Dindividual
dIndividual is a graphic design company founded by Gal Israel, a 24 year old from North London. Launched in August 2009, the company focuses on the design of customised gift pieces, with offerings including graphic novels, school yearbooks and “Milestones”. These innovative, bespoke pieces are the perfect personalised gift for a variety of occasions.
Gal graduated from Art College with a degree in Multimedia, before working in a variety of online marketing and sales positions, notably for Virgin Active. This valuable experience allowed her to develop her graphic design skills whilst also learning useful marketing techniques, such as Search Engine Optimisation.
Gal left her job in January 2009, in order to care for her ill mother, and moved in with her grandparents. This, however, gave her the opportunity to develop her passion for writing short stories. Through her membership of writers clubs, she identified that writers often liked to get a tangible product for their stories, complete with binding and illustration. From here, the drive to design and produce some sample novels for her friends started.
After gaining some initial customers through writers’ forums, Gal identified the need to provide different art styles to match customer needs and to expand her product offerings to include more personalised pieces for non-writers. For this, Gal realised she would need more space to carry out the work and the funds to market her idea to the wider market.
Bright Ideas Trust helped Gal through an investment of £8,000 in a mixture of debt and equity in October 2009. This enabled Gal to complete her website and open her studio in Camden where her team can create the artwork. This was combined with £2,500 of Gal’s own savings to allow dIndividual to become an established business.
Why BIT supports dIndividual?
Bright Ideas Trust supports dIndividual because we see it as a perfect example of how a passion and hobby can be turned into a commercially viable business.
V.OGRAPHICS is a filmmaking business that is run by Fabien Souzandry from Kennington, London.
The company makes documentaries for television or web broadcast, corporate or promotional films, live feeds for events, editing and music, short and feature films and runs film workshops for young people. Its customers range from small organisations or individuals to large corporate companies and government sponsored organisations.
Fabien was introduced to us by Livity, the Brixton based socially responsible marketing agency, which had commissioned Fabien to complete a filmmaking project for one of its clients.
Fabien was born and grew up in Paris and moved to London at the age of eleven. At that stage he spoke no English and eventually left school at 16 with 1 GCSE (an A* in French!!) in 2004.
Fabien says, “I was never really good at literature until I left school and found my own interest in reading and writing stories and developed a real passion for world culture, films, Japanese animation and manga, which is where I draw a lot of my inspiration in my filmmaking today.”
Bright Ideas Trust helped Fabien to incorporate v.ographics in October 2008 and invested £7,500 into the business. These funds will be used principally to upgrade the company’s filmmaking equipment. We have also provided him with a business Mentor and introduced him to financial and legal experts who are helping to plan and manage the business and to a number of prospective customers through our network of contacts.
Why Bright Ideas Trust supports V.OGRAPHICS?
From the first time we met Fabien we saw that he not only had a passion for filmmaking but that he also had demonstrated a drive and commitment to learn as much as he could about the industry. When we met him, he had already undertaken numerous projects and had worked, at times for nothing, alongside experienced filmmakers to learn his craft.
Fabien says, “I haven’t studied one day at traditional film learning platform, however my craft is very self taught, born out of personal interest and passion driven by conviction, resolve and ambition.”
“Initially I started out making films in my bed room but after having my work screened in cinemas and broadcast on TV and having worked on numbers of film projects I became in demand to create more films, which then evolved into paid work.”
During his apprenticeship period, Fabien worked with The Hayward Gallery, running film workshops culminating in a short film, which was screened at The British Film Institute and won a best story and best picture award. He also worked with BBC documentary filmmakers on a BBC3 documentary on the gallery. He worked for Live Magazine as a freelance filmmaker, making corporate and campaign marketing films for a number of companies including Nike, Mindshare, MTV and Sony BMG and for Current TV on a documentary about pop culture in Paris.
Fabien says that his “ambition is to become a self accomplished, renowned film director who owns his own studios and productions very much like Luc Besson and to work on films that I am passionate about and contribute to the enrichment of the British film/cinema economy and to enrich the cultural wealth of Europe.”
“For me Bright Ideas Trust is very simply for business mentoring, specialist professional support, such as legal, accountancy, marketing and consultancy a network of contacts, marketing and promotional activities. But also to tap into the potential clients that are within the network range of Bright Idea Trust.”
Rent-a-Cleaner
Rent-a-Cleaner limited was formed in early 2008 and is run by Shawn Brown to provide cleaning services in both domestic and commercial markets.
