Last year, LOVESPACE, a distinctive storage company founded by Streetcar co-founder and entrepreneur Brett Akker, won the Startup Awards’ Crowdfunded Business of the Year in 2014 after capturing over £1.2 million in early-stage funding and £1.6 million during its equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube. Since then, the company has expanded nationwide, hit 10,000 customers, and secured more funds.
Now, Akker is ready to share details about the company’s growth. During a recent interview with Crowdcube, he opened up about LOVESPACE’s progress:
“We’ve grown to 25 full-time employees (including some top senior level hires) and two big milestones were achieved early in the second quarter; we reached 10,000 customers and 50,000 boxes handled.
“In May, we moved into our new 25,000 square foot warehouse which was good time, as one month later we had our busiest day ever, with customer collections in 52 towns across the country.
“We also secured another investment round of£1.1 million, a large amount of which was from our strategic partner, Workspace. In addition, we launched LOVESPACE’s enterprise product to allow our business customers to store archive boxes for significantly less than 1 per box per month.”
Revealing what has been the single biggest highly for the business since the win, Brett shared:
“It’s got to be the day we got the keys to our new warehouse, or ‘fortress’ as we lovingly like to call it. It’s big and surprisingly shiny. But most importantly it enables us to store the thousands of boxes that are coming our way!”
In regards to winning the award, Akker added:
“We were absolutely delighted to win the Crowdfunded Business of the Year award. It’s always fantastic to be recognized for your hard work – and we’ve worked very hard, so it meant a lot.
“Competition was tough – we were even up against crowdfunding platform Seedrs, who had raised money from their own platform!
“Although it does take a long time to fill out the application forms, it’s actually a very useful process as it forces you to document your achievements and targets. And, if you are fortunate enough to be a finalist, or even a winner, it adds a huge amount of credibility to your brand and is great for building team morale.”
Startups that wish to enter this year’s contest can do so here.
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