Merci Maman was founded by my wife Béatrice de Montille in 2007 from our kitchen table in London. She wanted to improve her work/life balance to have more time with our two toddlers at the time, and quit her job after her application for part-time work was rejected. 

Béatrice noticed a gap in the market for personalised jewellery, and started hand-engraving jewellery from our home in Fulham, and Merci Maman was born. The brand draws inspiration from the bond between mother and child, as well as our French roots.

At the time we had two children, which has now grown to four. I helped her during evenings and week-ends during the first 6 years and left my job in 2013 to join the team of (then) seven.

In 2014, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge was spotted wearing a Merci Maman necklace. Overnight, revenue doubled, as did employees to keep up with the demand. It sparked huge international interest allowing us to get where we are today. We now have a team of 45 across with 3 offices in London, Paris & