Living for the present: How Louise Doyle helped build £1m online gifts company, Needi
Louise and friend, Steph Scholes, have helped build a gifts company with lofty ambitions of multi-million pound turnover
Their first business meeting consisted of a glass of wine on a picture-perfect late summer’s evening on a beach on the south coast of England.
The idea for Louise Doyle and Steph Scholes’s gifts company ‘Needi’, which is set to break £1million in revenue this year, came from spotting a gap in the market – and a long-established understanding of their clients.
Louise takes me back a few years to when she was 18 – and it was just a few!
A renegade of sorts, Louise, who is originally from the south coast of England but now calls Tynan in Co Armagh her home, had saved about £4,000 and took herself off galavanting around the world.
University was short lived. Louise needed to earn money and she had the wherewithal to know that “the quickest way that I'd be able to make money was in sales”.
“So I ended up as a recruitment consultant by the time I was 19,” she said.
And like a duck to water, Louise was hooked, quickly becoming one of the firm’s top billing consultant and managing about 130 temporary members of staff.
She then used that money to travel the world again – intrepid in her very nature!
“I went backpacking around the world by myself; that was a great time and I got involved with a company called Camps International, which is a global social enterprise. And that was really, I suppose, where a lot more business skills came in and it's where I met Steph, my co-founder.”
Louise worked her way up the ladder at Camps International and became the company’s first ever global sales director.
Steph was working as the UK sales manager and together they increased revenue from £5 million a year to £15 million a year on what was a shoestring budget.
Despite the turnover, there was little to no staff welfare budget for Louise to reward the hard-working employees.
“What Steph and I used to do is, we’d end up basically sending staff gifts by searching the internet; places like Etsy, Amazon.
“It was just little gifts that kind of showed them that we really care. ‘Well done, you hit your target; we can't give you lots of money but here's a small gift that says we really bloody appreciate you’.
“We would write little messages and all that kind of stuff and it just took ages trying to find gifts that would arrive on time and come with that bit of personalisation. We also wanted to support local businesses but it's really hard.”
The seeds of a business idea were well and truly sown. Louise was convinced, as too was Steph, and they were ready to hitch their wagons to this plan.
“We got to the stage when we knew that we wanted to do something together,” said Louise.
“Steph and I have done this before; we know how to grow a business, we know how to grow sales teams and we know how to release products into different global networks. Most importantly, we know how to motivate staff and clients, and that's where the idea of Needi came in.
“I think we saw what we could do within the confines of Camps [International]. We had a rough idea of the plan. I can remember speaking to Steph; I think we were having a glass of wine on Bournemouth beach and we are both just sitting there having our first proper business planning meeting. It all happened so quickly.”
That business meeting on the beach was September 2020. By December, the pair had found some well-connected advisors.
“We managed to somehow recruit the ex Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of our biggest competitor, Not On The High Street. He was lead marking strategy at eBay, John Lewis and a few other places.
“We had a great tech guy who was helping us do use some really clever technology that, over time, is going to be even better than the human kind of gifting that we do.”
Soon after, Louise and Steph joined the Founder Institute Tech Accelerator, almost like doing an MBA in about three months or as Louise described: “Like SAS boot camp crossed with Dragon's Den”.
“We were very driven and accountable but I knew the network was going to be important as it allowed us access to some of the top business minds across Silicon Valley, across London, across all these different places.
“I knew that I wanted to do something that was going to allow me to get into that network but also make sure that I ticked all the boxes with the business – not jump over a few hurdles along the way.
“We graduated as the top founders in June 2021,” beamed Louise. And immediately after, they created their minimum viable product. They launched Needi on a basic Shopify website, which today continues to host the website.
Louise admits that despite the range of expertise involved in a network it was “more about other people having the confidence in you” and “over time, I've got better at finding the right people and quickly learning from them”.
Louise says the company puts local independent merchants at the heart of their strategy, with businesses hand picked through a rigorous process, in an effort to stop small independent businesses being undercut like what happens on some of the larger platforms.
And while Needi was initially geared towards the individual, 80% of the business is now B2B with clients such as Spotify, Virgin, KPMG and QuickBooks all on their roster.
