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20 entrepreneurs Pump up the volume


By all accounts, Tom Dudderidge has it all: he has built up the UK’s leading Apple audio and accessories brand, GEAR4, which sells products in 60 countries, has a turnover of £30 million and an impressive growth rate of more than 50% per year, as well as building a family of four daughters and continuing a family tradition of entrepreneurialism. It’s quite a success story for someone who is only 35. Yet, as the ambitious entrepreneur tells Eleanor Harris, this is just the start, as the company focuses on becoming the global leader in accessories in a ‘post-PC’ era


Tom Dudderidge is founder and chief executive of GEAR4, based in High Wycombe. He was born in London in 1977 and left school at the age of 16 to work at Apple mail-order startup Computer Warehouse. He then worked in sales and marketing for mobile technology startups including UCP Morgan and XIAM. In 2004, at the age of 26, he founded Disruptive, and in 2006 launched the GEAR4 brand. The company, which today employs 76 members of staff across offices in High Wycombe, Hong Kong and Seattle, was a national finalist in the HSBC Startup Stars Awards in 2005 and won an Edison Award and a Red Dot Award in 2012 for its Renew SleepClock product. Dudderidge was a winner in the Ernst & Young London and South Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 awards. He is married with four children and lives in Coleshill, Buckinghamshire.


that first year we did sales of £1,000,700, just going past our target.


Can you tell me about the growth of the company from there?


At the end of the first year we got a call from Boots who had decided to get into the iPod and accessories and we won that whole piece of business, we did the whole range for them. Early in the second year the same thing happened with Dixons. We started to understand the scale of the opportunity. The market was growing faster than we possibly could, which gave us the opportunity to make mistakes without it being fatal, and we learned it all on the job. It was terrific: figuring stuff out along the way whilst growing a really successful business is a once in a lifetime opportunity.


Why and how did you set up GEAR4?


I had a visceral need to start a company, but something always stopped me. This time it was different. I had a great job, but it wasn’t my baby. I was on a plane back from South America from a business trip and something hit me in the gut, I knew I had to do it. There was no idea, just this commitment to the business. I got off that plane, quit my job, started the company, set a sales target of £1m sales of ‘stuff’ in the first year and didn’t even know what that ‘stuff’ was. It was about that time that I got my first iPod. I love music and gadgets and I’d connected a few dots – I had a background working with Apple products and mobile technology, and my father’s in the music industry, manufacturing music equipment – but it wasn’t yet obvious what the parallels with my business would be. I went off to a consumer electronics fair with a mission to find some products that would work well in the market and came away having decided to create a brand in accessories for the iPod. I scraped together my life savings, begged, borrowed, and raised £23,000. We found some products designed and manufactured in Asia that hit the sweet spot, including one that allowed you to listen to your iPod in your car, and


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And you have got ambitious plans for growth in the future?


We’ve always grown quickly, the annual growth rate is above 50%, and we’re very ambitious. The world is changing fast, we’re now in a post-PC era: the primary computing device in the digital world isn’t a PC anymore, it’s your smartphone, your tablet, eventually it will be your TV. For us, the ecosystem around those platforms isn’t just accessories anymore, and we think of ourselves as just as much a software company now as an accessories company. We’re making apps, we’re very involved in the content business – we secured a partnership with Rovio to create a range of Angry Birds-licensed products – as well as cloud services. Whereas for most of our history we’ve entered into product categories that have already emerged, and that’s good business, now we are also into real innovation, building technologies that haven’t been built before – we’ve built the unique SleepClock product, an ‘appcessory’ that measures your sleep, for example – and we want to be not just a global player, we want to be the global leader in these things. It’s not easy, but we’re really scaling up our international business, as well as our UK business, and we’ve started


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – SEPTEMBER 2012


developing a philosophy of the global SME – being truly global whilst also being small. We’re less than 100 people yet we’re a global brand, operating in 64 countries, and we’re not even yet at critical mass. Every category we’re in is growing really fast. Because we’re still small, nimble, fast, we’ll be able to address these opportunities quickly.


Is that how you would account for your success?


It’s being fast, decisive, and making great quality products which are better by design but also accessible. That’s part of our DNA. Our success in the speaker business was deciding early on, when the average selling price of an iPod speaker was way above £200, to make mass market speakers that were less than £100. People thought we were crazy, we really met resistance, but we stuck to our guns.


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