The last in the articles published so far from the ICAEW magazine related to Fit for Lending, although this does not deal with loans per se, but equity SME crowdfunding in this Wine funding article. As usual, its a well written article, and this one puts forward the business case for using CrowdFunding. It’s not necessarily good for every business, but in this case the business was an unusual and interesting consumer product which generally are suited for this type of equity fundraising.
The business (Soul Wine) is the making of wines in India (mainly outsourced but under the management of Soul Wine) and the branding and distribution of those wines, firstly in the UK in Indian restaurants (which are hugely popular in the UK with chicken masala being Britain’s favourite dish), then targeting larger distribution via traditional methods – supermarkets etc and then in other geographic markets.
In the end they raised GBP338k compared to the target of GBP325k on CrowdCube, for 18.3% of the business, from 225 investors from 20 countries. Impressive ! And all of those investors will be ambassadors for the business and putting the word out – of course there would have been thousands of others who had seen the pitch and may also be curious to try Indian wines. I will give it a go next time I’m in a curry house in the UK. I like this pitch, and it was not a start-up like so many of the pitches on crowdfunding sites, which by their nature are therefore much more risky.
Good luck to them. And to any Asia companies who are attempting the rather crowded method of crowdfunding – right now they seem to be limited to do that on overseas platforms as Asian regulators are taking a long time to authorise equity crowdfunding and we are limited right now mainly to donation and reward based platforms, with some lending platforms coming on line (see Crowdlending Malaysia, fintech loans)
SME News Asia
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