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While you’ve all been working on your dream business, I’ve been working on mine (you’re reading it). And I’m about to take FS into its next big phase.

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—Danny

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Last summer, Saul Gindill was renovating his family house when he clocked something: he had bare walls and a pile of art that needed framing, but no good way to get it done.

Framing, he realised, is either expensive and slow, or cheap and fast. Within months he quit his job and started building a middle option, Limner.

While Limner, which launched a few weeks ago, is Saul’s first biz, it’s not his first rodeo. “I’ve been on a bit of a wandering startup path over the last 10 years,” he tells us. Corporate lawyer, then Seedrs as an early team member, then helping launch the paint brand Lick as employee number 1.

→ Below: the joy of building something tangible, and Saul’s opportunity for all you artists out there. Keep reading, starters… 🖼️

💬 Hey Saul, you’ve worked at startups your whole career, and now you’re finally starting one of your own. How’d you make the decision to start your own biz?

For a long time I kept telling myself that I’m going to start a business, but I kept not doing it. I was involved in startups, but I wasn’t really a founder. I guess I had imposter syndrome. But I just want to do my own thing. I could go raise loads of VC and play that game, but when I thought about what I really wanted to do, it wasn’t about status or doing something at hyperscale. It was more about doing what my dad did when I was growing up – using his small business as a vehicle to build the life that he wanted.

💬 And you landed on picture framing – why? 

I thought, what did I have the most fun doing in my career? Home decor. Where do I think there’s still a problem? Home decor. Last summer we were renovating our new family home in the countryside, and we had lots of bare walls and art and keepsakes to get framed. I asked myself, “What’s the most painful thing about this entire process? Where am I wasting loads of time and money?”

Once I spotted those pain points, I couldn’t let it go. Within a few months I managed to put together a small angel round, and quit my job. Well, I convinced my wife to let me quit my job, because we had a baby on the way.

💬 Wow, congrats. What timing.

I wouldn’t recommend it!

💬 So your pitch is that Limner offers a more modern, efficient way of framing pictures?

Pretty much. Think of the framing market as having two sides. The first is super traditional and old-fashioned – it can be really high quality, but also expensive and slow. And at the other end, you’re competing with IKEA and Amazon – fast and cheap, but it devalues the proposition. 

My view is that when you’re framing something you really care about, you don’t want to devalue it. At the same time, there’s no reason for quality framing to be slow, clunky, or over-expensive. 

So the vision is, if Limner is framing in our central workshop, we can give people a really good price because we’re doing it at scale. We’ll do it quickly and efficiently and layer on good user experience and a curated selection, so you’re not paralyzed by too much choice. And in the future, we’ll have stores as well as online, so you can choose the option that works best for you.

💬 Tell us more about this brick and mortar vision. Do you wanna open shops tomorrow, or wait to see how customers respond and how the economics work out in the real world?

My initial idea had been to open up shops ASAP. I then spoke to quite a few people who have opened shops, and one well-known shop owner told me to avoid fixing our costs for as long as humanly possible: “If you don’t have to do it, then don’t do it!”

💬 Fair enough, haha. 

So I think it’s precisely what you just said. We have to first understand how people are reacting to us: Are we doing well? Have we nailed the customer proposition? And then we can open a store. But I don’t see us expanding long-term without a store.

We also had an idea to work with old-school framers who don’t have a succession plan, to see if they’d sell to us. We spoke to a few of them, but it hasn’t yet worked out. Either the locations or timing weren’t quite right yet.

💬 What are some of the other considerations you have to think about as you grow a non-software biz? You’ve got heavy materials like wood, you’re shipping stuff, you’ve got supply chains. Like, if there’s a fire in a Scandinavian forest, will that impact your costs?

Lick was a massive education in that respect, because we were building that business during a time of massive supply chain disruption. Do you remember that freak snowstorm in Texas a few years ago? I remember watching the news and thinking Wow, that’s so weird, and then getting a phone call from our factory five hours later. I learned that there was a resin made in this one place in Texas and now they weren’t able to produce any paint for three weeks!

💬 It reminds me of this New Yorker article from a few years back about how some tiny North Carolina town is critical in the global supply chain because it’s the source of high-purity quartz, which is needed to make semiconductor chips. The world economy relies on this one tiny town. Supply chains are insane.

They are. And for me, I’ve been waiting to find out where those skeletons are hidden in the framing business in particular. I’ve yet to encounter the major constraints… but I’m sure I’m going to find out!

One natural constraint I might face is around frame mouldings. Although there are thousands of frame designs out there, they can feel very generic. So it’s hard to do stuff that’s spicy and exciting. And so we have the idea of creating our own bold and distinctive designs. But I’m super nervous, because you’re basically shipping thin, 3 metre long strips of wood across the sea...

💬 Not for the faint of heart. I’m curious how you’re approaching customer acquisition so far. IG ads? Pop-up events?

At the top of funnel we want to tap into creator partnerships. We’re going out to people who are really big in the home decor and home makeover spaces and doing gifting partnerships. 

💬 Influencer marketing, essentially.

Influencer marketing, but with nano influencers. And because no one’s really doing it in framing, it’s been quite an interesting proposition. The creators are saying, “No one in this space has ever approached us, we’d love to do it.” Whereas now if you went to them with paint, they say, “I get asked to partner with a paint brand every week!”

