Trunki Entrepreneur - Rob Law

For many people, running your own company or being an entrepreneur is the dream career. The ultimate graduate job! And it's hard not to be inspired by the entrepreneurs we've filmed. They're part of an industry that has a very real impact on the world. Entrepreneurs improve things, invent things, create new markets, new goods and new services. In the words of the inimitable Levi Roots "they make business their business."

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Rob Law I am Director of Magmatic which also goes by the name of Trunki’s daddy.

What is Entrepreneurship?

I guess we as a business we produce really cool travel products for modern families, we are basically dedicated to the invention of products that can facilitate the perfect journey.  So that is what the business does, what is an entrepreneur?  I think it is a new term that has been used a lot recently but is used to just be a business man and someone who is involved in business really.

Can anyone be an Entrepreneur?

You don’t really need a huge amount of business acumen previously before you start your business I felt the first couple of years, I was winging it for quite a while and then I joined a group of business mentors and they just laughed when I said I was getting a bit tired of winging it I think I should have a lot more knowledge and they all laughed and said we have been doing it for 30 odd years and are still winging today, so I guess that is part of the entrepreneurial spirit really.  But is started my business when I was 28 so I had worked professionally in the design industry, I had worked overseas and I wouldn’t change any of that experience because it has really developed me as a professional and even if you think you are doing a waste of time job you are still working in business environment that you can learn from and improve hopefully by bringing it to your own business so even by having bad experiences, even by having a really bad line manager is going to help your mindset so if you are running your own business you are going to make sure you as a line manage or any of your line managers in the future aren’t going to behave in that particular way and there are so many different little things that you could easily pick out as things you particularly like about job or environments or  hate and it is just being a sponge and absorbing all that information so when you are running your own business you can really implement these ideas and things that you have experienced.

What attracted you to this career?

It wasn’t necessarily a defined moment when I decided I would start my own business it has kind of been a slow progression really.  And through various circumstances I discovered a potential opportunity I had been working as a professional designer for five years and got to the stage where I wasn’t that fulfilled and was struggling to get out of bed in the morning and kind of had the opportunity to start my own business and really push my own inventions and products forward and that was really the start of it all I guess.

Where did you get the idea for Trunki?

The idea for Trunki was really born out of a national luggage design competition I entered in 1997, and basically found myself as a second year student studying product design and entered this national luggage competition that other students across the country had done as well and was out looking for inspiration and was in a department store looking at luggage section.  I was getting really bored there wasn’t any thing exciting there, nothing that floated my boat and maybe is was the big kid in me but I found myself downstairs in the toy department and was really looking at the ride on toys they had there that kind of used the manufacturing technique called rotational moulding and I thought there is a lot of wasted space there to make that ride on toy and if I am designing a piece of luggage why not make a hard shell around a space that can still function as a ride on so kind of sculpting a saddle in there and putting some wheels on and making it a toy that would function as a ride on but also luggage.  And having travelled quite extensively previously and I had seen bored children in the airport so I guess that was the Eureka moment and then it has been a very long and winding process back in 1998 to starting trading in 2006 but that was partly wanting to develop my professional career and partly due to being knocked back by many manufacturers when I was trying to license the idea and then having the failed licensing deal through to finally having the opportunity at the stage in my career when I wasn’t feeling fulfilled and thought I could do a better job with this.

What does your job involve?

The job is quite involved I am a bit of a juggler juggling a lot of balls from making the tea sometimes for the team through to managing our intellectual property designing, creating with my design team a range of new products.  I do a lot of marketing work within my marketing team so it might be an interview on TV or interview in the newspaper and also managing the logistics team as well so looking at our sales figures through to making sure our fulfilment partners are sending the correct products out to the right places etc so managing factories in China.  There is a hugely wide remit of balls that I juggle.

What do you do on a typical day?

So a typical day for me would be arriving at work at about 8.30 spend half an hour just going through my inbox quickly, flagging up any emails which need urgent attention or a long winded answer to and then the team gets in about 9.00 and most of the day is distracted by managing those guys and making sure all their questions are answered depending on various things, I might take an interview call over the phone for a newspaper, we will probably get a sample from China of one of the new products we are working on so I will go through the sample to make sure the latest design is meeting all the things we wanted to.  I might schedule in some consumer research to get some feedback, I might have a sales meeting with my sales team, quite a lot of online stuff online marketing we do, varies everyday, no day is the same other than the one constant which is to answer a lot of emails.

How do you go about making a new product?

