Hey, starter! Read on for…

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

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1. Fresh from yesterday. Walk past Demain and you’d never clock it – bright storefront, glass cases stacked with croissants, and then comes the twist: it’s all a day old. Demain, in case you didn’t know, means tomorrow.

In this fantastic piece written by For Starters subscriber Peter Yeung, founders Martin Herbelin and childhood friend Adrien de Dumast explain how they collect unsold bread and pastries from 20+ partner bakeries every night, then resell them the next morning at up to half price – artisanal croissants for €0.50, sourdough at €4 instead of €8, etc. And anything too stale to sell gets reborn into things like “smash croissants” or “Chocobread.” → Since launching in 2023 Demain’s grown to 3 Paris shops. ~50,000 items dodge the bin each month via these guys. Hell yeah 🥐

2. And another one. By now you know how much I love lurking on real estate sites, bookmarking old shops, abandoned factories and forgotten ateliers, and daydreaming about what they can be turned into. It’s my thing (we all have things…). Right, here’s another. In Penzance, Cornwall, a 1,315 square foot workshop on the market for £150,000 – a former blacksmith’s forge, chapel, builder’s merchants, carpenter’s workshop and printer’s workshop. → Surely someone reading this can turn it into something spectacular. Get on with it 🏚

3. Booktruck. And follow along as Tony Giannotti quits the corporate rat race and builds Ink & Tide, a mobile bookstore. Launches in October! 🛻

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Starter Stack, in partnership with Whatnot

The World Cup is on and knockouts start this weekend, which means UK-based starter Aaron Pearce – one of Whatnot’s go-to football card sellers – has been extremely busy… ⚽⚽⚽

Football cards are part of the wider world of sports card collecting – big in the US for years, only recently booming in the UK, where sports cards are now Whatnot’s #2 category. A single rare card can sell for tens of thousands of pounds, sometimes hundreds of thousands.

But those big-money cards are sold individually. “Breaks”, on the other hand, are a more affordable way in. Aaron runs Baller Breaks UK from Chelmsford, Essex. Rather than buy a sealed box, his customers buy a team or a spot, and he opens it live on camera, shipping each buyer whatever lands for them. It’s an established route into the hobby, lowering the cost of entry and turning the box opening into an event.

Aaron didn’t start in this world. He managed 7 gyms for PureGym in London, then got back into collecting during the pandemic. “I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset, and when I commit to something, I tend to go all in,” he tells For Starters. What began in his spare bedroom with his partner now runs from 2 offices, with 5 streamers plus packing and ops teams. The business has doubled year-on-year, turning over £2.2m (!) last year with 219,000+ items sold.

So what’s his advice for starters with zero followers? “Have a clear strategy and be consistent,” he says. Pick a lane and learn your audience. Keep everyone feeling involved, “whether they’ve spent £5 or £500.” And build trust before chasing the money – month one is about earning repeat customers.

→ Spare bedroom to £2.2m. If you’re turning something you love into a business, live-selling’s worth a look… ✨

Nairobi’s newest hotel began life as two Dutch couples who kept inventing reasons to hang out. Then, one day, they found the perfect place for something bigger…

The four friends – Céline and partner Joost, and Saskia and husband Lodewijk (aka Lolo) – are now the proud owners of Céline & Lolo, a 24-room boutique hotel set inside a 1970s building designed by a famous architect.

The mission, says Saskia: “Bring together creatives, entrepreneurs and investors in a cozy and well designed space.” So far it’s working. Since opening earlier this year, the hotel has become a hangout spot for a mix of design-lovers, locals lunching by the pool, and dealmakers visiting town.

As for the couples, well… none of them had ever run a hotel before: Saskia has been an investor in East Africa for two decades, Céline’s the founder of Nairobi coworking company Workify, Joost set up the electric bicycle company eBee, and Lolo is an art framer and furniture maker.

But when’s that ever stopped serial starters?

