Joel Jeffery, co-founder of Desmond & Dempsey, explains why the business should win the Startup of the Year category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition:
My fiance and I started Desmond & Dempsey in September 2014, when Molly took to wearing my work shirts around the house. After they came back with the addition of coffee and breakfast stains, I realised we had to find an alternative. The options were £250 silk PJs (before dry cleaning) or synthetic fabrics that fell apart in the wash. So, we set about creating an ecommerce brand focussed on manufacturing high quality cotton sleepwear with unique prints.
We started with a £10,000 startup loan, a website that I taught myself to build and no experience in fashion. We had no idea what the ‘done thing’ was and zero marketing budget, so we hustled. Molly started calling fashion editors and knocking on doors to get meetings whilst I started hanging up notes on the tube. We even turned up at Paul Smith’s office at 6am with elaborately wrapped letters asking for help.
We quickly realised that a purely e-commerce strategy would be very expensive to scale due to factory minimum orders. We needed commitments from big names to help ease our cash flow requirements. Within six months of launching we had secured orders from Fortnum & Mason, Fenwick and Bergdorf Goodman in New York. Just over a year since launching, we have closed our first equity fundraise (oversubscribed), seen year-on-year sales grow by over 300% and sold out of three collections. And, in case you’re wondering, Paul Smith did write back. Meeting him was as insightful as we had hoped!
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
