Claire Barratt’s business ClaireaBella, a range of personalised products, began with three crisp banknotes in 2010. “I started with a £30 loan from my mum. I bought paint and some blank bags, and with that I was able to complete the first two orders.”
Fast-forward to today, and she is selling about 200 bags a day on her website, with 30 artists working for her during peak times. More than 250,000 products have been sold in total and she has made over £5.75m in product sales.
Barratt, a former police detention officer, came up with the idea for the business during a trip to Paris, after she had her caricature drawn sitting by the Eiffel Tower. She wasn’t impressed by the likeness. “My husband’s caricature looked sort of like Mr Bean, but the artist had really captured the shape of my eyes,” says Barratt. After the holiday she began drawing her caricature’s eyes on a piece of paper, with a simple figure representing what she looked like “on a good day”. Later, with the help of her mum’s small loan, she transferred this image on to a jute bag.
“I think I had about £20 left in my account before pay day – that enabled me to make one bag,” says Barratt. Her first two orders were for colleagues, who saw the bag and asked to buy one. “That’s really when it became a business,” she says.
After this, orders started to trickle in. Barratt’s husband, John, made a website for her, and she began spending evenings and weekends making bags, while working for the police during the day. She bought a money box, and her goal was to make enough money through the business to put down a deposit on a holiday for her family. “We have five children between us so money was never something I had a lot of,” she says.
To boost PR, Barratt got in touch with The Only Way is Essex (Towie) star Chloe Sims on Twitter, and ended up gifting her a personalised bag. “She was a really new cast member so I was more likely to get a response,” says Barratt. “The programme was current and very much fits the brand in terms of the big eyelashes and hair.”
At this point the business “just went bang”, with Barratt receiving 40 orders in the space of three hours. This turned out to be a mixed blessing.
“My husband found me at the bottom of my staircase crying because I had 100 orders on my desk to do. I had that, the children and work. It just felt like too much. I had no business skills at all and I was technically learning a whole new skill set,” she says.
However, Barratt managed to complete the orders and ended up gifting bags to the entire cast of Towie. In one episode, they all appear with their ClaireaBella bags. The Towie celebrity endorsement turned out to be a pivotal moment for Barratt’s business.
“I suppose [Towie] was the catalyst for people outside of my social circle seeing the brand, people who had nothing to do with me. It was such a big platform to launch it into the public eye.”
In 2012, Barratt left her job with the police to concentrate on the business full time. “It was a massive decision to leave – I didn’t want to because I have always been used to having a solid job and being able to support my children,” she says.
After linking up with Toxic Fox, an online gift retailer, Barratt decided to create a hoodie range, which launched at midnight one night. This was to avoid some of the “hysteria” following the Towie tweet, that had caused the website to crash. “We launched at midnight but [the hoodies] were already selling at that point, without people announcing it had gone live.”
Barratt says that without the support of her husband she would never have taken the business this far; in many respects she is an accidental entrepreneur. “The biggest worry for me is the security,” she says. “When you are employing other people as well as yourself it is a big burden to have on your shoulders and quite a big worry.”
She adds: “However, I think employing people and going into the main warehouse and seeing people working and happy in what they do – for me that’s massive.”
Barratt advises budding entrepreneurs to go cautiously when they first start out. “I am living proof that you can do it. I would say do what I did and tread carefully at first. Do it in evenings and at weekends, see how it goes before jumping ahead.”
Barratt’s dream is to see ClaireaBella on the high street, and she will be pushing out a trade range this year.
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