Member Article

Cheadle green fingered entrepreneur grows business

A trip to Vancouver inspired entrepreneur Lucy Serafi where she noticed the growing popularity of terrariums, mini gardens in glass containers.

After realising the potential in the market, she invested £55k via money from family and a small bank loan into her business the Urban Botanist.

Despite only trading for 18 months, the business is blooming with a turnover of £100k for this year.

Named as one of the Telegraph’s female entrepreneurs to watch in 2015, Lucy spoke exclusively to Bdaily on managing her workload, plans for growth and keeping her business lean.

Lucy said: “I manage my workload and I’m a mother to two sons aged 5 and 7.

“I face several challenges, managing my day to day tasks, working smartly and managing cashflow.

“We need large volumes of stock to keep up with international growth but we also need to keep lean and manage our overheads as a new business.

“I’m not committed to overheads, I don’t have an office but I don’t need one, we’re different we really question ‘is that value to the business’.

“I never began by working in my house but started straight away using a warehouse, so it was scalable and I could meet supply demand.

“Different people all advised us not to do things on our own so we have had third party warehouse from the start.

“The easiest thing is the product sells itself and it is perfectly viable for a web based business.

“We’re looking to grow and nothing will stop us, we will find a way to come across any technical issues. We are quite practical.

“We want offices regionally across Europe and I feel there is a huge potential in the Middle East.

“In the next 12 months I’m aiming to grow the ecommerce side of the business and move into international markets.

“The company is very energetic and progressive, everyone works hard and plays hard.

“We enjoy what we are doing.”

The Urban Botanist is an ambassador for the Business is GREAT Britain campaign. Visit www.greatbusiness.gov.uk to find out more about how government support could help your business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sophia Taha .