Velocity Commerce has rapidly grown from a small start up run from a home garage to being recognised as the 92nd fastest growing company in Europe in the Financial Times 1000: Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies. Read PJ & Eddie’s story to learn just how they’ve done it….

PROPERCORN’S HQ buzzes with youthful energy. Stroll through the front door, past the doorbell emblazoned with the words ‘Done Properly’, and you find yourself in one of London’s more life-affirming offices. The ‘guilt-free’ popcorn brand’s co-founders Cassandra Stavrou, an ex-ad agency employee, and Ryan Kohn, an entrepreneur since university, tell us how it all began…

It’s not about having gleaming offices, hiring tons of staff and shouting about how successful you are. These can be the trappings of ego-trippers. Effective entrepreneurship is more often about coming up with an idea, proving the concept as cheaply as possible, and scaling it as quickly as possible.

Beijing-born twins Jake Xu and Shane Carnell-Xu launched this men’s cosmetics brand in 2019 after raising funds from angel investors Sally Preston and Neil Mather of Kiddylicious, the children’s snack business. Bestsellers in Shakeup’s skincare and makeup range include moisturiser, under eye concealer and face masks. The brand is stocked by national and overseas retailers, such as Harvey Nichols, Superdrug and Australia’s Myer, and it recently launched its new Face 4ward range in China. The Xu brothers previously set up READY, a creative agency based in Bath.

In 2010, James Hyde and James Strachan built a cloud based e-commerce fulfilment platform in the corner of a Cambridgeshire warehouse. They now operate fulfilment centres across the UK, the Netherlands and America. Last year, it added 92 recruits and expanded operations with a new 200,000 sq ft fulfilment centre in Northampton. The business continues to build on its proprietary technology platform, enabling retailers a single global view of operations.

Alexia Inge co-founded Cult Beauty with no funding, during a deep global recession. Today, they employ over 130 people and turn over £104m. With coronavirus creating such huge uncertainty, we thought we’d sit down with Alexia to hear more about how savvy entrepreneurs can find opportunities at the unlikeliest of times…