s tours take cycling enthusiasts to picturesque locations such as the Dolomites, Pyrenees, Douro Valley and California coast.

5.
King Somm
Wine bar that’s popping the cork in the suburbs.

In Australian suburbs there isn’t much in the way of amenities: bars, restaurants and night spots are usually found downtown. But architect Simone Robeson spied thirsty – and under-served – customers in Bayswater, Perth. So she opened wine bar and bottle shop King Somm with her partner Matt Hayes, photographer brother Dion Robeson and sister in law Alana (pictured, sitting, with, from left Dion, Simone and Hayes).

Keep it local.
Bayswater is an improbable location for King Somm, with its obscure wine and sleek fit-out. But the team sees this as a safety net, not a risk. “I don’t think I would have been brave enough to try this in the city,” says Simone Robeson. “There’s a lot of competition.” And rent is cheaper: the team spends about 2 per cent of its revenue on rent, much less than the usual 10 per cent.

Diversify your business.
Unusually for the Australian hospitality industry, King Somm has been granted a licence to both sell and serve alcohol. This has allowed it to generate multiple income streams, including a bottle shop, dining venue, takeaway outlet and an online store that specialises in small-batch wine. “The goal was to offset the risk of owning a bricks-and-mortar business,” says Hayes.

Provide consistency.
Another point of difference was the decision to hire most staff on a full-time basis. “In hospitality most people tend to have casual workers to give flexibility,” says Hayes. “But that creates a high turnover. Staff want consistency: they have families, they want home loans. We might have too many staff when it’s quiet but we get loyalty and dedication from people. They know we’re sticking with them.”

Cap your fit-out costs.
Given Robeson’s background in architecture, King Somm could renovate its heritage-listed space in a cost-effective way. “I could spend nights and weekends on it,” says Simone. “But we wanted to keep the openness and feel of the original billiards hall.” But expenditure on fit-outs can be huge, says Hayes. “We’ve gone for something that’s a lot more rustic so there’s less financial pressure.”

Think about the small things.
Every tiny detail of the fit-out was carefully considered and tested out. “We don’t want people to feel like they’re in a gallery,” says Simone. “So we spent a lot of time on those aspects that people might not notice.” A friend even built the acoustic sound system using components such as 1970s valve amps, ensuring the music filling the venue is easy on the ear.

What success looks like.
Repeat customers are the backbone of King Somm’s success: about 40 per cent of revenue is generated from returning clientele. Events such as wine tastings, quizzes and music nights sell out quickly. King Somm is on track to repay its initial investment – which Simone says was “comfortably less than au$1m” – by mid-next year.

6.
Sleeep
Capsule-hotel firm opening customers’ eyes to sleep loss.

Founded by business-design duo Alex Kot and Jun Rivers (both pictured, Kot on left), Sleeep is a chain of capsule hotels in Hong Kong and Bangkok. Guests can reserve or walk in and use sleep pods for an hour or a night, making the business popular with both visiting tourists and hardworking locals.

Tackle a social problem.
Kot and Rivers entered a prototype of Sleeep in the Harvard Dean Challenge in 2014; the competition called for designs to alleviate problems tied to urban overpopulation. The duo say that people working in banking and the government sector are among Sleeep’s most frequent clients. “Some people are just looking for some ‘me time’,” says Kot. “They go back to their homes and sometimes it’s very crowded; they need to have their own space.”

Think outside the traditional business model.
When Kot and Rivers launched Sleeep they had eight capsules and no check-in system. The duo came up with a booking system whereby, upon arrival, guests scan a QR code that they receive after payment. “We couldn’t find a better existing solution out in the market so we invested our time and effort developing this ourselves,” says Kot.

Have a strong conviction.
“You can’t just fill a gap: you have to go through it and experience it for yourself,” says Rivers. Sleep deprivation has been an issue for both founders: Kot was diagnosed with sleep apnea as a teenager and Rivers experienced the lasting effects of staying awake for too long while at architecture school. “There’s an irony that architects are meant to create environments for people to improve their quality of life,” says Rivers. “But in that process we’re so negligent about our own health.”

Come up with another strand.
As well as providing cosy pods for visitors, Sleeep has a separate retail component for customers passing through. “We want to address the peripheral products that surround sleep,” says Rivers. “So we’re selling bamboo toothbrushes and comfortable T-shirts – this helps us to evolve as more than just a capsule-hotel business.” All of Sleeep’s merchandise is designed for the minimalist podhopper and is made from organic, sustainable materials.

Support your community.
While recent protests in Hong Kong have taken a toll on the city’s hospitality scene, Kot and Rivers see this as an opportunity to use their business for the greater good. “We’re trying to bring out a campaign called Recharge Hong Kong,” says Rivers. “There’s a lot of stress in society right now and we’d like to do a crowdfunding campaign.” Kot and Rivers hope that this will enable Sleeep to open its pods to anyone who needs them. “If we raise enough money we’ll open Sleeep up to people who are stressed, from work or for whatever reason,” says Rivers

What success looks like.
This has been an exciting year for Kot and Rivers; Sleeep recently opened a new branch of its capsule hotel in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. The duo also launched a four-storey centre in Central, featuring a specialised sleep laboratory, co-working space, café and 16 sleep pods. This month its first overseas venture will open in Bangkok. “In Thailand there’s an even greater sleep-deprivation problem,” says Kot. “We’ll be transforming the space into a Thai spa for sleep.”