Below, Saskia and Céline tell us how a dinner brainstorm turned into a full-blown biz, and what they’ve learned since launch…

💬 Hello you two. So you’re in Nairobi, but where are you from originally?

Céline van Asbeck: We’re both from the Netherlands. Saskia has a more interesting background than me. I’m just a boring Dutch person!

Saskia van der Mast: You’re not. You’re a Dutch person who’s been living in Kenya for the past 10 years! I’m Dutch but grew up in London. After studying in the Netherlands, I traveled around southern Africa and eventually wrote my master’s thesis in Tanzania. That basically led me back to Africa and my career in private sector development.

💬 So you were close friends, and one day decided to just build a hotel? Adventurous.

Saskia: We met here in Nairobi, and for years we’d invent reasons to do things together: a boozy brunch one weekend, or a batch of home-brewed beer and an event around it. Both of us couples had quietly fantasised about a business, but nothing concrete. Céline and I can’t cook, but our partners are fanatical about it. Lolo is also an art framer and a furniture designer. Basically, everything we all loved slowly started pointing the same way. Then one night we went to dinner and started brainstorming, and literally the next day Céline found the building. We looked at it and thought: This is it.

Céline: I’d seen the gap from another side, too. I opened a coworking company here 6 years ago. I’ve got two locations now, and I’m always meeting international founders passing through. They all asked the same thing: “Where should I stay in Nairobi?” And I never had a good answer. Everything was either business-neutral or expensive or a bit old-fashioned and colonial. We wanted to do it differently.

💬 The idea was a hotel for people like you? Creatives? Or business travelers who wanted something different?

Saskia: A bit of everything. What we were really missing was somewhere with soul. We’ve thought hard about every tile and every little detail – it sounds cliché, but so much love went into it, because we wanted to build a place we’d want to stay in ourselves. There’s a bigger reason too. I spent 20 years at a single family office in the Netherlands, investing in impact, and my goal has always been to bring more capital to Africa. Whenever the family or board came to visit, everything clicked. So we wanted to build somewhere that people want to come back to. And people don’t generally tend to stay over in Nairobi. They land, check into an airport hotel, then fly to the Mara or the coast, which is a shame, because the city has this funky, underground energy – artists, music – if you know where to look. We wanted to show that Nairobi is worth at least two nights, if not more!

💬 And the property you found sealed the deal?

Saskia: Totally. It’s a 1970s building by Karl Henrik Nøstvik, the Norwegian architect who designed the Kenyatta International Conference Center, the symbol of a modern Kenya. The building has such a vibe. There aren’t a lot of buildings like it here. So that’s why when we saw it, we knew. And there’s a creative side: we’ve got around 70 pieces of art either from Nairobi or with a 70s feel to match the building, every one framed by Lolo.

💬 What did you learn that you didn’t see coming?

Céline: I’ve been positively surprised by the guests we’ve attracted in a natural way. You never know what to expect. For instance, we poured everything into the hotel but I wasn’t so focused on the bistro, yet the bistro has become the heart of it! It’s become a real hangout spot for Kenyan women between the ages of 25 and 45. They’ll come for a long lunch, drinks and pool vibes, which is cool.

Saskia: For me, the surprise was I’d naively assumed we’d set the place up, build a great team, and that was that. But the opening is just the start of the real work. We were going to throw a proper opening party, but we were so optimistic about being ready that it became a sneak-peek – a sort of hard-hat party. It was such a success, and we slept in the hotel that night, thrilled. Then I lay in bed and thought: “Oh my god, this is actually when it starts.” As a perfectionist and a people-pleaser, realising you now have to keep every single guest happy, forever, is a lot. It’s the beginning of a long journey of making sure everyone leaves the restaurant happy, everyone who stays with us is happy, the team is happy…

💬 And what would you tell someone thinking about starting a hospitality business – here or anywhere?

