Waitrose has announced that it will expand its Deliveroo service to 110 new shops across the country with up to 400 new Waitrose shop roles created by the roll out. It will increase the number of Waitrose shops on Deliveroo to 150 in total by the end of the summer and is expected to take the number of people who are able to enjoy Waitrose food on Deliveroo to around 13 million. The partnership is a central part of Deliveroo’s expansion strategy across the UK. Customers will be able to order from an increased range of between 750 to 1,000…
Author: sme-admin
Mathys & Squire announces plant Biophilica, producer of leather alternative made from urban plant waste, as the winner of the firm’s world IP day SME pitch event. The Mathys & Squire Scaleup Quarter team hosted a virtual pitch event on Monday 26 April 2021 to celebrate World IP Day. The theme for 2021 was ‘IP and SMEs: Taking your ideas to market’. With SMEs making up over 99% of all UK businesses and contributing around half of all business turnover in the UK, the importance of supporting such businesses in their growth and development is clear for driving economic recovery and…
Boardies®, a privately owned, London-based business that designs, manufactures and sells distinctive swimwear products around the world, has today been honoured with a prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade 2021. The brand, which was launched in 2014 by Nick Crook (a former Levi’s, K-Swiss, Reebok and Pentland Brands executive), has successfully negotiated the challenges of Covid-19, pivoting to a direct to consumer strategy, resulting in a six-fold increase in online sales. Despite the pandemic and its restrictions on travel and holidays, Boardies® products have continued to sell to customers around the world, especially in the USA, Canada, Australia,…
BookingLive, the leading online booking and reservation software provider, is offering independent hospitality and hair and beauty venues its booking and scheduling system for free. Having successfully piloted the scheduling solutions with local government groups across the country throughout the pandemic, BookingLive are again offering their free scheduling and booking solution to organisations in need. As lockdown restrictions begin to ease, many independent hospitality and hair and beauty venues are expecting a surge in booking requests. To help cope with the increased demand, BookingLive is offering its booking and scheduling system for free, providing hospitality and hair and beauty venues the opportunity…
Does the fear of missing out on vital work calls stop you from taking holiday? Are you worried about keeping customers engaged while you are away? There are times when an out of office email or answerphone message just won’t do the business. Luckily, there is an alternative, one that could even make your business thrive in your absence. The Virtual Business Centre has been providing remote business services for 22 years. Run by Wiltshire-businesswoman Claire Brewerton, the centre has grown over the past year as more companies seek to outsource their telephone answering, telemarketing, and other related admin tasks.…
Aspen Waite Radio is going live in Wales on Saturday 1 May 2021. The home of work/life balance, Aspen Waite Radio has already been making waves since its launch last July. Despite being less than a year old, the station is ready and raring to go, and as the country continues to ease out of lockdown, Aspen Waite Radio has arrived on DAB at exactly the right time. From Saturday, over 2.5 million listeners across Cardiff, South Wales, Bristol and Somerset will be able to tune in. Providing the latest business news, insightful interviews and great music, Aspen Waite Radio…
Whilst hospitality is one of the industries worst affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, a Leyton-based entrepreneur has revealed how he has used lockdown to re-shape his Unholy Bagels business to bring a little piece of New York to London. Unholy Bagels, a name which reflects the initial period when Martin Frimet started to bake the bagels and struggled to create the infamous holes in the middle, was founded in August 2018. For the first 18 months Martin began by taking his bagels to markets. Then, in March 2020, he took over a kitchen in a café and moved his business…
Nora Beqaj, Business Director, The Nest UK, shares some insights into how to develop a start-up whilst maintaining the customer as the focal point and how to leverage data to optimise customer experience performance The need for a new company to put their customer at the heart of every action they take can’t be overstated enough. It can be all too easy to presume customers will understand and adopt a product or service as initially intended. However, scenarios of use and imagined paths customers will take will not be perfect, and will evolve throughout a product’s lifespan. This is at the core of the…
Allica Bank has launched its direct-to-SME banking offering and appointed three Relationship Managers and one New Business Executive to support the launch. The investment marks the bank’s mission to ‘bring back the local Relationship Manager’ for established small and medium-sized businesses – a group that typically is no longer offered a relationship manager with deep local knowledge and SME lending expertise. In response to the increased importance of relationship managers following Covid, Allica’s focus in its new direct banking offering is on strengthening its personalised and tailored service with the very best technology that makes customers lives easier. It has seen strong growth in lending in the last year and plans to offer £500 million in committed SME loan offers this year. These appointments mark the start of Allica’s ambitions in the direct-to-SME segment, which will see relationships managers rolled out nationwide, bringing local tailored support to Britain’s…
Time is nearly up on lockdown and staying in is no longer the new going out! We’ve missed going out and meeting people; socialising as opposed to socially distancing; dressing up instead of masking up, but now the Frow Show is back to help everyone remember how to laugh, giggle, chuckle, snicker and enjoy some comedy relief! Mike Sengelow, the Frow Show’s director and co-producer, said: “During lockdown, we’ve missed performing as much as people have missed going to live performances, so we’re really excited about this show. We think that people have been craving the chance to share some…