Liverpool, England - JAB Design is a four year-old product design company with eleven full time staff. In 2006 it participated in the Small / Medium / Large scheme delivered by Pembridge.
Starting the SML scheme, owner-managers Jonathan Butters and Charlotte Corke knew that their company offered a very broad service: all the way from blue sky creative and conceptual consultancy through to strong relationships with manufacturers who could make real products cost-effectively. But how to capitalise on that? JAB needed a new business model to make the most of the global market, benchmarks to understand its performance relative to its competitors, and support to set a new strategy and look into raising finance.
SML helped the team to realise that, while it does have a great design track record, what really makes JAB distinctive is the network of technical, financial and manufacturing expertise it can offer clients seeking to innovate new products. Working with SML mentors, the team put together a plan that would see JAB with a new focus that insight. Repositioned as a true partner to its clients, JAB is now able to leverage its expertise and relationships to add real equity value to their propositions, and take a stake in them as a result, with a growth path looking forward and a much stronger basis on which to raise finance.
“SML came at a great time for us,” says Jonathan. “The process bought us time to understand our strengths and play out the possible scenarios with people who really understand the Creative Industries. We quickly fleshed out a plan involving several strategic relationships and concrete specific deals and those are now starting to happen.”
The new strategy sees JAB getting more value for the work it does, taking more risk but in return becoming far more sustainable with stronger growth potential.
“SML has accelerated our progress significantly,” says Charlotte. “We would have taken longer to make the decisions needed on our own and we now go into deal negotiations with some major partners with far more confidence than we would have done before SML. Our only regret about SML is that we would have liked it to last longer as we really value the insight of the mentors who worked with us”
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