Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

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1. Live the dream. Someone out there right now – maybe they’re in Dublin, or Milwaukee, or Kuala Lumpur, perhaps a reader of this newsletter, maybe even you – is the future proprietor of The Jolly Roger, a traditional pub located on a majestic island in Ireland. It’s up for sale. Yes, pubs are hard. And true, the island has only, uh, 100 full-time locals. But never mind all that… I salute you and I will follow your starter journey with envy.

2. We’re building a hotel. Meanwhile, in New York’s Hudson Valley, follow along as couple Michaela Carpenter and Barry Dobesh buy, renovate and open the historic Rhinecliff Hotel.

3. Starting over. Michael Preysman founded Everlane back in 2011 on a radical promise: tell customers exactly what their clothes cost to make. Then the money came, private equity moved in, Preysman stepped down as CEO in 2022, and last week he found out (along with the rest of us dumbfounded observers) that the current owners had sold Everlane to... Shein, the fast-fashion goliath.

His response went up this week: “Seeing the reaction hit me hard,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “I had been brewing on an idea for years, and over the weekend, I realized there was only one path forward. For all the fans that loved what we did and what we stood for, it’s not over. We’re doing it again, but this time, with a new take.” This time, he adds, “no venture capital, no private equity.”

At the time of writing, his mysterious signup page – stillradical.com – has got ~72K signups.

4. Craft work. And here’s an absolutely lovely short film about the last female artisans preserving Sardinia’s millennia-old textile heritage.

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I’m a big cheerleader for starting your own business. This is a newsletter about starting. But sometimes starting can be taking on someone else’s dream business and making it your own. Which brings us to The Honey Project...

Back in 2019, brand strategists, life partners, and For Starters subscribers Ed Little and Laura Eyles looked around at the state of the honey industry, didn’t particularly like what they saw, and then asked that age-old starter question:

“Why don’t we do it ourselves?”

Their idea was to create a honey brand that was about “doing good and giving back,” where every jar sold helped plant wildflowers up and down the countryside, “rewarding our glorious pollinators.”

That concept became The Honey Project, which today is stocked around the UK. But five years later, they’re ready to hand the reins of the company to someone else. As Ed explains below, they’re looking for a passionate person or operator to take their plug-and-play concept to the next level. 

→ Want the details? And is that person you? Keep reading…

💬 Hey Ed, why did you two start a honey brand?

My now fiance Laura and I had just started dating. We both work in the branding world as strategists and she was working on the biggest honey brand in the UK. They do something like £300 million revenue across Europe. Her team was working on their rebrand strategy. There’s always a bees and beekeepers story, but no one really gets excited about the flowers. So she’d pitched them a bunch of amazing ideas about getting your fingernails full of dirt and giving back, about rewilding roundabouts, guerrilla gardening in schools, doing seed bombs. And they kind of patted her on the back and said, “We’re a bit more interested in how the packaging is going to make us more money, so why don’t you guys get on with that?”

I was at Otherway at the time, more of a challenger agency, and she was at more of a traditional agency, and I was like, “Fuck that, why don’t we do it ourselves?” What would the Tony Chocolonely or Oatly of honey look like? How would it behave?

We came up with this grand plan to create a 1970s-inspired honey business, very much summer of love vibes, full of flowers, and every jar would rewild 100 wildflowers. As strategists, we’re good at the ideas bit. But then obviously the execution piece takes a lot more work and is a bit harder…

💬 You were like, “Brand’s done, we’re finished!”

Yeah, exactly (laughs). So we basically created an amazing deck and then we started touring the UK to find a honey supplier and partner. It was fun. We went on an adventure around the UK, speaking to lots of farmers and trying lots of honey.

The deeper we got, the more we also realized that honey is one of the most faked commodities on the planet. A lot of it is mixed with corn syrup and fails authenticity tests. There’s been loads of ‘honeygate’ scandals.

We also found that if you’re buying supermarket honey, a fifth of it is coming from China. They use different methods to create the honey, which allows them to do it faster and cheaper. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. But it’s coming from China and it’s mixed in the EU, so there’s no real provenance. It’s just honey being heat-treated in a big vat and then put into plastic squeezies.

That was a far cry from how it was being marketed and sold. You’re presented with a story of an idyllic beekeeper tending their apery, but it’s actually highly industrialized, heated beehives on the other side of the planet that’s traveling in vats and crates and then mixed.

The honey system – unless you’re buying it locally – is broken. We wanted to create something in-between. If you can buy local honey, do it, because that’s the best for you. If not, buy us. That was our thinking.

💬 Where did the wildflower and rewilding element come into play?

Right, so we asked ourselves, ‘How could we give back to nature? How could we build a brand that had reciprocity in its core?’ We did research and realized we’ve lost something like 96% of our wildflower meadows since the 1920s, predominantly due to agricultural farming. Fewer flowers means pollinators often get stuck. So how could we use our jar as a vehicle to raise awareness but also create some change?

We decided that, for every jar we sold, we’ll rewild 100 wildflowers. So how do we actually make that work in the backend? We discovered an amazing charity called Buglife which has a program called B-Lines. They basically create bee superhighways up and down the country, so pollinators don’t get stuck in one place. We created a metric with them in which 25p from each jar is the equivalent to 100 wildflowers – a meter squared. So we pay them based on how many jars we’ve sold, and then they do these rewilding initiatives.

💬 Bee highways, incredible. What happened next?

So we started the brand, launched it, and then we grew. We found an amazing beekeeper partner who now has 10% of the business. He’s a younger guy – most beekeepers in the UK are still operating off a landline and have never heard of WhatsApp. He has 170 hives in Tamworth and loves doing the beekeeping and manufacturing and production – he’s also a trained accountant – and Laura and I do the branding and marketing.

