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Save The Environment One Drink at a Time With Pokito

By Jessie Wilkens on November 7, 2016 in

coffee-1566341_960_720Here’s a great idea that can help the environment – while helping you to enjoy your coffee. A British entrepreneur has invented a reusable plastic cup that can collapse and fit in your pocket. Calling it Pokito, investor Andrew Brooks hopes that it will start to be used by Costa, Starbucks and others.

If you can imagine this, about 2.5 billion cups are dumped each year and, because of the coating that they have, they can’t be recycled.

The Pokito has three sizes and can collapse to be small enough to fit in your pocket or bag. It has been tested to last for over 1500 uses and it’s even dishwasher-proof. The cup is patent-pending and, as Andrew Brooks said,

“Growing millions of trees to manufacture billions of cups for a few minutes of convenience has to be considered a wasteful and ecologically unsound practice. I do believe there has to be a better way. We can still enjoy our daily indulgence and manage to safeguard the environment for future generations.”
He is using Kickstarter to raise £12,000 to produce the Pokito, and each cup with be £15.

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Splurge for Your Dog with Four Legged Fancies

By Jessie Wilkens on October 9, 2016 in ,

dog-1557287_960_720For those of you who have it all – Four Legged Fancies is the place to enjoy. That’s if you’re a dog lover. This is a bakery for dogs and they are busy securing deals with Googlebox’s Steph and Dom, model Georgia May Jagger and actor Warwick Davies.

The 35 year old from Somerset, Victoria Stent, started selling her dog treats at the beginning to farmers’ markets. She insists, to those who wonder, that her dog treats are healthy. As she said,
“When people approach the stall and you can see they aren’t too sure what to think we explain to them that all of our treats are wheat-free, natural and hand-made. People are actually very savvy these days when it comes to pet nutrition so they know what they are looking for.”

Stent went full time in 2014 and now has a celebrity following among others. They offer regular treats, birthday cakes, a doggy party package and more. Her bakery has actually won six awards at agricultural shows. Their projected turnover for 2016 is £103,000.

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Clothing Businesses Showing Low Turn Out

By Jessie Wilkens on September 14, 2016 in

fashion-1031469_960_720This is certainly bad news for high street businesses. They have had seven months now of low sales. Last month, alone, the year-on-year sales fell by 1.5%, according to the BDO monthly High Street Sales Tracker. Sales of clothes dropped by 3.3% last month and by 9.6% in the last week alone; homeware sales, however, rose by 11.3% which is the strongest showing they’ve had since April of 2016.

Lifestyle goods sales which include software was up by .7% last month. This was helped by the Rio Olympics. As Sophie Michael, the head of retail and wholesale for BDO said, retailers had “failed to put last summer’s woes behind them and deliver a positive story for 2016.”

Interestingly, Barclaycard said that spending in pubs was up by 13.3% last month and restaurants had a 12.7% increase.

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Pops Is Serving Up the Fun

By Jessie Wilkens on August 15, 2016 in

Here is an interesting business idea. Pops supplies high-end restaurants, stores like Selfridges and events like Wimbledon with alcoholic ice lollies. They are raising new funds and plan to double in size. They plan to sell almost 500,000 lollies this year and hope to double that next year with supermarket deals.

Flavor choices include a £5 champagne with 4.3% ABV, a Moscow Mule and the non-alcoholic versions like Apple and Elderflower.

They are working with celebrities like Miley Cyrus in marketing campaigns. They just took part in an event with Uber. Uber bought 35,000 lollies from them to promote their taxi app’s food delivery service.

Co-founder James Rae owns 75% of the firm with his schoolmate Harry Clarke. As Rae said, “We were in the Balearics when we came up with the idea. We wanted a quality product. We use real strawberries where our competitors would use artificial flavours. Our Classic product contains half a glass of champagne.”

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Coffee Shop Craze in the UK

By Jessie Wilkens on June 19, 2016 in ,

coffee-770272__180
If you’re noticing more coffee shops around town – you’re not going crazy. Experts actually predict that there will be a 40% rise in the number of outlet coffee shops by 2020. At the moment, there are close to 19,000 cafes, close to triple the amount that existed in 2010 at 7000. Property specialist CBRE has been backing the movement, as they said “Britain has well and truly adopted a cafe culture with the number of outlets rising twentyfold since 1998.” Almost 2 billions cups of coffee are purchased from UK cafes a year and many independent outlets are actually keeping up with the giants like Starbucks and Costa.

As Analyst Frances Perrin said, “We have seen the hunted become hunters with the emergence of a new stronger independent sector challenging big brands for market share.”