So to create a new product, we kind of start with a workshop where we get a few parents along, a few retailers, my design team, some of the guys from the marketing team and we will thrash out a load of ideas around any product idea or category, so for instance it could be how to keep kids entertained in the car so we will end up noting up every idea everyone has on the wall and exploring all avenues and directions and that might be down a musical route or an activity route or something they can do just looking out of the window etc, normally an idea workshop will come up with 100-150 ideas.  Then after the workshop we look at those ideas and map out the ones that are kind of a bit too blue sky and which ones are a little bit more tangible and kind of cement them down into product concepts and will then develop those a bit further in sketching and things like that and try and capture encapsulate an idea in a simple sketch presentation we will then look to see if those ideas meet the company’s objectives in terms of long term strategic goals.  Then we will riddle it down to about 5 or 10 concepts which we will then put into consumer research groups which will actually get parents round the table show them the ideas and another room linked by a video or a one way mirror and really get some new feedback from a real target audience.  With us it is more dealing with the parents and the children we don’t really involve a huge amount in the focus groups at that stage because they are quite young but the parents will give us their feedback and quite often some of the ideas that we thought were absolute winners get thrown out immediately and they normally give us some really valuable insights and feedback and we end up amalgamating a couple of concepts to form normally a shortlist of three which we will then start developing and start doing a lot more development work on and start developing some quotes from the factories in China and start making a lot of prototypes and the whole thing moves on fairly slowly.  The manufacturer in China will also start developing some safety test houses at a very early stage where we will send them some concept sketches and get them to advise of which European safety standards or even which US safety standards will be applicable, can they see any issues with one of the designs we are looking at developing and then we can start designing out very early on.   A very long drawn out process but hopefully that explains it to some extent.

What are the best bits about your job?

Some of the best bits of being an entrepreneur and running my own business, things such as we might win a product award or something when I have an appraisal with one of my team member and they say that coming to work is so much fun, it doesn’t really feel like I am coming to work, that is a real buzz.  Creating an environment that people really like working in or it might be the new arrival of a product sample we are working on and you can almost see the final prototype in the stores and you can really see it is going to work, through to getting feedback from end users of your final products that are out in the market and hear them just singing high praises so there is an awful lot of positives that I experience running my own business.

What are the worst bits about your job?

I guess the bits that are less fun but really it is quite important to raise if you are running your own business, there are always going to be hurdles thrown at you.  If it was going to be all about highs then everyone would be doing it so it is really the hurdles that come at you are really an opportunity to develop your business acumen and develop you personally a lot more so that you are able to have wider shoulders to be able to cope with big issues, some of the issue we have come across, we had factories close in China which meant that the Chinese Government came in and ceased everything in the factory, including our very expensive tooling so we had to bribe some Chinese official to release the tooling out of the factory, we have had quality problems with quality of the very first batch with meant I had to go through 4000 units in the warehouse in the summer checking very single product to make sure it didn’t have this fault or if it did, fixing it, there was a bit of theatrical television on Dragons Den, which meant that we had to deal with potentially some very damaging TV exposure, we have had big problems with the banks in more recent times trying to get the funds  that we clearly need to help grow the business.  There are quite a lot of things that come at you but it is a hurdle but hurdles are meant to be overcome and it may take long or they may take a short time to overcome but it is about having the agility and the mindset to be very optimistic and just to keep going.

How did Dragons Den effect your business?

At the time of filming in the Den I was absolutely gutted I thought I had ruined my business before we had even started trading because when we filmed my episode we had only had stock for two weeks and had only been in business for two weeks, but looking back now I wouldn’t actually change a thing I think that the fact that Theo ended up potentially breaking one of the products on the show was a huge plus for us because the public saw through it and thought it was a hugely unfair and unkind thing to do so it made it a very long episode with a nice long clip on the BBC and I think we benefited enormously from the exposure it gave us in the UK.

What has been your greatest achievement?

One of the earlier ones was featuring in Time magazine, we had a nice little article in there, that was great, awards wise we have won 23 now and the biggest one for me was the National Business Awards where I won Credited Suisse entrepreneur of the year for Wales and the West Country and more recently we have just done an equity investment deal which values the company at a threshold that I am very pleased with so it makes al the hard work really pay off when you are able to put a valuation on the company.

Any Regrets?

I guess one bit of advice I would give myself is to really focus on doing one thing really, really well.  So in the case of Trunki we created this great product that I was keen to start diversifying and building a whole range of products around this core product but we were still struggling to do that one core product perfectly.  So a lot of time was taken away from really focussing on making it 100% perfect not just how it is made but how it is retailed, how it is displayed in store, how we build our support for our retailers and also we grew very quickly internationally. So really putting resources for international customers such as marketing trade kit, really having monthly meetings with our international distributors and those came much later and I think if we had done them a lot earlier we would be in a situation where we would probably be bigger today.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

Certainly when you start up in business the pay and perks are few and far between because you are trying to invest all available cash into growing the business and trying to recruit as many people as you can to help bring that business forward.  So the first couple of years you really aren’t getting remunerated highly at all but then when you start really making some good returns and profits there are various ways you can sort of pay yourself and the accountants can help you do some very efficient tax planning  to make your personal package very appealing.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

