18 entrepreneurs Back on the road to Destination Success
Rachel Lowe has had an extraordinary rollercoaster ride. Nine years ago, while working as a taxi driver, studying for a law degree, and bringing up two young children, she had the idea for a board game, Destination, and set up her own company. Looking for funding, she appeared on BBC’s Dragons’ Den and was ’ripped to pieces’; nevertheless, she launched Destination London in Hamley’s in 2004 and it became the store’s top-selling game, outselling even Monopoly and Twister. But in 2009, having spent six years building her business, Lowe lost everything: the company went into administration, she was declared bankrupt, her home was repossessed, and she had a nervous breakdown. Two years ago, Lowe bounced back, regaining her Destination brand, as well as launching a new fashion brand, She Who Dares. As Lowe gears up for a big 2013, she talked frankly to Eleanor Harris about the highs and lows, facing her fears, receiving an MBE, and sitting alongside Chanel
Rachel Lowe MBE is director of She Who Dares UK, based in Portsmouth. Lowe was born in 1977 and has a law and business degree from Portsmouth University. She founded Destination Board Games in November 2003, and to date has produced 21 editions of the Destination game, including licensed editions Destination Hogwarts and Destination Animation. In October 2010, Lowe teamed up with entrepreneur Simon Dolan to found She Who Dares UK, and launched the She Who Dares brand in Autumn 2012. £500,000 has gone into its development, with products including fragrances, accessories and jewellery. In 2009, Lowe received an MBE for services to business, and she won the NatWest Everywoman award in 2006.
mum, but I continued to cab drive on weekend nights, so I managed to juggle it. I used the winnings to get a prototype made, and raised £12,000 in sponsorship from companies I featured in the game, and got that match funded by a local firm, raising enough to get two editions into production, Destination London and Destination Portsmouth, 2,500 copies of each, and I secured a launch platform with Hamley’s. Ordinarily the buyer wouldn’t have taken it based on a prototype but for some reason he did. Just prior to that I did some filming for the Dragons’ Den, there’s quite a story there!
What happened? What inspired you to create a board game?
Everything in the game is drawn on my own experience as a cab driver. I was on my way to a job when I got held up at a set of traffic lights, and the idea of “red light, miss a turn“ popped into my head. I imagined my cab being a playing piece and the destinations I was travelling to being a game. I did nothing with it, but then one day I picked up a lecturer from Portsmouth Uni, and he inspired me to go to uni as a mature student. That really changed my path: while I was doing the degree, I spotted a poster for an enterprise challenge, entered my game, and won. Because the game features 45 top tourist destinations, it doubled up well as a souvenir, so I used all the prize money to set up the company from a hub at the university.
How did you take the business to the next level, and how did you fit it all in?
I ran the business between lectures, while the children were at school, and in the evenings I’d be
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I went in all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, did my pitch and felt confident that the Dragons would love it and be really impressed with everything I’d done, and they completely missed all of that and focused on my inability to remember all my numbers. They ripped me to pieces and I cried the whole way home. But I picked myself up and thought I’m going to do this anyway – and I did. We launched in Hamley’s in the October half-term and by November 18 it was the number one selling product in the whole store, and it stayed number one for the whole Christmas period. It was apparent I’d proved the Dragons wrong, it was a bestseller, and we got Debenhams, Toys R Us, Amazon, WH Smith, all the national retailers, stocking it. We did a deal with Disney for Destination Animation, as well as adapting the game to other cities. It was a really exciting time, my feet didn’t touch the ground.
In 2009, everything went wrong – what happened?
We’d agreed a deal with Warner Brothers for a Harry Potter edition, but the film it was attached to got delayed, so we lost all of our retail listings and couldn’t bridge that financial gap in bank repayments, and it was the height of the recession, so our bank, rather than helping us, pulled our
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – SOLENT & SOUTH CENTRAL – MARCH 2013
overdraft. I don’t think at the time I realised how ill I was getting, I started to fall apart and everything went to the wall. When you’re an entrepreneur you put everything on the line. If things don’t work out, you can very quickly lose everything you’ve ever worked for, which in my case I did: my home, my car, my savings. I had a total nervous breakdown, it affected me badly, both mentally and physically, and the company went into administration. I’d desperately tried to save the house and business but in the end I couldn’t. What I felt let down by was the banking system, there was every reason to help us bridge the gap and they didn’t. As a consequence, we featured in a BBC Panorama documentary called Banks Behaving Badly, which raised the profile of the brand again.
How did you bounce back? I read that it started with a tweet to ’Twitter Dragon’ Simon Dolan ...
It was around the time that Panorama was screened that our paths crossed. He came to
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