Rainbow Rare Earths Phalaborwa project shaping up to be one of the lowest cost producers globally. Watch the video here.
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Not tried any of these links yet myself:
‘The story of eve sleep over the the time I worked there through to its eventual sale to Bensons for Beds has been a difficult one to tell.
I've shared it in snatches, sometimes over a coffee, sometimes in the pub, sometimes on the phone. Often though laughter, sometimes through a voice wobbling with emotion.
And when the story of eve as a standalone business, and my wonderful time there finally came to an end, for some time I couldn't talk about it at all.
Kate Magee caught up with me just at the moment I felt that telling the story would be beneficial, and I was ready to do so in a useful and helpful manner.
The result is in the article and podcast below. If you've any interest in what leadership, and business feels like when not passed through the LinkedIn filter of 'we are all smashing it', I hope it'll be enlightening.
And I mean what I say. If you are facing similar challenges, please reach out. If I can be of any help I will be.
(p.s.I managed it with barely a voice wobble!)’
https://lnkd.in/ezjcyP5N
The inside story of Eve Sleep’s demise
'January: The high
By January 2022, Eve Sleep was in great shape. “We came into the year feeling like we’d completed the rebuild strategy. Everything we’d sought to put in place was there. We were ready for growth,” she says.
The business had external targets of 10% growth and only losing £1.5m. The internal targets were 32% growth and to break even for the first time.
“If we’d hit either of those external targets, I’m sure we would have been on the front page of the business press. If we’d hit our internal targets, my goodness me, it would have been Champagne breakfasts all round. Those goals were what we as a team had fought for, built, sweated over, cried and laughed for years to get to,” she says.
By the end of January, Eve Sleep’s orders were up 28%. “We were bang on target at the bottom line and ahead at the top line. The executive team and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve done it.’”
The team brought in a growth partner and were about to start building a sleep wellness app, which she believed would pivot the business to access a different funding pool.
“It was all happening,” she says. Until February when, “quite frankly, the market just disappeared from under our feet”.'
'anuary: The high
By January 2022, Eve Sleep was in great shape. “We came into the year feeling like we’d completed the rebuild strategy. Everything we’d sought to put in place was there. We were ready for growth,” she says.
The business had external targets of 10% growth and only losing £1.5m. The internal targets were 32% growth and to break even for the first time.
“If we’d hit either of those external targets, I’m sure we would have been on the front page of the business press. If we’d hit our internal targets, my goodness me, it would have been Champagne breakfasts all round. Those goals were what we as a team had fought for, built, sweated over, cried and laughed for years to get to,” she says.
By the end of January, Eve Sleep’s orders were up 28%. “We were bang on target at the bottom line and ahead at the top line. The executive team and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve done it.’”
The team brought in a growth partner and were about to start building a sleep wellness app, which she believed would pivot the business to access a different funding pool.
“It was all happening,” she says. Until February when, “quite frankly, the market just disappeared from under our feet”.'
Also;
'The next step was to talk to potential investors. Calverley was already in conversations with interested parties because she had planned to take the business private by the end of 2022 – she felt Eve’s smaller size was a barrier to raise funds and get on the agendas of the various investment houses. “Eve’s a little bit small for the AIM market to be useful, but there’s about half-a-million pounds of cost to bear just by being a PLC. So we were bearing high costs without being able to get the benefit of accessing funding,” s
'February: The shock
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine. By the end of the month, orders were 15% down. By the end of March, orders had dropped by another 30%. So it went on.
“I didn’t scramble the jets until April. I often ask myself, should I have done that sooner? But if I’d have sat in front of my board in early March and said, ‘I've had two weeks of data that tells me we're no longer 28% up, I think I should restructure the business and make redundancies’, my board would have said, ‘You're nuts. That's really knee jerk. I think you need to wait.’”
Like many other management teams, the circumstances were unfamiliar. The business had just survived an unprecedented pandemic and was facing market conditions that the team had never witnessed.
It wasn’t just Eve Sleep feeling the pain. Searches for mattresses had dropped by about 60%. “People just weren’t searching for them and there’s very little you can do – 80% of our business was still going through mattresses at this point,” she says. It showed no signs of improving over the next few weeks.'
Thanks for sharing Geeman, I listened to the podcast already. Tough luck... cost me an arm and a leg. Just a real shame. Great people just a very difficult business in this environment.