Behind the business with startup Weekend Box Club

Andy Stephenson is the North East entrepreneur behind Weekend Box Club - an startup that produces activity boxes for young children. Andy recently secured an exclusive contract with Number 10 Downing Street to produce a range of gift boxes for the Prime Minister to give to visitors including heads of state and foreign dignitaries. Here, he takes Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

Our biggest challenge to date has been trying to achieve everything ourselves; it took a few weeks of me working 18 hour days trying to get everything from packing boxes to writing press releases and creating an order system together. A friend of mine suggested outsourcing parts of the business like packing of boxes - despite being strapped for cash, this freed up my time to focus more on growing the business. The saving grace of having gone through that process is that we now know meticulously well how every part of our business’s operations work so we can optimise each area and negotiate outsourcing rates more effectively.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Receiving a ringing endorsement from Netmums, the UK’s largest parenting website - we contacted them to see if they’d be interested in reviewing one of our boxes and they immediately jumped at the offer. Their review couldn’t have been written better ourselves! “Our Weekend Box inspired creativity, exploration and fired imagination. We loved how the box contained all the bits and pieces you need to complete the activities as well as a magical mix of things to do that kids will love.”

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

Driving up our subscription levels - that’s our primary metric at the moment. We’re really lucky to have a strong referral rate and also a fast-growing social media audience which is helping to grow subscription rates organically so the key is now to replicate this on a larger scale, whilst also maintaining the high levels of customer engagement we’re achieving with our early adopters.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

Start something. Make sure you start small and then test out all of your assumptions about your idea: do people like it, will they pay for it, what do they engage with most? There are loads of easy ways to test little assumptions out without breaking the bank - with Weekend Box I put together our first box from items bought off the shelf; I even hand wrote all the labels for the activity pieces! This essentially allowed us the opportunity to create something real that people could interact and engage with. We also asked all the prototypers to (voluntarily) pay what they they thought the product was worth; this proved that our pricing policy needed tweaking slightly but overall we then had data showing our assumptions on price were correct. Some of our prototypers liked the product so much they then became our first subscribers!

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in your region or generally, and where your organisation sits within it?

In my view, there are a lot of good people working on a lot of great ideas but I think what is needed is greater connectivity between more experienced entrepreneurs and startups. This is where the Experience Bank (from NEA2F) and Virgin Startup/PNE seem to be making a difference: bringing startup people like me together with experienced business leaders who can provide advice, connections and potentially even investment at some point in the future, it’s a win-win.