- For Starters
- Posts
- Keeping it in the family
For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. Inspiration and ideas, every Friday – for free. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines.
Hey, starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ A floral family biz
Advice ➠ “We massively screwed up”
Ideas ➠ Boneless couches, silent clubs
Resources ➠ B2B tools for small biz
Town Hall ➠ Shop small & local
➠ Get inspired
Father-daughter starters | Credit
1. A floral family biz. The handmade floral phone grips from Untouched Blooms are super fun – but what’s even more fun is how founder Max is building a small business with her 78 year-old father as co-star. Max started her biz journey with $300 and 3 jobs – one of which was riding around Miami Beach on weekends selling flowers on a tricycle her father built for her. Now, the duo are growing a flower-based phone grip company together. Last year they handmade, packed and shipped 10,000+ (!) grips. 🌸🌺💐
→ I just love their wholesome IG and TikTok. This is how you do authentic small biz content that sticks.
2. Live that multi-hyphen life. Have two things you love doing? Follow the path of novelist and olive oil maker Robin Sloan. You don’t have to be just this or just that. You can be both. ✍️🫒
“My work life has two great lobes. One is writing and publishing, and the other is Fat Gold, now rounding out its eighth year. We started the company with a tiny leased olive grove; today, we make California extra virgin olive oil in small batches on a state-of-the-art mill that gleams like something out of Star Trek. I feel lucky to work on two different things that are just so clearly and simply … good! With like, zero tradeoffs! Books: very good. Extra virgin olive oil: very, very good. The more you have of each, the better you are doing.”
→ Btw, that quote’s from Robin’s very good holiday gift guide featuring some real small biz gems.
3. Coooookies. In San Francisco, Nicole Balsamo runs her bakery No Crumbs Cookies out of her one-bedroom apartment — on top of her full-time gig as head of marketing at an AI startup. She launched six months ago, and now her cookie boxes sell out within seconds. Loved reading this profile of her in SFGate… 🍪
“On Saturday morning, a line was already forming outside Balsamo’s apartment before she’d even set up her folding table on the sidewalk. All of the customers had preordered their boxes the week before on Hotplate (the Ticketmaster of hyped food drops). With only 60 pastel pink boxes up for grabs, competition was fierce.”
4. Music to their ears. London-based software engineer Alastair Roberts built a 3D-printed synthesizer for his daughter’s third birthday and wrote about the process here. After a positive reaction (from kids and adults alike), he’s thinking of turning it into an actual product — and he’s asking for help. “If anyone reading this has experience bringing small-run hardware to market,” Alastair writes, “I’d love to hear from you.” 🎶
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➠ Starter wisdom
Here’s a story that’s well worth your time…
Illustrator Leon Edler and creative director Chris Clarke built RoomFifty into a wildly loved online print shop – then watched it all fall apart due to bad tech, burnout, money stress, mental and physical health problems, divorce, shaky systems… basically all the unglamorous stuff that most business owners experience, but few talk about openly:
“They never paid themselves, haemorrhaged money on tech they couldn't fix, and stayed in what one of them described as ‘an abusive relationship’ with their own business. Then Leon shut the doors. Had a breakdown. Got diagnosed. And figured out what they'd been doing wrong all along.”
→ There’s a silver lining (RoomFifty is back), so it’s not all doom and gloom. But we need more stories like the one below – the kind that save starters from learning everything the hard way…
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➠ Good idea!
1. Not-quite-restaurants → Is it a restaurant? An ice cream shop? An over-21 club? We’re seeing the rise of multidimensional food spots that defy easy definition — including Potential New Boyfriend in Asheville, North Carolina and Cuties in Portland, Maine. (Note: adorable names aren’t a requirement…)
2. Restaurant solidaire → Meanwhile… this is a type of social enterprise eatery that helps out low-income locals. The BBC profiles one in Marseille:
“Le République is a gourmet restaurant with a few big differences. First, the staff include a recently released prisoner. Second, around 40% of diners will pay just €1 for their three-course feast. And, finally, several diners have never set foot inside a restaurant before.”
3. Made in Europe → Can this “Made in Europe” design system / visual certification / label take off? It’s meant to be printed on packaging, in code and etched into products.
4. Boneless couches → Foam couches, vacuum packed and squeezed into teeny boxes – before dramatically expanding in buyers’ living rooms – have become TikTok phenomenons.
5. Silent book clubs → There are now more than 2,000 chapters in 62 countries where people read books – different books, whatever you want! – quietly together.
6. Refounding → The process of rediscovering a company’s essential character. Basically, when things go wrong in a business – they lose their way, chase bad things, mess up – this is a way of getting back to your roots and rediscovering your purpose and culture.
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
Inc. has put together a directory of B2B tools for small business owners.
📚️ Reads
Inside The Neighborhood Wine Bar New York Deserves. Swurl
A conversation with Jesse Lee, LA’s new hype king. Apartamento
‘The French people want to save us’: help pours in for glassmaker Duralex. Guardian
It’s insulting to read your AI-generated blog post. Pablog
The Steamy, Sweaty, Towel-Spinning Weirdness of the World Sauna Championships. The Walrus
How Hong Kong’s zine-making movement is helping people heal and be heard. PostMag
The Startups Producing Drinkable Water from Air. RTBC
AI is taking entry-level jobs. What happens when Gen-Z-ers can’t start their careers? Intelligencer
The Viral App That Started With Videos of Nightclub Queues. Broadsheet
New York Stores Where the Shopping Is Better in Person. Strategist
Instead of hiding rips and tears, the visible mending movement turns them into art. Vox
🧠 Findings
50% → At VC-backed coffee chain Blank Street, matcha makes up a full half (!) of the business. Matcha madness.
65 square feet → The size of Eliko Picture Books, Singapore’s smallest bookshop. Sitting above Chinatown’s largest wet market, the shop is run by owner May Lin, who juggles bookselling duties with her gig as a documentary director and lecturer.
🙃 Fun
Bookmarker, a table that’s also a bookmark (and more). Beautiful, simple, functional.
When a famous architectural designer creates a £348 t-shirt from a single panel (no seams!), it looks something like this.
There’s a 19th-century military sea fort on sale in the UK that looks like it’s from a fantasy movie or a video game that’s going for a guide price of £50,000. This place is just dying for you to start a creative cult or, ya know, sling natural wine and small plates in an environment with character. Any takers?
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➠ Town Hall
1. Today, shop with these folks. Becky and Huw – the legends behind Paynter Jacket, one of the best brands I know, anywhere – graciously asked me to curate a list of interesting small businesses and makers. FS subscribers might see some friendly faces here! (link below)
2. And shoutout and congrats new FS subscriber Connor Home. After an unexpected redundancy, the software engineer decided to launch his dream biz: a digital session planning tool for football coaches called Rondo:
“Earlier in my career I worked as a software engineer at a great company offering football coaching tools & resources. During my tenure I learnt a lot about building digital products for football coaches, and found myself obsessing over how we could improve our product to better serve them. It was during this period that the seed was planted that one day I’d like to build my own product for football coaches.”
Beautiful. ⚽️⚽️⚽️
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