The cosmetics brand Glossier was born out of a makeup blog, with its 32-year-old founder touted as a visionary. This year, British women are poised to get a taste of a brand that has taken the US by storm. The rise of beauty startup Glossier over the past three years has extended far beyond the narrow confines of the cosmetics …
Monzo’s founder Tom Blomfield: the quiet coder turned enemy of the big banks
Monzo’s founder has combined Silicon Valley zeal with a predilection for publicity to position himself as digital banking’s consumer champion. Will he pull it off? Monzo is hiring. Monzo, it seems, is always hiring; the newly-licensed UK bank is arguably the hottest startup in London right now. ‘We’re working to become the Google or Facebook of banking,’ runs the job …
Profile: How Wetransfer founder Nalden made file sharing cool
The founder of Wetransfer first made his name with a cult nineties hip-hop blog. Now, his file transfer service has gained a global troupe of fans by turning what could be a boring service into a cultural cornerstone. For his 21st birthday, Ronald Hans threw a party. It was held in one of the clubs he often went to – …
‘To do anything well is a struggle’: Simon Mottram, founder of Rapha
In 2004, Simon Mottram unleashed an audacious plan to put his startup, Rapha, at the centre of road cycling. Now the world’s biggest luxury group wants to buy it. Of the four ‘company values’ at Rapha, number three is a strange one: ‘suffer’. The others are rather more humdrum. Not only is it hard to imagine ‘suffer’ on another company’s corporate …
Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe: the dating world’s Queen Bee
Stung by her previous company but not stopped, Whitney Wolfe is deploying her trademark marketing tactics to sign up students to her dating app, Bumble. In 2014, when the buzz around Tinder was at its peak, one of the dating app’s earliest team members left and promptly sued the company $1m for sexual harassment. For some, the case confirmed their …
Alan Yau: The tastemaker does tech
Wagamama founder Alan Yau is one of London’s best known restaurant operators. He’s about to launch an app that he says will be the opposite of Tripadvisor and Yelp. Not long after Naamyaa opened just by the corner of Angel tube station, a scathing review came out from restaurant critic Jay Rayner, panning the ‘infantile palate’ of its excessively ‘sweet and …