Will Kennedy and Adrian Gilbane, Sons
Sons is a digital health business seeking to provide clinically proven and affordable hair care for men.
Founded in 2020 by two friends, who were motivated to solve the problem of hair loss for men based on their own personal experiences of overpriced and ineffective treatments.
Sons offer its treatments directly to patients and via retail and marketplace channels.
Having already treated over 250,000 men across the UK, Ireland, and Germany, Sons is now setting its sights on channel and market expansion.
The great Guinness shortage has lessons for Diageo
Ireland has won the corporation tax game for now, but will that last?
Corkman leading €11bn development of Battersea Power Station in London: ‘We’ve created a place to live, work and play’
Elf doors, carriage rides and boat cruises: Christmas in Ireland’s five-star hotels
Q. What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?
A. Both of us were suffering from hair loss and were frustrated with the poor experience of going to a physical clinic. We got talking over a drink and realised we could change access to a highly undertreated area of men’s health by licensing the products and creating an online clinic experience removing the need for face-to-face consultations.
Q. What is your business model and what makes it unique?
A. Sons is a traditional consumer health company by definition but we don’t look or sound like one. We have an innovative direct-to-patient business model and hold pharmaceutical licenses for two clinically proven products for hair loss. Having begun as a direct-to-patient business, our brand has expanded into retail pharmacies and marketplaces. We are the only multichannel company specialising in hair loss in Europe.
Q. What was your ‘back-to-the-wall’ moment and how did you overcome it?
A. Our “backs to the wall” year was 2022. We tripled the business in 2021 and were at term sheet stage with a number of venture funds. We allocated a lot of our existing capital on the assumption of landing funding but the Russia/Ukraine war meant the funds paused overnight on investing. Post this we had six months to get the business to profit. We hit profit by October 22nd, 2022 and our existing investors supported us at that stage. We have been profitable since.
Q. What moment/deal would you cite as the ‘game changer’ or turning point for the company?
A. About November 2020 we were 11 months trading and delivered €200,000 monthly recurring revenue on the UK direct-to-patient model. That gave us strong conviction on scaling that specific channel as well as other markets and other channels.
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. The changing regulations for digital health and the treatment of suitable conditions remotely are exciting for our brand.
There is an increase in the use of electronic prescriptions and remotely treating patients, which can offer significant growth.
Q. What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?
A. The changing regulation to permit direct-to-patient telehealth epharmacy models is an exciting and promising development for the healthcare sector. On the back of this we have seen both Pfizer and Eli Lilly launch DTC models in the US. This is a significant development and something we are excited by as big pharma looks to enter the direct-to-patient space.
Q. Is AI impacting your business and industry?
A. AI is something we are staying very close to. We are encouraging our team to use it daily. Tools like Co-pilot and AI automation of customer enquiries ensure our operations and customer success teams are efficient. We are also exploring AI tools to help improve diagnostics and to support patients in managing/tracking the progression of their hair growth.
Q. How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business?
A. Similar to other consumer health businesses we are experiencing increased costs in labour, product, packaging and fuel for our logistics. We have seen packaging and product costs stabilise in 2024 but we expect fuel and labour to remain a challenge due to labour shortages and global supply chains remaining difficult.
Ciaran Burke and Andrea Reynolds, Swoop
Swoop is a platform that helps businesses secure finance across debt, equity, and grants, and helps them make savings on everyday business costs. Swoop’s platform acts as a one-stop shop for business owners to access financial products, it’s a virtual CFO and to date has enabled 180,000 business owners to access over €1.5 billion in funding and savings solutions from loans, investments, grants, banking, insurance and energy products across its businesses in Ireland, UK, Canada, US, Australia and South Africa.
Q. What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?
A. The light-bulb moment was all down to Andrea, when she was working for McLaren Automotive where she was working with the spin-out engineering team and had to get creative as to where you go to fund all these heavy capital projects. She started to unearth lots of options across alternative debt, investments and grants. From there the idea of being able to connect business owners to financial products was born.
Q. What makes your business unique?
A. Swoop is a two-sided marketplace with business owners on one side and funding providers such as banks, lenders, investors and grants agencies on the other. Every time Swoop connects a business owner to a source of funding it earns a transaction fee. Swoop also has a secondary revenue stream where we have a software as a service version of our product, which is white labelled by customers such as Lloyds, F45, Compare The Market, Sage, British Chamber of Commerce among others.
