What we can learn from the UK’s 10 fastest retailers

In popular imagination, the fastest way to grow a business is with an app or algorithm. Yet it is retail, not tech, that dominates the definitive list of the UK’s 100 fastest growing companies.

Winner Interview – Au Vodka

The chemistry swots among you may find it fitting that this year’s fastest-growing company is named after the chemical symbol for every winner’s favourite element, gold.

GX winner AU Vodka has dazzled the drinks industry with its signature gold bottles – concealing often startlingly-coloured spirits – and its highly effective social media and influencer marketing.

Lior Shiff, CEO, Tripledot Studios

Companies that monetised games through in-app purchases, like the business I co-founded in 2007, Product Madness, used to look down on companies that monetised through advertising, because the revenue per player was much lower.

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).