From bad taste to Forbes magazine
Sophie Trelles-Tvede (Denmark) is the co-founder of invisibobble and was named as one of Europe’s 30 greatest entrepreneur talents by Forbes. Her products are distributed in over 70 countries and have earned her the 30 Under 30 Europe: Retail and E-Commerce prize.
My name is Sophie, and I’ve just turned 23 at the time of writing this. My life is quite hectic. Here are some examples of what has happened to me over the past 4 weeks.
Forbes magazine named my friend and partner Felix and me among the 2016 30 Under 30 Europe: Retail and E-Commerce award recipients, and a few days later, the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA) broadcast a TEDx Talk with me, in which I talked about entrepreneurship. This resulted in many enquiries about talks and interviews, of which we can only manage a few. In addition, I took part in a product launch in Paris, visited our production facilities in China, took legal action against a supplier in California (he withdrew his products), negotiated new distribution agreements with various companies, went Kitzbühel with some team members for a sales training, and conducted recruitment interviews with eight people.
Privately, I was with a dance troupe at the carnival in Rio, skied in St Anton, and celebrated my 23rd birthday in Switzerland. I must also admit to getting a fine for driving too close to another car. All this within the past 3 weeks, when I’ve only slept 5 hours a night on average. So, yes, it’s been hectic, and the main reason for this is probably that I’m an entrepreneur!
Why all this?
Well, it started 3 months after I, as an 18-year-old, began a degree course in business management at the University of Warwick in England. In reality, my plan then was as follows:
1. Use the 3 years of my bachelor course “to find myself”—that is, find out what I really wanted and get some professional knowledge, of course.
2. When I’d found myself, I’d take a master’s degree in whatever subject I was passionate about—whether it was marketing, finance, or something completely different.
3. Then get a super job in a consultancy, for example, as a springboard to a career.
4. Finally, get a good job in a well-reputed business where, after a few years, I could become responsible for a product or a branch and thereafter perhaps start my own business in a branch that I fully understood.
I still believe today that this plan would have given me a good and productive life; it has done so for many others. But that’s not what happened.
The reason why things didn’t go as planned is a little bizarre. The cause was that, a few weeks after my studies at Warwick had started, I was invited to a “bad taste party,” and as part of my outfit—which should express resolutely bad taste—I used an old-fashioned telephone cord as a hair band.
A hair band tends to tug on the hair and can give you a headache, probably because the small muscles in the scalp pull in the opposite direction, and in addition it leaves a kink in the hair when you remove it. Most people with long hair know this.
However, when I woke up the morning after the party, I noticed that although I was still wearing the telephone cord in my hair, I didn’t have a headacheas I usually do when I tie up my hair. When I took it out, I realized I didn’t have a kink in my hair as I usually got with other hair ties. I looked at the telephone cord perplexed—and then it hit me. Because the telephone cord has a different shape to hair ties, it puts an uneven pressure on the hair, thus not leaving a kink. I therefore asked myself if making hair ties designed after old-fashioned telephone cords would be a good idea … which is when I rang Felix, the friend I mentioned, who was also 18 at that time, and who was studying at the University of Bath. I told him about my strange observation and idea, and I asked him, “Don’t you want to be a part of that?” Initially, he thought it sounded silly, but he and I had both been feeling a bit empty from sitting in a classroom all day, so we’d already discussed that, if we could get a good business idea, then we should consider it seriously. We’d actually talked about it several times. So after a little more palaver, I was happy he said, “Yes, let’s try it!” And so we got going, and invisibobble was founded.
The first tasks were really quite easy, and we enjoyed doing them, because we were full of expectations. For instance, firstly we had to find a name for the company. And then a logo, which we did ourselves in Photoshop, but that meant we had to invest some of our savings in the software. After that, we had to find a factory in China that could make some demo hair ties. And so it went on with packaging, pricing policy, and other things.
While other students went to plenty of parties, Felix and I sat every evening Skyping about all these things. Often we met at each other’s universities and worked on the project together.
When we’d got the demo hair ties made, we showed them to various distributors, and we got a lot of help here because Felix’s brother Daniel and his friend Niklas together had a company called New Flag, which already sold hair brushes (Tangle Teezer) in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and therefore had many contacts in the branch. Thus they already had distribution in a couple of countries, and we had a new product. It was like a hand-in-glove situation, and New Flag started to mention our product at their own sales meetings. In the meantime, Felix and I sat in our rooms and packed and sent our products for free in hopes of getting leads. I can remember a plethora of trips to the post office.