Said Louise: “The cost of customer acquisition has increased by about 60% over the last few years, so to pay for Direct to Consumer (DTC) customers and to onboard them is not a massively great business model, it would be very, very expensive.
“Many of the DTC customers also worked for companies and the average order value went from £30-50 to £1-2,000.”
That pivot to B2B was the game-changer!
“We were convinced it would be small to medium sized companies that wanted really personal gifts, and really cared about their staff, but then suddenly we were getting orders from KPMG. Someone from Microsoft found us on LinkedIn and put in an order for them and the next thing you know we're working with these corporates, and it turns out that many corporates actually need it more than the SMEs.
“The SMEs are at least still speaking to their staff. They are real people, whereas the corporates are trying so hard to compete with that, especially tech companies. Some great tech companies are working with us, trying so hard to be people-centric and look after their staff. That’s where we come in.”
Needi uses technology and artificial intelligence to improve the gift giving experience by matching shoppers with a high quality, local, product or service based directly on their needs and wants.
Like most start-ups the budget isn’t quite there for large-scale marketing campaigns.
A lot of what Needi do is done through organic LinkedIn outreach, email marketing, which is followed up with phone calls. Louise, Steph and their team attend a lot of networking events, often frequented by executive assistants.
We love working with these amazing Executive Assistants who are often underestimated, but hold so much power within these big corporates. It’s good old fashioned word of mouth.
But for a company expecting to hit £1million in revenue this year, there has to be funding involved, which has been a steep learning curve for the two co-funders.
“It was the Founder Institute Tech Accelerator; that was probably our first introduction to it because you don't go on an accelerator unless you want to be a multi-million pound business,” said Louise.
“We have access to that amazing network so I was constantly speaking to other founders, CEOs, investors, about how it all worked and then we just took all that advice that we were given and just absolutely went for it.
“We did our first round and closed it at £150,000. That was from a mixture of angel investors and people we've met along the way.”
That process took nearly a year and it didn’t come without its bumps.
According to Louise, less than 2% of female founded business receive VC investment but working in Northern Ireland has really opened a lot of doors for Louise as she believes “there is a genuine desire to help bring money into Northern Ireland”.
While there is a pressure to perform and make a return on that investment, Louise is confident she has got the right investors behind her specifically Techstart Ventures and soon to join, Clarendon Fund Managers and Ada Ventures.
Louise is also realistic on her expectations. Needi, for her, is not a lifestyle business. It comes with its pressures and in the next 5-7 years she hopes to make a comfortable exit. Not to out her feet up, but to one day invest in other businesses; offer her help and expertise along the way.
For now, it’s all about striking that balance. Running a start-up with three children can be tough going. Steph is also mum to a young child.
“It is easier now [raising three children] than it was raising one,” Louise joked. Since returning to her husband’s home turf, the support network has been invaluable.
“I aim for a four day week where I spend Wednesdays with the children. It’s hard and I do work a lot of extra hours after bedtimes but I am massively working towards keeping those as gospel Wednesdays, which I just absolutely love.
“Steph has a young baby. We work hard on striking that balance; we support each other so much. If one of us spends all week networking every night we’ll persuade the other one to take Friday off. We know when the other ones getting to that biting point and when to give that space and freedom.
“We’re work wives. We worked together for eight years before we started the business. I could not do this without her. It would crush me, the weight of running a business without a co-founder who can just scrape you off the pavement when you've been rejected, annihilated, screwed up and nearly gone out of business again, all of those kinds of things.”
Needless to say, with an £5 million revenue target for 2025, they will need to harness all that support.
“Initially, I think putting the plan together, you're like, ‘what the hell am I doing?’ But just lean into the things you've got that gut feel for; the things you're really getting excited about – a project or something you think is going to be good for the business.
“If there's any way you can free yourself up from all the other stuff, just to concentrate on the gut bit, I think that's how we've done it, just really followed out gut.”
Louise added: “You've got to have enough passion and enough drive but if you've got all of that without the energy to do it, don’t do it. Running a business is like climbing a mountain with hurdles.”
Needi are always on the lookout for new independent business to team up with so reach out to Louise here if you want to know more.
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