💬 And there are only so many walls in your flat you can paint for an Instagram video…

Exactly. We’ll eventually go down the Meta ad route, but it’s really expensive. We want to first partner with these small scale creators and see how it resonates. In general, I want to build slowly. I don’t think this is going to be a venture scale business, and I’m not desperate to get to another funding round ASAP. So it’s about testing, learning, and building iteratively, rather than exploding out the gates.

💬 Why do you think it’s not a venture scale business?

The few VCs or funds I’ve spoken to are looking for a £100m exit, even for consumer brands. If you work backwards from the size of this addressable market, the number of things that would have to go perfectly right to grow a business of that size is quite high. I don’t want to bet the business on that journey when I can actually create an outcome that’s great for everyone involved, by just doing it in a slightly more purposeful way.

💬 I love that. But Saul, you’ve just gotta add the word ‘AI’ to your domain or biz name and you’ll get to a £100m valuation in months! Are you using that word at all?

Nope – and I thought about it a lot. Last summer when I was thinking about business ideas, I could have gone down the AI road. But I purposefully went in the complete opposite direction. I want to build something real, that results in real outcomes for real people in the physical world, because it’s exciting and tangible and matters. I can send something out to a customer wondering if it’s going to be treasured and handed down over time.

💬 Refreshing. Has the learning curve been steep now that you’re in the driver’s seat for the first time?

Some of the things I thought would be easy aren’t easy. I thought ecommerce would be a lot easier. It’s actually been one of the harder parts. 

Another really hard thing has been running the business alone. When you’re in the foothills on your own, deep in the weeds, you’re often not sure whether you’re doing the right thing. So I’ve drafted in loads of help from smart friends, like Rich Frazier, who I spoke to when I first had the idea for Limner. Rich and I went to school together and he’s been an amazing sounding board, advising on the brand strategy and producing content. He’s been a core part of the journey.

💬 Last one: anyone you’d love to work with?

As well as framing photography and art, we’ll also send people empty frames if they want to pop in their artwork/object at home. We’ve been thinking about creating placeholders for those empty frames, and we’d love for these to be amazing designs that people would want to keep in their own right. So we’re keen to collaborate with any independent artists and illustrators who would like to showcase their work with us. Get in touch! ☼

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Every biz is a coffee biz ☕️ → “Why that small clothing (or record, or book) store you love also sells coffee.”

US tipping culture 🤮 → It’s arrived in the UK.

How to pitch a biz on sustainability ♻️ → “When startup founders build products that last longer, recover more value from materials and reduce dependence on fragile supply chains, they often create a more robust business. The environmental benefits follow naturally.”

Turning old festival tents… ⛺️ → …into fashion.

Software brain 🧠 → “A particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops.”

Is the ‘clean girl’ era over? 🧼 → “The hyper-controlled, minimalist look that has dominated beauty for years is fading out. Make way for the Messy Girl.”

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Studioworks → ‘Run your creative business from one beautifully branded place built just for you.’

JetPens → An online stationery store selling pens, paper, and art supplies from Japan and beyond.

Archiv → A collection system for organizing and identifying the physical world, by designer David McGillivray.

Editable → A new platform for building custom websites you can edit on the page.

The deeply stressful reality of trying to get the perfect night’s sleep. Esquire

Co-founder math: socializing the wins & the losses. Self-Projecting Projections

Sight, taste and touch: how Mikael Selin built a career in packaging. The Brand Identity

A fine press makes beautiful books the (very) old-fashioned way. NYT

The cult of the enhanced self. Derek Thompson

Gen Z are not the future, Millennials are. Matter

How to think clearly when everything feels like an emergency. Big Think

Brands suddenly care about Reddit. Redditors don’t return the feeling. WSJ

The restaurant is 118 years old. The merch is new. NYMag

Can this city banish single-use coffee cups? RTBC

Most tourists skip this Japanese town. This Singaporean just spent 7 figures opening a hotel there. Vulcanpost

Inside the billion-dollar industry that’s keeping your beer cold and saving lives. Texas Monthly

1,400 → The number of British cheese varieties; more than double the varieties in France!

In other news: Crococlips 🐊

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1. Over in Paris, For Starters subscriber Jen Boyd runs Rebel Paris Tours. Originally a graphic designer from New York, Jen moved to Paris in 2019 to work as the global brand art director for a big French tech company – until she “had quite enough indeed.” Last year she launched her dream business, leading walking and cycling tours. She also runs a made-in-Paris gift shop and writes a monthly newsletter. Go Jen! 🇫🇷

2. Meanwhile, subscriber Roni Bandong-McSorley makes small-batch, plant-based, Filipino-inspired sauces and condiments under her brand RoniB’s Kitchen, “bringing flavours I grew up with into British kitchens without watering them down for anyone,” she says. “The bigger dream is making Filipino flavours as familiar on a British shelf as any other cuisine, and doing it as a small, independent, women-and-family-led brand rather than waiting for a big FMCG player to do a diluted version of it first.” 😋

3. And Keir Whitaker is busy plotting his next Craft & Work on Oct 9th. Keir says: “Craft & Work brings together fifty soloists, founders, and leaders from the Shopify Partner ecosystem and beyond for a slide-free day of honest, candid conversations about what it really takes to build agencies and app companies in 2026. If you enjoy the topics covered in For Starters, we’re pretty confident you'll find Craft & Work your kind of day.” 👏

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