Real Innovation Awards 2020 Shortlist

Bloom & Wild

Flower delivery has been part of the traditional florist offering for decades – but Bloom & Wild has capitalised on consumer demand and emerged as the market leader by offering a different and better business model than the long-established first movers. The idea came from founder Aron Gelbard’s “so-so experiences [of] sending flowers and [wondering] why it couldn’t be better, especially on mobile.” In refining the value proposition, Gelbard borrowed an idea from snack-box company Graze, which uses an innovative letterbox delivery model, to resolve one of the main pain points with sending flowers: the recipient has to be home to receive them.

A direct-to-consumer online florist (“carefully hand-packed and sent in bud [so they last longer] in boxes that fit through the letterbox”, the company differentiates itself through emotive branding, an improved user experience (seamless online ordering) and letterbox delivery. Its disruptive model has catapulted the company ahead of incumbents: in 2019, Deloitte reported that it had grown revenues by a factor of 40 over the last three years. Bloom & Wild was not first to the flower delivery market, but it has blossomed into the best.

@BloomandWild

When Down Dog was launched in 2015, the online personal fitness industry was highly competitive and ‘digital’ yoga was becoming an increasingly crowded space. But, being yoga practitioners themselves, Down Dog co-founders Benjamin Simon and Carlos Ormachea identified three key areas where they believed they could create additional value: delivering a yoga experience that was as close to a studio one as possible existing videos and apps made users select their own yoga sequences from a limited set of poses, which lacked the element of discovery of a ‘live’ studio class; using more appropriate music (instead of the usual ‘elevator music’); and enabling a highly customisable practice. They then developed an app that provides over 300,000 yoga sequences each time a user logs in that is also highly customisable by yoga type, duration, level, pace, music and even narrator voice. The result? Down Dog is now the highest‐rated app for yoga at home (over 1.7 million downloads in April 2020), available in nine languages, and boasts a near-five-star rating from 230,000 online reviews. Asked to account for the company’s success, Ormachea cites a quote by Archimedes: “Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world” – as Down Dog is doing in homes everywhere, every day.

@downdogapp https://twitter.com/downdogapp

Founded by James Watt and Martin Dickie in Aberdeen, Scotland in April 2007, BrewDog could hardly claim to be the first craft brewery and pub chain. And in 2007, with many large, established competitors operating on small margins, the industry seemed far from propitious for a couple of students making home brew in their student accommodation and giving it to friends to test. But the founders’ mix of brewing and financial expertise, coupled with a passion for craft beer and the belief that there was real consumer appetite for a more authentic, stronger-tasting product than the current market leaders, saw them launch an operation that began by making small batches of craft beers, then expand rapidly to become the fastest growing food and drink company in the UK in five years.

By June 2019 it had become the 19th most valuable beer brand in the world, with revenues of about £240 million and a valuation of about £1.6 billion. Today it is a $2 billion business that runs breweries, pubs and hotels in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia and Japan. So, BrewDog was far from the first company to make and market ‘real’ a@le. Then again, you could say, best beats thirst every time...

@Brewdog

Duolingo

When Duolingo was founded by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker in 2011, Rosetta Stone – founded in 1992 and the largest among many players in the online language learning space – was valued at $70 million. How could a new entrant succeed in such a mature and crowded marketplace? The answer: through a superior product, an innovative business model and self-belief. Incumbents typically charged hundreds of dollars for content and required accredited testing to take place in person, so von Ahn and Hacker decided to create a free, mass-market product. Initially using an ad-free model that used language learners as an outsourced labour pool, Duolingo leveraged users to translate content from a learnt language into their native language, selling the product to corporates. The founders subsequently pivoted from a B2B to B2C model, launching an ad-based freemium model and the ‘Duolingo English Test’, which allowed users to take university language-entrance exams digitally. The result? In 2019 the company secured a $1.5 billion Series-F round that not only made it a unicorn but gave it a valuation 3.4 times that of Rosetta Stone – whose user base it now dwarfs by many millions of subscribers.

@duolingo

Term Finance Holdings

Consumer credit and loans is hardly a new business concept, especially in the Caribbean where a borrowing culture has really culminated over the years. Trinidad and Tobago-based Term Finance Holdings was really late to the race, but introduced a new way of lending that is quickly propelling them to the top.

Founded by Oliver Sabga in 2015 with just one other employee, in five years – and with a headcount of 15 – it manages TT$60 million (approximately £7 million) a year in micro loans, with a “strike” rate of 80% for clients – staggering results given that it has never had a face-to-face meeting with a customer. Nor could it, because Term Finance is an entirely virtual operation.

The CEO credits the success to a collaborative team effort, but it also owes much to technology, as all their markets have a high mobile penetration rate and very good broadband connectivity. Now disbursing thousands of loans every month, the firm simply wouldn't be able to cope if each customer received an average consultation of 30 minutes. But, as Sabga points out, “I can guarantee that we know a whole lot more about that customer than you can get face-to-face” – and it is that knowledge that is enabling Term Finance to out-pace the incumbents.

@termfinance