Certainly in the early days the working hours were pretty much 24/7, I was living, eating and breathing my business because we didn’t have much finance to start off with, the more effort I could put in the more we could grow the business and the quicker the returns would come in so it was a huge commitment, not only from the 8am-7am, 12 hour days basically through to weekends, you had trade shows to go to and things like that so it was a huge commitment so that certainly sucked a lot of my time.  Social life did start to suffer certainly, but fortunately I have got a very supportive girlfriend.  But as the team grows and as you get more people in then your commitment isn’t needed to be quite as great and you do start taking a bit more time off, certainly more recently I have started to take a few weekends off.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I have got quite a few friends who are entrepreneurs and running successful businesses in their own right and I think the group of us all share some personality traits, we are all very optimistic people and I think optimism is a key cornerstone of becoming an entrepreneur, it is not easy and you have always got to look on the positive side and think well if I can do this, this is going to happen you have always got to look very positively I think equally you need to have a lot of audacity now to be able to stay very strong and determined to stay very focused.  Also a lot of drive, you have to have a lot of fire in your belly to quit a full time job and go it alone.

What is your top tip for breaking into your industry?

Tips for starting your own business would really be go in with your eyes open, it is not an easy ride and it is going to be challenging and area really going to be tested to the 100^th degree so bear in mind it is not an easy road to choose but equally the rewards are so far outweighing a traditional career working for someone else.  Being your own boss is incredibly rewarding, being in charge and being responsible for a team of people is a huge responsibility but if you play it right it can be hugely rewarding too.

You don’t necessarily need to start the business with all the business acumen, I certainly didn’t.  I was a trained product designer before starting the business.  I fortunately had a bit of mentoring and help through the Princes Trust in the early days but certainly didn’t have an MBA or anything like that and I think you can pick up a lot of business skills and tools along the way.  There is a great website out there called Business Link which is a phenomenal resource, any problem you might have about planning your future business or one you are currently having to overcome, there is a great online resource there on Business Link.  So there is a lot of help out there should you need it, there are some great books too and things like that but don’t be put off if you are putting that step forward and feeling that you haven’t got all the full package because it is certainly a learning curve, it was for me and still is.

Have you got any advice for budding inventors?

So quite often when inventors contact me and ask me advice they are normally very pleased that they filed for a patent and that’s their job done.  It is only the start and having a patent isn’t necessarily essential to bringing the product to market.  What you want to do as an inventor is make money out of your idea and just having a patent does not mean you will make money.  So you have to spend an awful lot of time doing market research and making sure your target market would buy that product and for a particular price.  So it is all very well that you have shown your friends and family this idea and they have all been nice and kind and said it is a great idea but you haven’t got any real tangible evidence that it is going to be a winner.  Hopefully if you can prove to yourself, and hopefully then your bank manager, that there is a market for this idea you need to spend a lot of time focusing on that.  Equally just filing for your patent you have got to spend a fair bit of time and develop your idea, you can’t just leave it as this intangible idea of a suitcase that turns into a deckchair or something, you have got to really figure out exactly how that is going to work.  Everyone has ideas everyone has quite few ideas, it is really having that great idea that is proven in the market that people really want and you have been able, whether it is you personally, or you used consultants, to really take that idea into a more tangible prototype form and then you are in a very strong position to either take the business on yourself or license the idea to another manufacturer. 

Is being an Entrepreneur a risky business?

I have a huge amount of respect for the people who have started their own businesses and they have families and have a lot of dependents.  I was very fortunate I didn’t have a mortgage I didn’t have a family I could just take the risk and if it failed I would just be in a little bit of debt and would be able to get another job and lick my wounds and carry on forward but I would have learnt a lot by that moving forward so it is a lot easier to encourage people that don’t have a lot to lose, even if you fail, putting it on your CV is going to open a lot of doors because you have tried it and learnt a lot from that process.  For people who do have dependants they do have to think very hard at whether they can really put their family in a situation where they might not have any income for a while and how much of their personal time is going to be dedicated to the business.  I certainly don’t want to say don’t do it because there are an awful lot of people who have gone out and done and done it really well, it is just more of a real decision you need to think about not lightly but in depth.  But if you aren’t chained down to responsibilities I would highly recommend you just go our there and try it.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

One book which was highly influential at an early stage was a book called ‘How to Build a Better Mousetrap – the Business for Invention’ and that is a great book for potential inventors who have come up with an idea but don’t know how to take their idea into reality.  So I read this book and it really set down a couple of different roads I could take and I started really exploring all of them to start with and then it became quite clear to go down one of those routes but certainly it was a great book that I would highly recommend and still do to a lot of inventors who contact me to read this book.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

So if I hadn’t decided to hand my notice in and become and entrepreneur, yes I would still be at the same business as a product designer, which was a great job but it wasn’t ticking a few boxes for me and wasn’t keeping me very driven so I started losing a bit of interest in it perhaps.