Great British Entrepreneur Awards founder, Francesca James, has been talking to a number of entrepreneurs recently about how they have pivoted or adopted a ‘plan b’ during these challenging times.
Snag tights founder Brie says that pre-pandemic her business was doing £2 million a month revenue and sales were growing month on month.
And then Covid-19 hit. Brie describes the time as “intense” adding that “we lost 50% of our business (that is overseas) and we were also about 50% down on where we were previously on our UK business. We were sitting there with about 25% of the revenue compared to previous months.”
Describing the situation as terrifying, Brie admits she did have confidence in the announced government support packages and therefore invested time and resource into doing something that would make a big difference whilst they waited. Their ‘Snags for the NHS’ initiative donated 22,000 pairs of tights to support front line workers via a ‘buy one donate one’. Brie said that they concentrated on this initiative and waited for the support to kick in. It then transpired that “it wasn’t going to be that easy and it was unlikely we’d get the loan that we needed”.
Realising that help wasn’t going to come, they knew they were going to run out of money in July.
Exploring options, considering speaking with VC’s about funding, she and her team decided that that approach “was not really very Snag & the Snag thing to do is to go out and tell our customers the story”.
