Lesley Landels is the founder of Love Scottish, a gorgeous home fragrance manufacturer based in the Scottish Borders. She ran a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to help her develop a new refillable ceramic vessel for a candle refill subscription service, aligning with the sustainability values of her business.
She initially ran the campaign for four weeks, then extended it by a further week over the festive period. In total Lesley raised just under £2,000, a valuable contribution to help offset some of the costs involved in developing the new product.
It was a donations and rewards-based campaign, and her reward offers were a range of products she currently sold, but at a discounted price to the same products currently available on her website in order to encourage backers via the campaign.
By undertaking some market research and looking at other similar crowdfunding campaigns and business models, Lesley carefully worked out how much she needed to raise to cover her costs and ensure she had enough left over to partly fund the new product development.
With all the research and planning, as well as running the campaign and distributing the rewards, the total time involved was approximately 12 weeks, so Lesley advises others to think about allocating enough time for the campaign from start to finish over a 12-week period. It sounds a lot, but time soon runs away from you!
Lesley really enjoyed working with and learning from other women business owners as she was part of a group that were all crowdfunding at the same time. The support on the WhatsApp group was good too, as it was available at any time, fitting in easily with the busy life of a working mum!
The overall exposure gained for herself and for her brand was hugely beneficial and at times she felt quite humbled by the support her customers and community were giving to her – and it certainly spurred her on.
Like many people crowdfunding for the first time, Lesley initially found it difficult to ask people for support – especially those she didn’t really know – but again the group support from her peers helped. And she wishes she had spent a little more time developing better graphics for her rewards as she feels that would have sold them a bit better.
And whilst Lesley didn’t quite reach the stretch target that she had set herself, being part of a group made her accountable to others which helped with her self-development…and it was great to see other women smash their targets! Women supporting other women all the way!
Lesley’s top tips are to take time to really plan your end game…and also take the time to listen and learn from others. There is a lot of support out there that you can benefit from – crowdfunding is not something you have to do alone.
Some final inspiration from Lesley to get you motivated:
“Keep going, trust the process and believe in yourself.”
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