The Startup

Nadia Hassan and Rob Fletcher had been friends since university, where Nadia studied engineering and Rob studied economics and mostly played five-a-side football. Ten years later, they were both doing jobs they didn't enjoy: Nadia designed packaging for a supermarket chain, and Rob did the accounts for a car parts company. They complained about it every Thursday in the same pub in Hackney, until one evening Nadia stopped complaining and put a pair of trainers on the table.

They were made almost entirely from recycled plastic bottles and old tires. She had designed them herself, in her spare time, and they were surprisingly comfortable. "Millions of trainers end up in landfill every year," she said. "These don't have to. I can make the product. I need someone who can make the numbers work." Rob looked at the trainers for a long time. Then he asked her what size she had made them in.

Six months later, they had both handed in their notice and turned Rob's uncle's garage in East London into a workshop. They called the company Second Step. The early days were exhausting. Nadia did the design and production with two second-hand machines and a lot of patience; Rob did everything else, from the website to the deliveries, which he made on a bicycle with a trailer. They made a lot of mistakes, but they made them quickly and learned from all of them.

Their first real break came when a well-known running blogger wore a pair in a video and described them as "the most comfortable thing I've ever put on my feet that used to be a bottle." Orders went from twenty a week to four hundred in a fortnight. Suddenly they had to hire staff, find a supplier who could deliver plastic in large quantities and meet deadlines that would have seemed impossible a month earlier.

To grow properly, they needed money. After dozens of meetings, an investment fund called Northbridge agreed to put in two million pounds. The contract would be signed on a Friday. On the Wednesday, Nadia and Rob signed a lease on a proper factory in Dagenham and ordered three new machines, on the understanding that the money was coming.

On Thursday afternoon, Rob got a phone call. Northbridge had changed its strategy and was pulling out. There was no explanation, just an apology and a very short email. Rob sat in the garage for twenty minutes without telling anyone. When he finally told Nadia, she didn't say anything at all. She just went over to the whiteboard and started writing down every debt they had.

The next three weeks were the hardest of their lives. They had to make decisions they had always hoped to avoid. They canceled one of the three machines, which cost them a penalty. They asked their twelve employees to accept a pay freeze, and to their surprise every one of them agreed. Rob rang every investor who had ever said no to them and asked them to think again. Nadia did her best to keep production going, sleeping in the garage on more than one occasion.

In the end, the solution came from somewhere they hadn't expected. Rob had written a short, honest post online about what had happened, explaining that they were not asking for charity, just for people to buy trainers. Within forty-eight hours, they had sold more pairs than in the previous three months. A small group of customers suggested a crowdfunding campaign, and then helped to run it. It raised nearly six hundred thousand pounds from over four thousand people.

It wasn't two million, but it was enough. They moved into the factory in Dagenham six months later than planned, with two machines instead of three, and a wall in the entrance covered with the names of every person who had invested. On the day it opened, Nadia gave a short speech. "We did a lot of things wrong," she said. "But we did one thing right. We made something people actually wanted, and we made friends of the people who wanted it."

Rob still does the accounts. He also still makes the occasional delivery on his bicycle, mainly, he says, to stay humble. And every Thursday, he and Nadia still go to the same pub in Hackney. These days, though, they don't complain about their jobs. They argue about trainers instead.