PROBLEMS SOLVED
The five winners of the Emerging New Business category in this year’s SFA National Small Business Awards care about what their customers really need and are being innovative in delivering on that
GET THE SHIFTS
Based in Shannon, Co Clare, Get the Shifts matches temporary workers with hospitality clients across Ireland using an on-demand web and mobile platform.
The start-up’s disruptive technology helps clients not only in the sourcing of staff, but also in the managing of those they hire. A business can browse through about 600 trained, pre-screened Get the Shifts employees (known as Superstars) and offer a shift from an app on their phone. Superstars accept the shifts they want up to three hours beforehand and check in and out through GPS.
Hannah Wrixon founded the company in 2016 further to spotting the need for such a service while working in the hospitality sector. “Effective staffing is a historic problem for hospitality businesses, from trying to forecast the right number of staff on any given day to combating no-show employees and talent shortages. The reality is that businesses are in constant need of reliable, trained staff,” she says.
Everyone with a profile on the Get the Shifts platform has gone through a recruitment procedure and bespoke training programme. In addition, the Superstars have the opportunity to up-skill by availing of e-learning programmes provided by Waterfordbased company Dulann at about 10% of the standard cost.
Get the Shifts is on track to secure 60% of the casual hospitality market in Ireland, further to filling over 20,000 shifts since it was founded. It services hotels, bars, stadiums, festivals and catering companies throughout the country, but most of its activity is in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. Its clients include Aviva Stadium, Thomond Park, Workers Beer Company, Aiken Promotions, The Right Catering Company and Dynamic Events.
GYM + COFFEE
Friends Diarmuid McSweeney, Niall Horgan and Karl Swaine decided to start an online business together in Dublin in 2017 after identifying different lifestyle trends while living in Australia and the US.
“We are first and foremost a predominantly online, Irish-designed and owned athleisure wear company. Athleisure wear is a category of clothing that can be worn anywhere from the office to the gym and when going for a coffee,” says McSweeney. “Since starting out, what we are consistently tapping into is the trend of socialising around exercise. And so we came up with the brand idea ‘Make Life Richer’. The clothing is now one element of an overall concept.”
In practice, this translates into Gym + Coffee having built an online community
of 45,000 people and each year running about 24 free exercise events. “These could be a morning run, a yoga class, just everyday healthy activities. People come together around those activities. We are looking at doing bigger adventures too from now on,” says McSweeney.
The Gym + Coffee team has designed all of the clothing and manufacturing is outsourced to partners in China and Singapore. Last summer, an opportunity arose to have a pop-up store in Dundrum Shopping Centre for two weeks. This has since become a permanent outlet.
“We found that we acquired a lot of new customers and there was no cannibalisation of our online sales,” says McSweeney. “We are proud of our products. The athleisure category is booming and will continue to globally for
the next few years.”
In the longer term, McSweeney sees an opportunity to use the Gym + Coffee platform and brand for various things connected with its message, including possibly through collaboration with other companies.
PEACHY LEAN
Sharon Keegan has designed special leggings that offer support to women, inspired by her own need to look and feel good in the gym after having a baby and suffering post-natal depression in 2015. Having previously run a food business called Pieminister, Keegan went to University College Dublin to study
“Since starting out, what we are consistently tapping into is the trend of socialising around exercise. And so we came up with the brand idea ‘Make Life Richer’”
innovation and product design to set her on the right path.
“I wanted to create something that was made of high quality material but was soft enough so you can bend and work out while wearing them. The leggings are like a combination of tights and Spanx – soft like tights, but with enough hold to give you a streamlined shape,” she explains.
Now women of all shapes and sizes, including celebrities such as Vogue Williams, are backing the brand with its distinctive heart shape on the bum. Within a year, Peachy Lean has built up 14,000 followers on Instagram and sold around 4,000 units in Ireland and 24 other countries. Keegan works from her kitchen table and outsources the manufacturing to China.
The community aspect of the brand has been central to its popularity. A campaign called ‘I am Peachy Lean’ called out to women on Instagram to get involved in a photo shoot. Nearly 650 women registered their interest and Keegan decided to turn it into an event at the DCU Ryan Academy in Citywest, Dublin.
“We took women in groups of ten into a room and asked them to tell their stories as well as put compliments on stickers on each other. Twelve winners were picked for their unique stories and are now brand ambassadors.” One of these is Trisha Lewis, who lost 100lb in a year and was on The Late Late Show in January.
THE UX STUDIO
Established in Galway two years ago by Rachel O’Donnell, The UX Studio specialises in building digital products and interfaces by focusing on both user needs and the business objectives of its clients.
“Instead of sitting at a boardroom table deciding what end users want, we ask them directly and involve them throughout the process,” O’Donnell explains.
One of The UX Studio’s key projects to date which illustrates this has been with med-tech multinational Medtronic. In the clean rooms at its Galway facility, there are multiple machines with different interfaces. “Having numerous interfaces from different vendors was not intuitive to the users’ needs. This was getting in the way of Medtronic’s two core goals – that of reducing downtime and maintaining quality,” says O’Donnell. “We spoke to operators, engineers, R&D people as well as maintenance staff actually doing the job on a day-to-day basis and defined a set of requirements.”
The team highlighted to Medtronic management that they needed to consider colour blindness, for example, and got around this problem by using icons and words instead of colours.
The UX Studio’s proof of concept with Medtronic has led to referrals in the med-tech sector. Now employing seven people, it also works with SMEs in Dublin, helping them with e-commerce solutions. “We don’t design run-of-the-mill standard websites; it is more about functionality,” says O’Donnell.
“An auctioneering firm came to us saying they wanted a website, but we asked them to tell us about their business and the problems they had. One was the fact they didn’t have time to upload property listings on different platforms. We looked at how their users want to absorb information and found they had a short attention span and preferred to watch rather than read. The solution we came up with allows the firm to upload photos and a video for each property on multiple platforms.”
ZARRDIA
With over 20 years’ experience between them working in IT companies, Finn Killeen and Martin Davis set up Zarrdia in 2016 because they are “fundamentally passionate about helping people”, according to Killeen.
“What we found was that the IT industry is predicated on sales vendors and the agendas of the larger vendors in the world which provide software and hardware. We felt there was nobody sitting on the side of the customer in these conversations,” he says.
“We can sit with a customer and help them to make very strategic and tactical IT decisions, whether it is in relation to the management of their existing IT legacy estate, moving into the Devops and cloud native environments or a hybrid solution thereof.” “We already have 11 major clients who can see we are helping them to make decisions that aren’t based on our own sales agendas”
The backbone of Zarrdia’s business is to focus on areas that will give clients the most competitive advantage and how to use IT to enable that. “Technology is changing at such a pace and we’re the worst industry in the world for following buzzwords. We call it ambulance chasing when customers feel they have to spend money on different types of solutions,” says Killeen.
“This is wrong because every business is at a different maturity level. For some it is the right decision to leave the IT estate they have as it is, while others should jump at new technologies.
“What we try to do is develop small pieces of work to demonstrate what we’re about. From there, things have snowballed. A ten-day piece of work becomes an 80-day engagement, for example. We already have 11 major clients who can see we are helping them to make decisions that aren’t based on our own sales agendas.”
Zarrdia generated over €1.5m in revenues in its first full year (2018). It employs 11 people and also uses up to 30 contractors on a flexible basis when required.