Q&A with...
increasing demand for our service over the next few years. I developed the business plan over a six-month period. In the meantime, I was designing people’s websites and brands to pay my rent, and putting everything else I had into start-up capital for Bouf. I raised a small amount of capital from friends
W
ith a background in graphic design, Alex Griffin was passionate about developing his own brand. He had his eureka moment while browsing
the stalls as the Old Spitalfields Market in London; deciding to bring together an eclectic group of suppliers into one shared platform called Bouf.
What inspired you to launch Bouf? I studied graphic design at university and on graduation I was awarded the D&AD Best New Blood award. After working for creative studio Vince Frost in London, I moved to brand agency Wolff Olins. I was then accepted onto NESTA’s (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) Creative Pioneer Programme. A few months later I had my lightbulb moment while wandering the stalls at the Old Spitalfields Market in East London. It became clear that this was a large,
fragmented group of suppliers with incredible products to offer, who all shared the same difficulty in getting their products in front of customers. This presented a significant gap in the market for an online marketplace that provided design-led brands and boutiques selling quirky and unique products with a reliable source of traffic and customers. The idea had scalability at its heart, and I imagined creating a Spitalfields market on a global scale.
Bouf is now four years old—what has been your greatest challenge so far? Getting the ball rolling was the biggest challenge. I knew I had to carve out a niche while ensuring there was going to be an
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Alex Griffin of Bouf
We hear you’re projecting £20 million in sales in five years’ time, how will you achieve that? We’ve been lucky to be able to grow the business organically, despite economic pressure while we were starting up, and this has been supported by angel investment over the last 18 months. We’re doing £60,000 a month now, growing at a rate of 250 percent year- on-year. We have an aggressive strategy to build our user base by introducing greater product selection and incentives to register, while developing our core partnerships and streamlining the entire purchasing experience so that our customers come back time and again to find products they love, and recommend us to their friends. On top of this, our PR and SEO efforts are beginning to pay off so that we can minimise our reliance on Adwords and Facebook Ads, which are the only form of paid advertising we do. Further, we hope to close a
significant Series A round by the end of this summer.
Tell us about your new initiatives—what do you have planned for 2011 and beyond? We’ve launched a private shopping
and family, and found two developers who were prepared to develop our website for £15,000. I went to all the trade shows I could get to
during that time. I needed 100 quality brands to launch the site with, so the challenge was getting the first few. Each brand had to take a leap of faith with us, and I spent many hours on the phone to each one convincing them to get on board. By Summer 2007, I finally had my 100 and the site was tested, working and ready to go. With all our money tied up in web
development, and a shoestring marketing budget, we collected as many sign-ups we could through a landing page we put up announcing the imminent launch of
Bouf.com. We had about 3,000 sign-ups by the time we launched, which was a big help in getting the word out. As we brought in more and more suppliers,
and built up a more thorough understanding of who our customers were and what they wanted, along with improvements to our platform and more sophisticated online marketing activities, we started to see a nice lift in all of our key metrics. We closed our first funding round in September 2009 with four angel investors, and by January 2010 had found a further 10 investors to get involved.
club offering our customers a way to buy gifts, homewares and clothing at a fraction of the price. We plan to expand this significantly over the coming 12 months, increasing the amount of sales we run. We are also introducing Bouf-branded packaging, and are partnering with innovative shipping companies to offer customers services like evening delivery, Saturday delivery and delivery within 90 minutes. We also plan to open international offices
in key European and US locations in the near future, with local support and marketing staff, and locally translated sites.
What advice do you have to online retail start-ups? Some start-ups try to scale too quickly, either from impatience or pressure from investors, which can often be counter-productive. Keeping the business lean through those early days is key, but do ensure you put together an adequate team from day one, and ensure you delegate the roles clearly. Do your research and learn from other people’s mistakes, but don’t do so much research that you develop a fear of starting, because at some point you just have to jump in and learn to swim.
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