Taylor & Hart Academy

I am delighted to announce that after a fantastic weekend “hackathon” in April, Taylor & Hart colleagues developed and launched the T&H Academy.

We’ve felt for a long time that our approach to training on-boarding colleagues is world class and with so many online education courses launching around the lockdown, we decided to get in on the action and develop our own jewellery education platform.

We’ve taken all of the resources from our own jewellery and diamond training and applied it through practical and commercial courses that anyone can sign up for free of charge.

If you’re interest in an online jewellery course or related diamond and gemstone training, check it out and let me know what you think.

Taylor & Hart Investment Round

We’re extremely excited to be launching our third investment round (and 4th Seedrs campaign) since our first round in 2014.

While we expect most of this round to be constructed by institutional investors that can add value in the long term, through their contacts, advice and further investments, we also feel extremely proud to have over 240 existing investors supporting us over the years, as customers, advisors and brand ambassadors.

It is for this reason that once again we’d like to invite you to join us on our journey.

Launchub, the VC that backed us in 2015, has once again committed to helping us grow through an initial investment of £300,000 in this round.

We’re now talking to some of the best-known VC funds and angels in the UK and Europe, and as we make progress with them, we will update you here.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly on the Seedrs campaign discussion, if you’d like to invest or if you have any questions:

https://www.seedrs.com/taylor-and-hart

Exciting times ahead!
– Nikolay

Seedrs or Crowdcube – who to chose when crowdfunding?

Having now raised two rounds of investment with the help of Seedrs.com for our bespoke engagement ring brand, Taylor & Hart, I often get asked for advice about which company I would choose (if I could do it all again).

Having not worked with Crowdcube, the question for me really becomes, would I recommend Seedrs and why?

Over the years I have always passionately defended Seedrs and my reasoning was on several different levels.

1. Values – I have heard and read some negative things about Crowdcube from an ethics point of view, relating to how little support small campaigns get and how they over-state the amount of money they helped raised to include funds raised by the companies without their help. Seedrs, from my experience, has values that are more aligned to ours at Rare Pink in terms of their integrity, authenticity and passion for helping each other succeed.

2. Due Diligence  – Comparing campaigns I have seen on Crowdcube and Seedrs, I think Seedrs are more diligent in terms of who they let on to the platform, making it harder for you to launch your campaign… and that’s a good thing. You want to have the best chance of convincing investors and if someone can tell you what needs improving before you’re investor ready, then I see that as value being added.

3. The Underdog – On a personal level, I wanted to work with Seedrs to help them to do well too. I think Seedrs has for some time been slightly smaller than Crowdcube (though not anymore it seems – now ranked number one in various categories of investment).

They both have similarly large number of investors. I believe you will have the same access to funding by working with either of them but I feel Seedrs try harder by having had to play catch up in the past.

What about the money?!

To be completely honest, I do feel that the most important thing everyone cares about is: “will the one platform help me to raise more, faster (or at all)?”

I can’t answer this accurately. Crowdcube has had more high profile successes from what I have seen but I also feel like more campaigns are live at any point in time compared to Seedrs, thus diluting investor interest.

The secret no one tells you when you start…

So let me close this post off with a little secret. We got more value out of Seedrs in what they do after you raise than we got during.

This is not to say they did not do everything they could to help us raise… what I am saying is that there is enormous value in the admin and legal work they do that would otherwise have involved me spending hours trying to learn my way around what is a confusing landscape.

For two years we raised without the aid of paid legal counsel. I DO NOT SUGGEST THIS – we learned on our second round that it is important to get legal advice once your funding round starts to get more complicated (think VCs, accelerators, options, parent-child company structures etc.); and we now have legal counsel.

The benefit of having Seedrs as an ally was huge and as a first time fund-raising entrepreneur you can not know how complicated things can get and how much work there is around the closing of a round.

So yes, I would pick Seedrs over Crowdcube and give them a solid 10/10 in terms of how likely I am to recommend them.