Interview with Fairfax & Favor’s Felix Favor Parker
Appropriately enough for a brand that began with leather footwear, Fairfax & Favor was thoroughly bootstrapped. Founders Marcus Fairfax Fountaine and Felix Favor Parker funded the Norfolk-based business through its early days by working summer jobs in the local pub and delivering fireplaces. They kept their stock in Parker’s mum’s attic.
Interview with Beauty Pie’s Marcia Kilgore
Beauty Pie is a buyer’s club for luxury make up, without the markup. To illustrate the concept, founder Marcia Kilgore holds up a lipstick sample she received from a supplier.
Growing pains: How to stay agile as you scale
GX leaders offer their advice for retaining entrepreneurial spirit. No company stays young forever. With success comes size, and size inevitably slows you down: eventually, today’s disruptors will themselves be disrupted.
The UK needsmore than one growth engine
The companies on this list are achieving exceptional things and deserve our warmest congratulations. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had more of them? For too long, we’ve been like a plane running on one engine, with opportunity limited for large sections of the population. To unleash the UK’s full potential we need to get the whole country firing.
How to make purpose practical
If you ask CEOs what their company’s purpose is, very few will say to make money. Most will reel off their mission – the thing they aim for that, if satisfied, will produce a financial return.
Money talks
There was a slight drop this year in the number of GX companies that had received venture capital or private equity funding, from 47 to 41.
A tale of two sectors
It’s been a bumper year for retail, with 26 companies making our top 100. That’s a significant improvement even on last year, when there were 21 (including those previously defined as fashion companies).
How Huel aims to be the world’s leading plant-based brand
The idea behind Huel is simple. The company sells a powder product designed to replace meals, and since launching in 2015 has attracted legions of fans worldwide who refer to themselves as Hueligans and swear by its benefits.
Bambino Mio: Environmental concerns over single-use disposable nappies means reusable alternatives are becoming mainstream
Bambino Mio aims to make reusable nappies mainstream and cut the thousands of single-use plastic nappies sent to landfill
Activate Group: A hobby that very quickly grew and grew
Mark Wilcox lasted just two weeks in retirement before he got the idea for Activate, a technology-led vehicle insurance and accident management company that now employs 750 and has annual sales of almost £200m.
