BE A PART OF POSTTEA’S FUTURE!
Hopefully you’ll have read our previous post about PostTea popping up in Camberley in July, and I’m still so excited about planning our little shop adventure. I’ve all sorts of ideas about what I want my space to look like and what’d I’d like to offer to the pop up shop customers, but I’ve one big hurdle to leap over before we get there!
Those who’ve been following PostTea’s story will know that PostTea was rather catapulted into the start-up world in February, when it won ‘Best Start-Up’ in Start Up Richmond’s Dragon’s Den Pitch Up competition. With the package of business support that we won we’ve managed to progress to the point where PostTea is ready to launch online! Through winning the competition we gained a small private investment which has managed to get us where we are today, and ready to launch online!
Whilst PostTea’s startup budget contained ‘contingency’ money for miscalculations or additional costs, it won’t cover the full costs of operating in the pop up shop for two weeks. We have enough money to cover the rent, but we don’t want to just ‘be’ there, we want to BE there. (It’s like going ‘out out’, instead of just ‘out’). We want to use the space to advertise properly, display our full range, have great visual merchandising and launch a couple of new tester ranges too!
To fund this venture, we need to raise about £500, although more would be amazing! To do this, we’ve linked up with Crowdfunder, the UK’s leading crowdfunding website. Crowdfunder helps fund a number of projects, big or small, that aim to change the world a little or a lot. Since our launch in 2010, the Crowdfunder network has raised over £500,000 for great ideas, people and projects.
For some, crowdfunding is a foreign concept – so what is crowdfunding? Crowdfunding is a way to fund various projects through sourcing funds from a crowd, so many backers instead of just one or two. By having an online backers platform, backers can pledge a small amount of money (PostTea’s pledges run from £5 to £200), and receive a reward for their pledge. Project owners are responsible for promoting their project, and therefore are responsible for the success of their project. A project does not receive any money if it doesn’t reach it’s target amount, but projects can exceed their total. Payment can be made either using Paypal, goCardless, or just with a debit/credit card. Money is not taken from backers until a project is completed – when the total has been reached and the project timeline has been completed.
So how can you help? There are a few ways:
- By backing PostTea’s Pop Up Venture – we hope that having a range of pledge options will encourage lots of people to back our project, as whatever monetary level they are comfortable with.
- Spread our message: We’ll be tweeting and posting on Facebook to spread the word about our project! We’re also going to post a couple of example tweets for you to tweet, and we’ll have some pdf adverts that you can email to your friends as well. Please share PostTea’s page, and retweet our tweets so we can grow and raise our funds!
- Come and visit us! Once we’re set up in Camberley, come and visit us in our shops! We’d love to see all our supporters and backers, and hope that you’ll want to see for yourself what PostTea is all about!
We were so pleased that Crowdfunder love our project and were really brilliant about setting it up so quickly! We only have 30 days to achieve our £500 total, so please please help! 🙂
You can find our Crowdfunder page here:
http://crowdfunder.co.uk/helpppostteapopup/
PostTEA 