Saskia: Well we just opened in January, so it’s still very early. We’ve literally just finished the last six rooms. You keep thinking we’re almost there... and then you’re not. It’s a continuous process. I remember when we were working on the business model and budget, and looking at things like fixtures, we were like, ‘Oh, in the first year there won’t be anything broken because it’s all so new.’ How wrong we were. So I’d say: keep everything as simple as you can, because it’s already harder than you think. There are so many things that will happen that you can’t anticipate.

Céline: Grow naturally. Don’t try to do everything at once. And do it with friends – people you can decompress with, so you’re never carrying the weight alone. 

Saskia: Just make sure you have complimentary skills, because the four of us are completely different, which has been perfect.

💬 So one of you is really good at operations, one is good at creativity or customer service, one is really good at finance, etc?

Céline: Yeah, you have to accept you’re not good at everything. Find the right people and don’t be afraid to ask for help. You can’t grow if you insist on doing everything yourself.

💬 Five years from now, where’s Céline & Lolo?

Saskia: We’re right in the middle of that question. The four of us literally just sat down to ask: What’s next? Is it Céline & Lolo in every African capital? Three more in Kenya? A shop, a travel arm, a lifestyle arm? How can we build on what we’ve already created? We don’t quite know yet. There’s a lot going on. We’ve only just put the scaffolding away! ☼

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The distance between ‘deciding’ and ‘doing’ 💡 → It’s the single most reliable predictor of whether your life will be extraordinary or ordinary.

Kohakutou 🍬 → Have you seen TikTok’s “viral crystal candy”?

Take a lesson, even when you think you’re an expert 👏 → Why? “He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.”

Hyper goo 🤮 → “A style of glitchy, gloppy maximalism that has landed on consumer culture like a wet sneeze.”

Cha chaan teng 🧋→ Hong Kong-style cafes are thriving globally as Gen-Z embraces nostalgic dining.

Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? 🏬 → “The short answer is both simple and surprising: In many cases, lowering the rent on a building will force the bank to foreclose on it.”

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Google Pinpoint — It’s now open for everyone: “Pinpoint lets you store and analyze hundreds of thousands of files so you can find tiny needles in gigantic digital haystacks.”

1-800-BROCCOLI — A new consulting service for magazine-makers from the Broccoli team.

A small brand’s guide to sustainability certifications (£$) — What GOTS, OEKO-TEX, B Corp, LWG, RWS, RCS and GRS actually mean, and how to decide which ones make sense for your brand.

A few ways I've found success in an industry that harbours very little of it. Daniel Dooreck

The $1B acquisition of Breathe Right: the deal no one’s talking about. Making Cents

Why Japanese companies do so many different things. David Oks

The British food scene was booming. Why has it suddenly gone bust? Guardian

The great hotel blanding. Bloomberg

Why Tuan Nguyen closed Larry's Cà Phê, the first Vietnamese coffee shop in Brooklyn. It’s Tuan

25 of the world’s best coffee shops, run by next-generation owners. Monocle

~70% → The proportion of Americans who play video games for at least an hour each week. Weekly, 212.3 million people in the US between the ages of 5 and 90 play video games.

€100m → In 2022, Ireland trialled a first-of-its-kind basic income for artists scheme: a weekly stipend of €325 for 2,000 artists. According to a study, the scheme generated €100m in “social and economic benefits” to Ireland’s economy. Now the scheme is permanent.

Chili peppers of the world.

Do you like pockets? No, but like… really?

And set your calendar for the next drop of Performative Tote Bag.

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1. Huge congrats to FS subscriber / supporter Justin Kalifowitz, previously founder of Downtown Music Holdings and now the brains behind Klaf Companies, for backing the new live experiences platform Playgrounds, which looks really cool. “I’m all in on businesses that get people out of the house and off the phone,” Justin says. Amen. 👏

2. And new subscriber Kristen SaBerre, a TV and film screenwriter in LA, writes in with a biz gap, idea, and question…

The analogue revolution continues! Anyone? Get in touch with Kristen. 📀

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