With lockdown coming to an end, we thought this is a good time to showcase all the outstanding founders we have interviewed for our ‘How I Grew My Brand’ podcast series. Click here to listen to the inspiring brand stories from the founders of Bloom & Wild, Mindful Chef, Proper, Deliciously Ella, Neom Organics, Sipsmith, Camden Town

Nicola Elliott has told how a ‘magic’ tincture created for aching footballers inspired her to launch wellbeing brand Neom Organics. ‘My husband is a sports teacher and I used to blend oils for him when he came back from playing football,’ says Elliott in the third of Piper’s ‘7, 17, 70’ podcast interviews with leading

His brand pioneered the concept of ‘letterbox flowers’ and has gone on to sell more than 50 million flowers across the UK, France and Germany. But Aron Gelbard, co-founder and CEO of Bloom & Wild, has revealed how his revolutionary idea nearly fell at the very first hurdle.    ‘When we started, we assumed there

She is the author of one of the fastest selling debut cookbooks ever and creator of one of the country’s most popular food and lifestyle brands. But Ella Mills, founder and creative director of Deliciously Ella, has revealed how she never anticipated a career in business, let alone as the face of her eponymous empire.

In the latest episode of our current podcast series, Jasper Cuppaidge, founder of Camden Town Brewery, talks about the impact of his decision to sell his brand to AB InBev, the world’s biggest drinks company.   ‘Joining AB, I don’t have any regrets. However, it [the day the sale was announced] was one of the

Fairfax Hall and Sam Galsworthy, two of the three co-founders of premium craft gin brand Sipsmith, have told how an ‘insane level of naivety’ helped them to rewrite 200 years of history and build a new gin distillery in London.  Hall and Galsworthy are childhood friends from Cornwall who had been ‘nicking gin from the drinks cabinet

Giles Humphries and Myles Hopper, two of the three Mindful Chef co-founders, have told how learning to ‘relinquish power’ has helped drive their healthy recipe box brand to even greater heights. Giles Humphries and Myles Hopper, two of the three Mindful Chef co-founders, have told how learning to ‘relinquish power’ has helped drive their healthy

Radha Vyas and Lee Thompson, co-founders of Flash Pack, have told how inexperience of the travel sector proved to be a key component in helping the brand to disrupt the $8.8 trillion industry.‘It’s an advantage not to have worked in the industry which you want to disrupt because you apply a different approach to problem

Steve Moore and Paul Barham, co-founders of social darts chain Flight Club, have told how they were forced to raise £160,000 in an afternoon after their bank lending failed. ‘Our builders were going to go off site, so we basically had six hours to borrow money. It was horrible,’ says Moore in the latest podcast

Amelia Harvey, co-founder of The Collective, has told how she applied learnings from her early career at Kellogg’s and L’Oréal when launching her gourmet yoghurt brand. ‘Even though they’re huge businesses, they were very entrepreneurial in terms of the way they gave you the responsibility to carve out your own role,’ says Harvey in the

Charlie Bigham, founder of his eponymous gourmet food brand, has revealed how a ‘painful correction’ during the 2007 financial crisis forced his business to sharply refocus its priorities.   ‘Our stuff was just taken off the shelves because everybody panicked,’ says Bigham in the latest podcast from Piper’s second season of ‘How I Grew My

Turtle Bay founder Ajith Jayawickrema, who moved to the UK from Sri Lanka at the age of 15, has revealed how singer Leona Lewis unknowingly inspired him to launch his highly successful Caribbean restaurant chain. ‘My girls were young and we were watching X Factor – and a girl called Leona Lewis won it,’ says

Alex Reilley tells us about how a ‘Game of Thrones’ approach to business, which involved defining ‘the Cause’, enabled him and his team to turn Loungers from a small café-bar chain into a hugely successful nationwide brand. ‘The biggest challenge was dealing with the scale,’ reveals Alex in the second of our ‘7, 17, 70’