Can Dragons’ Den star’s pal turn Middleton firm around?

The Duchess of Cambridge’s brother James Middleton is trying to put the oomph into Boomf and has hired a new chief executive officer to transform his marshmallow company’s fortunes.

On January 1 Sophie Dummer was quietly appointed in the role. Sophie, 40, was previously a commercial director of the personalised greeting card company Moonpig, whose founder Nick Jenkins is one of the stars of Dragons’ Den.

Intriguingly, Jenkins is a major investor in Boomf.

In November, I revealed that James’s future brotherin-law, hedge fund manager James Matthews, had spent £100,000 bailing out Boomf, ahead of presenting Pippa Middleton with a £250,000 art deco-style sparkler in the Lake District in July.

Pippa’s beau’s investment in Boomf, which prints Instagram pictures on marshmallows and sells boxes of nine ‘magical’ sweets for £15, was part of a fundraising round. In October, it emerged the confectionary company lost almost £1million last year and increased its bank debt by taking out a £500,000 loan with Barclays. Boomf’s new CeO Dummer is used to choppy waters as she was a crew member on the Qingdao Yacht which took part in the Clipper Round The World race. Middleton started his first venture, the now-defunct Cake Kit Company, with an £11,000 loan from his uncle Gary Goldsmith, who was caught in a cocaine and vice sting two years later. Perhaps James is hoping that the Moonpig magic will rub off on him. he founded Boomf in 2013 and named it ‘after the noise a marshmallow makes when it falls through your letterbox’. It took Jenkins five years of losses and four rounds of fundraising before his Moongpig website, founded in 2000, eventually made a profit. he sold it to Photobox.com for £120million in 2011. Mr Middleton can but dream . . .