At the moment, there are about 1400 independent coffee shops in the UK and this number is expected to double by 2020.

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Akeroyd Moves from UK Fashion Label to Versace

By Jessie Wilkens on May 25, 2016 in

Jonathan Akeroyd has moved from UK label Alexander McQueen to the Italian design house. Akeroyd previously worked at Harrods to help them expand and improve the McQueen brand. He helped to manage it through the difficult times when Alexander McQueen died in 2010.

As fashion business expert Eric Musgrave said, “It is very interesting to see a Brit hired to run a top luxury Italian label. He is certainly regarded as a very capable manager.”

He will be moving to Milan next month when he joins Versace, the label founded by Gianni Versace in 1978.

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Kindle Direct Publishing Just Might be the Key

By Jessie Wilkens on May 2, 2016 in

ebook-551204_960_720Most writers have been discouraged at one point or another by rejection letters. Some preserver and others give up. Mark Dawson is in the former group. Two years ago, he uploaded a manuscript onto Kindle Direct Publishing and he is now earning a “high six-figure” salary doing so.

It all began years ago when Dawson, a trained lawyer, published a novel The Art of Falling Apart in the year 2000. Published by Pan Books, the book didn’t sell well. Then, in 2014 he was inspired by a friend who used the Kindle Direct Publishing service.

The software program is offered on Amazon’s e-reader Kindle and allows authors to upload their work to the online store within minutes. Authors will then get paid royalties of either 35 or 70% depending on what they charge for their work.

While ebooks often cost less than print books, this still could offer authors a nice way to make money. Most royalties on books pay 12.5% with a publishing house.

As Mark said, “My friend was having great contact with readers, he was getting paid quite quickly in contrast to traditional publishing, which pays out quarterly or yearly. It was the impetus I needed to get going again.”

During that year, Mark then published six books which he managed to write during his daily commute from Salisbury to London. And now, he has actually become a stay-at-home novelist. As he said, “I’ll write in a coffee shop for a few hours then go for a run and pick up my kids. When I was a lawyer I would get in when my kids had already gone to sleep, but now I can play a part in their lives.”

He estimates that his novels have been downloaded more than a million times, although have of those were given away for free.

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Welsh Brewer Sees Great Sales…in Coffee

By Jessie Wilkens on April 10, 2016 in

Interestingly, the Welsh brewer SA Brain had a great boost in coffee sales last year with 34% growth. Their chain of coffee shops, called Coffee#1 has seen great success.

The Cardiff-based brewer sponsors the Welch rugby team and produces beers like Bread of Heaven and Brains SA. Their total turnover for the year to September, 2015 grew 3%.

The brewery, however, has taken a loss for their beer. They had a pre-tax loss of £5.3million, down from £837,000 the previous year. As Chief Executive Scott Waddington said, “This has been a year where we have achieved a great deal in terms of implementing a range of initiatives that will benefit future years, but we also had to react to a subdued trading environment.”

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Women Earn Less Than Men During Their Lifetime

By Jessie Wilkens on March 13, 2016 in

According to official data by Robert Half UK, women will earn approximately £300,000 less in their working lives than men. They earn roughly £5,700 less a year than do men, so that, over their career, men will earn on average £1,556,568 before taxes and women will earn £1,258,504.

Annual earnings for women grew 1.4% between 2014 and 2015, while male annual earnings grew by 1.6%.

As Katy Tanner, the director for the Robert Half UK said, “International Women’s Day [on Tuesday March 11 2016] provides a platform to highlight the importance for rewarding all employees fairly on the basis of their contribution to the organization, rather than their gender or indeed any other point of difference.”

As a government spokesman said, “This government has gone further than ever before in tackling the gender pay gap. Only last month we unveiled a raft of measures requiring companies with more than 250 employees to publish their gender pay gap and we are extending that duty across the public sector.”

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Pippa Middleton Become Dassi Bikes Ambassador

By Jessie Wilkens on February 19, 2016 in

We all know that Pippa Middleton doesn’t just have a great body because of genetics; she is an athlete who works hard to accomplish the goals she has. Now, Dassi Bikes is recognizing those accomplishments, tapping her as its ambassador.

At the Bike Show which takes place at the ExCel center in East London, Dassi just launched their first “totally made in Britain high performance cycle” and, as Dassi’s founder Stuart Abbott said, “We are talking to her about standing up for British manufacturing and riding more events.”

Middleton chose a Dassi for her 3000 mile bike race across America in July of 2014. Abbott launched Dassi in 2011.

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