Transcript

NICK ALLEN:

We didn't know what we were going to have to begin with. The idea was we had some designs. We knew that people liked them. And we were being asked to produce more and more of them.

Just briefly, the way it works is that my wife asked people for four or five things that they really love, and then she creates a picture out of those things. She finds some references to their lives and creates a story with them on the design. Because we knew people liked them, we thought we would just see if any anyone else would like them.

At that stage, we really had an identity crisis. We didn't know exactly what our business was. We didn't know how it was going to develop. And I know there's lots and lots of stuff we learned from the Open University about plan and understand your market and things like this.

But we thought we would just try. We would just take them somewhere, to a market, and see what would happen. And lots of people guided us towards silk scarves with their suggestions. So that's where we went next.

CLAUDIO MARTURANO:

The original concept is pretty much the same, because the whole concept is about actually creating a support mechanism for aviation maintenance personnel, such as myself. But how the plan has come around has changed dramatically. Because it was just a concept. I just knew I wanted. I didn't know how to execute. I didn't have a business plan. I didn't actually have anything like that. So the Open University, the MBA programme, actually really helped push that level.

EMMA PRINCE:

: I would say it's evolved. Because as I say, it started off as a mentoring and coaching service with the offer of group work if there were more than one young person or child in any given setting that needed help. But schools were soon asking for things that I hadn't previously thought of-- for example, education coaching, tuition, working with families. And so, through recruitment this year, we've been able to expand our offer to cover what we were being asked to do.

ALEX BOND:

The idea of the label was really obvious to myself. It seemed like a really clear benefit to me. Because I'd know whether my food was off or not.

But after speaking to the big food manufacturers, the cost of packaging is so slim that adding in any sort of label was just going to make it way too expensive. And so no one wanted to purchase it. But we had this cool technology and we wanted to still use it for something. So we started to develop our spray product.