Q. What was your ‘back-to-the-wall’ moment and how did you overcome it?
A. One of our first white-label contracts was with RBS in the UK where we had a business bank comparison service for RBS and NatWest customers. As it was a bank-led project it was a baptism of fire. Add to that our product was data comparison – it meant that we had to put about two weeks of 20-hour days together with our data and engineering team stress-testing bank comparison data across seven banks to make sure we hit the delivery deadline.
Q. What moment/deal would you cite as the ‘game changer’ or turning point for the company?
A. This one is pretty easy. We won a UK banking competition, winning £5 million (€5.96m) in non-dilutive funding to help develop our technology to improve access to finance for SMEs in the UK.
Q. What is your growth funding path?
A. We’re a walking case study of our platform. Enterprise Ireland Overseas Competition €50,000 plus a UK start-up loan of £25,000 kicked us off before we did an equity round of Irish angel investors, UK angel investors and Enterprise Ireland HPSU (High Potential Start-Up) for €1 million. We then won two UK banking competitions for a combined value of £7.5 million. Then we have subsequently raised further equity of €11 million.
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. More of our ecosystem is getting digitised so business owners are being enabled to access financial products more easily and the application friction is less, although sadly the Irish banks have a long way to go in the SME space. However, in three years we expect to see a lot of reverse engineering for business owners when it comes to accessing financial products. Instead of lengthy applications it will be pre-qualified products tailored made to them based on their connected data set
Q. What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?
A. We are getting out in front of the business owner or financial director of the business to show them the value of their data. What I mean by that is we’re waving big red flags at them in our product if they are overspending in areas where they are getting ripped off like banking, FX, energy and insurance and then connecting them with options to bring their overheads down.
Q. How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business?
A. It is relevant to our business as it affects every one of our customers from their supply chain, pricing, overall cost base and cost of capital. We are always trying to keep our customer base of over 180,000 updated with changes in pricing with regards to funding and any relevant grants that have come on stream that are relevant to their sector and/or location.
Damian Young, Zeus Mobility
Zeus Mobility provides shared mobility services such as e-scooters, e-bikes and e-mopeds to customers across Europe. Its focus is to deliver environmentally friendly alternatives to last-mile transport in urban areas. Zeus operates in more than 70 locations and recently launched Zolar stations in four locations, offering parking solutions and environmentally friendly solar-powered charging for vehicles.
Its plan is to scale the business over the coming years as shared mobility markets continue to expand. The market is estimated to grow to $360 billion (€329bn) by 2030, according to a recent McKinsey report on micromobility as users shift their behaviour in urban transport.
Q. What is your business model and what makes it unique?
A. We provide “shared mobility” meaning that users can find one of our vehicles using our app, scan the vehicle and ride freely. The user can pay as they go or they can opt to have a subscription, reducing the cost to ride significantly.
Our e-scooter model has three wheels and so attracts a wider demographic and our target markets are smaller cities and towns that have less developed transport infrastructure.
Q. What is your greatest business achievement to date?
A. I believe it was our launch because we originally planned to launch in March 2020 and then the world was hit by Covid-19. Not expecting it to last, we re-planned for June 2020 and despite a further lockdown and continued restrictions, Zeus launched in Heidelberg in June 2020. The result was phenomenal because public transport was restricted, but people needed to move around for essential work and other reasons. Our scooters provided a safe form of transport for users and attracted thousands of new users each week.
Q. What moment/deal would you cite as the ‘game changer’ or turning point for the company?
A. Fundraising is always difficult but especially for a fast-growing start-up company. In the first two years we funded the business through contacts, angels and small investors. In 2022, BVP and Enterprise Ireland provided our first “institutional” funding that allowed us to scale the business incrementally over 2022, enter new markets and support the acquisition of two companies in Ireland and UK.
