UKFT Rise subscriber Pea turns the bedroom of your childhood dreams into a reality. This award-winning children’s bedding brand uses 100% cotton bedding sets, wall stickers and joyful prints to inspire and fire the imagination of little ones. Thanks to the power of creativity, the founders Claire and Paul transform bedrooms into new worlds, where everything becomes possible.

Read Claire’s feature with UKFT Rise below:

Claire and Paul founded From Pea in 2019.

• Company launched in:June 2019

• Company based in: Winchester

• How many people are in your team: It’s just the two of us. Together we are Pea.

• Our background is: We met in 2013 at a creative agency where we worked together for five years, becoming close friends. I’m a former TV Producer, turned entrepreneur with an MBA and over 15 years’ creative leadership experience. Paul is a graphic designer and illustrator with over 13 years’ experience creating and delivering brands across a range of sectors.

• We decided to start our business because:Like all good ideas it was born out of looking for something that didn’t exist. We believe childhood is an adventure lived through the imagination. Our design-led bedding sets are made for dreamers. Offering worlds full of story-starters created to inspire little imaginations. To tell stories, to problem-solve and to dream. Because well-travelled imaginations lead to tomorrow’s creative thinkers. And one day our children will change the world.

Enchanted Forest

• Something that really helped in getting our business off the ground is: Two things. Firstly having each other. We are an amazing team. We trust each other implicitly and are brutally honest. We are two peas in a pod. Our values, vision and worth ethic are so entirely aligned. We also bring contrasting and complementary skill sets. Paul is the creative thinker that brings our imaginations to life, and I’m the doer that makes it all happen. Secondly, talking to people. We’ve never been frightened to reach out to people who inspire us. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And as a result, we’ve been lucky enough to have an amazing sounding board of successful people along the way such as Us Two Co-founder Mills, Trunki founder Rob Law, and Mumsnet Founder, Justine Roberts.

• Our biggest success so far has been: It would be easy to say the awards we’ve won, or the brand partnerships we’ve achieved. But it has to be starting from scratch, creating bedding for the imaginative and building a brand on a mission to grow creativity in children. There is nobody out there doing what we do. Our designs and our ethos are entirely unique. That makes it hard because we are working to get the attention of those who are less comfortable adopting something new. Brands weren’t talking about imagination when we came into the market, but that has slowly become a more common language and we’re proudly confident that we influenced this. Once adults start to think about the role of their own imagination, they’ll understand intuitively why it’s even more important for kids.

• An area of business we’d like to gain more knowledge of: It’s hard to pick just one area because we never stop learning. As small business founders we have to wear many many hats on a daily basis, and we have to learn from our mistakes. It came to our attention recently that there is another part to the jack of all trades quote and that is “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. As an entrepreneur, this is actually a huge advantage. And as individuals we are committed to learning, adapting, and growing constantly.  That said, if we had to pick one area of business to gain more knowledge of it would probably be funding and scaling-up for future growth.

Behind the scenes

• A brand we find inspiring is: There are so many brands we find inspiring for different reasons. But I think we’d have to go with Trunki. Way before Pea was even a glint in our eyes, Trunki were disrupting the concept of travel for children. They created a product that made travel exciting. And one that made children feel part of the whole experience of travel, not just the destination. Their innovation made navigating airports fun for kids and less stressful for parents. But it was not an easy journey. Trunki Founder, Rob’s determination is such an inspiration to us. He has overcome challenge after challenge. There is an amazing quote in his Trunki book where Rob says “while there are many ways to fight battles, the conclusion I’ve come to is it’s best to stay anchored in the present. Focus on those problems you can solve in the here and now because leaping into the future risks muddying your thinking”. We’ve come to realise, your role as a founder is to solve problems – continuously. So, when you’re running a small business and trying to build a small brand, it helps to have this powerful reminder to focus simply on your next step.

To the moon

• One thing we wish we’d known before launching is: It’s a marathon not a sprint. Naively we had no idea how slow organic growth would be. Instagram gives the illusion “if you build it, they will come”. But it takes hard work, dedication and most importantly passion. We are an entirely bootstrapped business with a team of two, which means we literally do everything from design to packing the orders and everything in between.

• Success for us looks like: Building a team. Our vision has always been to become the number one children’s bedding brand. But we can’t do that alone. We’ve learned you have to mark the moments. Celebrate the small incremental wins we have achieved together along the way. But when we are able to grow a team of our own and be joined by other talented, like-minded individuals, who care as much about our mission as we do, that will feel like we have really started to achieve success

Discover Pea’s website:

PEA

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