Care is not a traditional business value. Peruse the classics and you’ll see boldness, passion, honesty and perhaps integrity, but not the C-word.
Thankfully things are changing – as Bloom & Wild demonstrates. This flower retailer meets tech company is undoubtedly growing relentlessly. Yet its business values would disorient yesteryear’s ‘manly’ entrepreneurs. “We’re obsessed with care,” says founder Aron Gelbard. “It’s vital to me and it’s a key trait I look for when hiring.”

Lucy Locket Loves makes colourful fitness clothing and accessories for women. The Derbyshire business caters for a wide range of body shapes, with sizes spanning six to 26. Former personal trainer Lucy Arnold founded the company in 2018 after suffering a back injury. While recovering, she created leggings to sell to former clients. Customers include Made In Chelsea star Rosie Fortescue and the company launched a collection with Strictly’s Dianne Buswell last year.

SoPost has built a digital sampling platform which enables over 200 brands, including Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and Unilever, to run data-driven online sampling campaigns. SoPost’s technology is available in 20 markets, utilising a global distribution network to ship samples direct to participating consumers’ homes…

Business origin stories are often intriguing and inspiring, but that of free-range meat-box supplier field&flower is even better – it’s sublime. Because co-founders James Mansfield and James Flower launched their £13m food business in 2012 not with a glitzy website or fancy app, but with a single cow. The two James’s (we’ll stick to surnames from now on for clarity) met at agricultural college, but this wasn’t your typical farmer-farmer friendship. Mansfield is a South London lad who somehow ended up studying agriculture:

Pizza oven maker Ooni’s year-on-year growth is turbo-charged, but the stat that most exhilarates co- founder and co-ceo Darina Garland is not directly related to revenue at all. The number that makes her happiest is the company’s Employee Net Promoter Score, which is a whopping 74. The global average eNPS – a measure of employee engagement – is 12, with anything above 30 regarded as outstanding. So 74 is an outlier that proves that Ooni’s team absolutely loves working there.

Offering exotic escapes, from jungle adventures to beach retreats and ‘big five’ safaris, this online tour operator specialises in the luxury travel market. Chief executive Nena Chaletzos founded the company after becoming frustrated with the complexity of tailor-making a luxury holiday. The company developed technology that makes the process of multi component trip building easier. […]