Q. What were the best and the worst pieces of advice you received when starting out?
A. Throughout our journey we have had the privilege of getting advice from a range of people. Probably the best advice I have received is that businesses that are growing need a sense of urgency in their organisation and while you can try to perfect a product to the nth degree there will always be a reason not to launch it, allowing your competition to steal the march. This has shown in history where businesses have lost the market edge because they lacked the urgency to meet customer demands. On bad advice, well, whatever might have been received it’s what you take that matters.
Q. What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?
A. As with many new industries, regulation can be the biggest disruptor. But not negatively. Towns and cities are learning more about micro-mobility and how to make it work in cities. Therefore, new regulations to develop the right infrastructure, make travel safer and deliver quality services to urban living will change this industry for the better
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. We are passionate about this market. If you look back 20 years cities and towns have changed fundamentally – more infrastructure for bikes, pedestrians and micro-mobility, better transport infrastructure and reduced congestion. This trend will continue over the next 20 years, and we will see significantly more car-free cities across Europe in the next decade.
Q. How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business?
A. Cost-of-living rises change how consumers spend their money, with luxury and incidental spending usually reducing. However, our services provide a cost-effective alternative for urban travel, and we see more customers choosing our subscription packages to reduce their average commute costs. We encourage customers to avail of very low-cost alternatives and we have implemented initiatives to drive this – for example, we provided discounted rides for people to vote during the European elections.
Q. What is the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make?
A. Managing cash flow and funding can be the most important element of the business. Entrepreneurs must challenge costs regularly and as they grow avail of economies of scale and bargaining power. Over the last four years we have significantly reduced our cost to serve by negotiating the right level of costs with suppliers aligned to our revenue. It is important that a constant focus on these costs is maintained.
Denise Phillips, Voduz
Voduz is an Irish-owned hair care brand that was established in 2019 with the launch of our innovative infrared straightener. Almost five years later we extended our product offering to include hot tools, home care, styling products, and more.
Q. What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start up in business?
A. Having personally suffered with hair loss, I realised there were no electrical styling tools on the market that would allow styling with heat for thinning hair. Seeing infrared technology being utilised in the US market, I recognised a gap for a styling tool that includes a temperature control to adjust for certain hair types, textures and concerns partnering perfectly with infrared technology bringing styling with hair health in mind.
Q. What is your business model and what makes it unique?
A. Voduz operates an omnichannel approach to its offering – online social-platform selling and retail . Launching in 2019 during the Covid-19 pandemic, we had to react quickly and operate predominantly online. Now that the pandemic has passed Voduz has pivoted massively in offering different routes to market including retail and further online channels such as TikTok shop in the UK.
Q. What is your greatest business achievement to date?
A. There have been various moments that have attributed to the success and growth of Voduz. Our first launch, the infrared straightener, was such a strong launch that I would most definitely class it as an achievement. Another achievement would be the brand’s success on TikTok shop. The team have put many hours in to ensure that we fully embraced this new route to our customers and market, and we managed to get one of our products (Velvet Crown) to go viral.
Q. What was your ‘back-to-the-wall’ moment and how did you overcome it?
A. One example of this is overselling on one of our product launches. It takes teamwork and communication to contact all customers affected and offer an explanation and solution. Moments like these can destroy brand reputation so by ensuring quick, efficient and informative solutions for the customers affected, Voduz was able to retain its customer loyalty.
Q. What moment/deal would you cite as a turning point for the company?
A. The “game changer” moment most definitely was bringing the infrared straightener to market. This really set a precedent for the ethos and journey that Voduz is on.
Q. To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your future plans/ambitions?
A. We have just begun our European roll-out launching into various countries in the European Union off the back of a successful show at Cosmoprof Bologna 2024. Future ambitions are to break into the US market and become the first Irish-owned hair care and electrical tool company to be present in this market.
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. Since launching in 2019 during the pandemic, the geographical focus has mainly been Ireland and the UK. In the next three years I can see Voduz trading internationally and implementing a strong product offering to ease the market expansion plans.
Q. How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business?
A. Shipping and cost of goods sold has massively increased within the five years of the business. This being said we have been able to allow for one price increase in five years.
Q. What is the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make?
A. Copying other business models/products directly and not improving or changing their offering.
Q. What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a less experienced entrepreneur?
A. Hire your weakness in business and know your market inside out.
- Sign up for Business push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our Inside Business podcast is published weekly – Find the latest episode here