Over the past few years we managed to sell a fair bit online, but we also got into places like Selfridges, The Modern Milkman, and Boots in the north of England. We won a Soho Chance award, which meant we got into Soho Farmhouse. And we just got into Anthropologie. We’re also in 60+ independent shops.

💬 So why are you looking for a new partner or new owners?

We’ve been running it in the background, alongside our day jobs, and it’s been doing £30-40k in revenue a year, off about £10k initial investment. So we’ve managed to fill the coffers back up again. It’s been selling well in independents, too. But our frustration is that we don’t really have the time. We’ve both got full-time jobs and, while it’s continuing to sell without much effort, it also feels like wasted potential.

We’ve had a couple of hard conversations where we’ve asked ourselves, “What do we want to do?” And we’ve realized that, unless we’re both two feet in and can see a clear path, then you need to say, “It’s been fun, we’ve taken it from zero to one, but who’s the best partner to take a brilliant idea and concept to the next place?”

So we’re looking either for someone to come on and invest in it and grow it, or just buy it outright and grow it. We don't have loads of money to play with, but there’s equity. It’s not romantic, but it’s real.

💬 In terms of logistics, if somebody’s reading this and they’re, like, “This has me written all over it,” what should they do?

I’d love to have a conversation with anyone who’s interested in the opportunity. At this stage it’s very exploratory. We’re feeling our way through this and seeing what our options are. It’s a very plug-and-play business, which is exciting. And there are definitely ways you can grow it quite easily with a bit of attention and passion! ☼

Want to be part of The Honey Project’s next era? Get in touch: [email protected]

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Develop a hacker mindset 🧠 → And learn how to walk through walls.

The ‘freelance fried egg’ 🍳 → The work is the yolk, the operations is the white bit.

Atlanta 🤔 → The best place in the US to start your career?!?

Burgers, cars and airlines 🙅 → What unites them all? They’re banned from advertisements in Amsterdam…

Social prescribing 🏝️ → To treat loneliness, doctors are writing prescriptions for things like nature walks, art classes, book clubs, and singing lessons.

Micro forests 🌲 → Related: “The Miyawaki method of reforestation inserts small, densely packed wild acreage into urban environs. It’s proving wildly successful.”

The typo vibe shift 😃 → People are adding typos intentionally to prove they’re human.

Folded pizza sandwiches 🍕 → Behold! A new food has hit Sydney.

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The Creative Independent — A growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people.

Worse On Purpose — Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what’s still worth buying.

Type.lol — A living directory of the world’s independent type, built for designers hunting the right typeface, and for buying it directly from the foundry that made it.

Index of Aesthetics — Design trends in corporate and consumer worlds, as highlighted by Elizabeth Goodspeed in It’s Nice That.

The lunch break as business strategy. Golde founder Trinity Mouzon Wofford spent years running her wellness brand on a mega-packed calendar. There was one rule though: 2 to 3pm was lunch. Calls and meetings could wait.

In our frenzied, hustle culture era, where rest is often treated as something we deserve once we’ve worked hard enough, Trinity tells Shopify’s newsletter In Stock why slowing down – and making time and space to cook a delicious lunch – made her a better starter. → Grab her playbook (and recipes) ✨

What actually keeps an independent restaurant alive. No Days Off

How to start your own community from scratch. Zac Solomon

If I can make it Mallorca, why go anywhere else? Monocle

How to make a living as an artist. Fnnch

Why Bed-Stuy’s Bike Plant became a worker-owned co-op. NY Groove

Strangers rent my home, sleep in my bed, play my guitar. The Dial

Couple quit film and PR careers to take over their family’s cemetery business. Make It

50% → The rise of searches on Etsy for “whimsical jewelry,” “whimsical décor” and “whimsy-related items.”

$6,000 → How much this full-time engineer makes – per month – on his luxury dog-walking side hustle.

18% → The percentage drop in dementia risk for people who drank up to five cups of coffee a day compared to those who drank little or none, in a new landmark study of 130,000 people across more than 40 years.

0 → The number of Starbucks cold-beverage cups with Bluetooth-enabled trackers that ended up at a recycling facility in a recent investigation by Beyond Plastics.

47% → The percentage of people who believe humans have the advantage when it comes to creativity, compared to 30% who believe AI holds the advantage.

2021 → The year when investment in the global ed-tech industry peaked; it’s been in decline ever since.

39% → The percentage of all new podcasts that are AI slop.

A Tokyo restaurant is offering lunch for less than 1 US cent if you win at rock-paper-scissors. The twist: you do it at the end of your meal.

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1. For Starters subscribers Jack Atkinson and Joe Welstead started the hydration brand Oshun two years ago. To say it’s gone well is an understatement. And the cool thing: they avoid the grow-at-all-cost, 9-9-6 vibes that are so prevalent in tech circles. (They also don’t live in major commercial hubs: Jack’s in Devon, England, while Joe’s in rural France.) Last week, the two starters, along with Jax Davey, launched JAW, “a startup studio focused on joyful innovation.” The idea, Joe tells us, is to help you “grow your business without falling into hustle culture.” Instead, they want to “share a different approach to growth, centered around enjoying life first.” 👏

2. And in NYC, Josh Krigman operates a small biz called Little Nights, which runs creative writing programs with a focus on accessibility and collaboration. “We have one-night events, multi-week workshops, and weekend retreats,” Josh says. “The dream is to expand the model and have chapters running around the country! We just started in San Francisco and I'm hopeful for more.” ✍️

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