We had both been really looking forward to meeting Simon since we won the Growing Business competition and couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. We feel that our company ethos is very similar to Bulldog’s and are sure he will be able to help us push boundaries in the baby skincare market as Bulldog have done for natural men’s skincare.
Our first mentoring meeting with Simon Duffy took place at Bulldog HQ last month. We spent a couple of insightful hours with Simon, talking through our journey so far, how we created our brand and telling him about us and our and products so that he could identify the areas where we need help. His knowledge and enthusiasm for the natural skincare market is invaluable to us and it really helped to bounce ideas off someone with such expertise in the field.
We discussed our business plan with Simon and explained where we are now and our plans going forward. Our main goals are to secure a contract with a major retailer in the UK within the next year, (in particular targeting John Lewis and Waitrose), and plan to expand further in the overseas market.
We were interested to hear about the early days of Bulldog, and how Simon prepared for his first meetings with big retailers. This was insightful and helped us to understand the processes we need to go through as well as gaining an understanding of how the big retailers operate.
We came away from our meeting with an increased level of confidence about our brand, products and positioning and feel that Simon can add real value by helping us devise a strategy to achieve our goals.
We are looking forward to our next meeting at the end of this month where we will be focusing on the specific areas and strategic plans that will enable us to move forward in a growing market and hopefully we will be able to place ourselves in the perfect position to start expanding very soon.
Organic Monkey was set up a year ago by two entrepreneurial mums, Heidi
and Claudine, who identified a gap in the market for a truly organic
range of baby skin care products. Since launching in June 2010, the
business has grown steadily. It now has around 20 stockists and
sales from their own website are steadily increasing.
Find out more about the Growing Business export mentoring scheme