One of the most fantastic moments of my life was when we got our first order. I can easily imagine that this may sound weird to many people, because the most fantastic moment in one’s life must surely have something to do with love or the universe or something like that, and in the end I suppose that is true. But when you start a business in a student dorm room, and one day, suddenly, there is a large, serious company that couldn’t care less about you as a person but apparently is more than willing to buy your product, then it feels really wild. Imagine! They’re ignoring that you’re 18 and living in a room at university! “They consider us equals!” I thought in astonishment. “They’re taking us quite seriously.” And that’s what Felix thought as well. We were ecstatic.
When I took my final exams at Warwick 3 years later, we had 22 employees and distribution via retail chains in about 40 countries. By the time, after another 2 years, I turned 23, we were majority owned by New Flag, and our organization had grown to over 100 people, of whom 25 worked solely with packing and sending the products. Sitting in our dorm rooms and packing hair ties was suddently a thing of the past. Now there were pallets four floors high, forklift trucks and lorries. That was how my life became what I described at the start of this short story—very hectic, but also wildly exciting.
So what have we learned from this that we haven’t already been told at our universities?
Here are 10 of our most important observations:
1. Because of crowdsourcing, cloud computing, shareware, Skype, and so on, the cost of starting a business is remarkably small today; at least it was for Felix and me. Our overall initial investment was about $4000—money that we’d earned as skiing instructors while at school. Of course that was a lot of money for us then, but if we hadn’t used the money on this project, it would surely have been spent on drinks. I actually calculated that we could have bought 1350 vodka Red Bulls for the money, but that wouldn’t have given us the same lasting pleasure.
2. You don’t have to be an expert in your field to get success. Outsiders obviously have some handicaps, but on the other hand, they think more originally, which can give great advantages. For instance, Felix and I began to distribute hair ties to sectors that had never sold hair ties before.
3. A product doesn’t necessarily have to be complex to be successful. Many of the biggest business ideas are very simple, and the advantage of something simple is partly that you can build the business very quickly if it works, and partly that the adventure is quite cheap if it’s a flop.
4. Who you choose as a partner is really decisive. Felix and I knew each other from many years at school together, and we therefore knew that we could rely completely on each other’s abilities and dedication. It worked. On the other hand, we quickly found a company that offered exclusive distribution in Scandinavia, which impressed us so much that we didn’t check their true strength on the market fully. That was an expensive mistake.
5. Keep your expenses down. In the beginning we sent everything by airmail, but when at the end of the year we calculated what our expenses had actually been used on, we realized that this item ate the largest part by far of our potential profits. The conclusion is that you should not only be cost-conscious when there’s a crisis; you must be cost-conscious every day, all the time. Even if you don’t have an aggressive competitor right behind you, you must act as if you do.
6. Notwithstanding the above, we learned that if you, like us, achieve global distribution and travel a great deal, then it pays to fly business class, as you can get a good night’s sleep. It saves time and hotel expenses, and most airports have showers.
7. I know that network effects in parts of the software and media industries may make it unnecessary to protect all of its intellectual property. However, in other industries—like ours—there are hardly any network effects, and therefore you must protect your intellectual property quickly and efficiently. We only learned this along the way, but now we are masters of it. However, our lives would have been easier if we had fully understood this from the start.
8. Don’t give the most prominent titles to the first people you recruit. If you do, you’ll have a problem if you, like us, become much larger and can recruit more experienced and competent people later.
9. There are many disadvantages to being a small company, but one advantage may be that you can act with the speed of lightning. For example, do not let emails go unanswered for several days. Reply to everything at lightning speed. Use your smartphone for this if you’re not at your computer. And send, for example, minutes of meetings to participants within an hour of the end of the meeting.
10. There will never be a time in your life when the personal risk of starting a company is smaller than when you’re a student. As a student you have no large recurring expenses, no family responsibilities, and no CV that can be ruined. If things go awry, you can just finish your studies and get on with a traditional career. If it goes well, it’ll probably be hectic, but also great fun.