Rent-a-Cleaner focuses on four London boroughs (Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham and Wandsworth) and offers a range of cleaning services including domestic and commercial cleaning and fleet car washing services. It provides services to both Domestic Clients – homeowners, tenants – and Commercial Clients – embassies, offices, estate Agencies, schools, etc.
Bright Ideas Trust supported Rent-a-Cleaner with funding of £7,000. This came directly from the Accenture donation to Bright Ideas Trust and is being used by Rent-a-Cleaner to acquire a company vehicle, cleaning equipment, consumables and for marketing.
Shawn Brown was born, grew up and lives in London. He left school at 16 in 2001 and began work in the retail management working firstly for Selfridges as a sales advisor and then Harvey Nichols as a sales manager in their formal menswear department. However, it was when he changed career to the property lettings business that he developed the idea for his own business.
Whilst working for two London based property lettings companies during 2007/08 Shawn saw the opportunities for cleaning services in this sector. He says, “Tenants were always asking me where they could get reliable cleaners once they moved in, particularly if they were not from the area. Also, as agents we were continuously looking for professional and good quality cleaning services between lettings and during the void periods and we had a fleet of cars which were cleaned every few days.”
During 2008, Shawn decided to leave his position and become an entrepreneur. When we first met him, he had just completed an intensive 6-week industrial cleaning course and qualification and was clearly determined to learn as much as he could about the industry in which he had chosen to work.
Since that time, he has undertaken extensive on the job work experience with other cleaning providers and has built a sales pipeline of prospective domestic and commercial clients. He said “I did about as much as I could to get my business started by doing my research, learning on the job and taking a course, but ultimately realised that the two things I really needed someone else to provide was some expert business guidance and the finance required to buy the essential equipment I needed.”
Why Bright Ideas Trust supports Rent-a-Cleaner?
Bright Ideas Trust chose to support Rent-a-Cleaner because not only does it offer the opportunity for us to help to get a determined individual back into gainful employment through the creation of their own company but also expects to initially employ another 2-3 people.
Shawn says, “I believe having your own business enables one to have more choice and flexibility in life. I want to be a success; I have always believed with hard work, ambition and dedication I can achieve ‘anything’ in life. I also want to provide my daughter and family with a better lifestyle.”
“I believe that we will be successful because we will promote rent-a-cleaner as a professional, customer friendly business with fully insured and CRB/police checked staff offering a high quality service at affordable prices.”
Visit the Rent-a-Cleaner website
Ballerz League
Ballerz is a football and leisure company who operate and govern competitive leagues throughout London, in order to build teams and improve relationships run by Nana Sechere, from Stratford and Kofi Sarpong, from Bromley.
Kofi and Nana became friends whilst attending Kingston University and it was here where they were first exposed to Bright Ideas Trust, through a presentation by Tim Campbell. Following on from completing the Young Enterprise scheme and graduating from university, the two decided to concentrate on starting their own business.
“When we met each other, we discovered that we had similar ideas related to business and that we had both attended leagues and sporting activities that we thought could be run much better,” Kofi says, “Nana knew of a league which was shutting down and this gave us a perfect opportunity to get a start in the market.”
The Ballerz league was created to allow athletes to showcase their talents and to increase the profile of small sided sports with the aim of being a higher standard of league than what was currently offered in the market.
After running a pilot league for 12 weeks, they realised there was a sufficient demand to roll their product out around London but they knew that this would require funding to turn their dream into reality. Remembering the talk he heard at university, Nana sent off an application to the trust.
Bright Ideas Trust helped the Ballerz through an investment of £7,500 with a mixture of debt and equity. This has allowed the development of their website as well as a variety of promotional activity to publicise their leagues. We have also engaged them with Skylet Andrew, a professional football agent, to act as their business mentor, combined with engagements with professional services firms to aid them for other
Post-investment, the Ballerz continue to expand with leagues at four different locations happening concurrently after a successful summer league, with a future expansion into different sports, such as basketball and netball proposed.
When asked about their ambitions for Ballerz, Kofi is very clear. “We want Ballerz to be a household name, not only across London, but across multiple cities. In five years time, we’d like to be opening our first facility.”
Why does BIT support Ballerz?
Bright Ideas Trust supports the Ballerz as Nana and Kofi both exhibit the required enthusiasm, dedication and understanding of their customers to deliver and develop their business successfully. In addition to this, the Ballerz were able to demonstrate that there was both a demand for their business as well as a need, through their test period.
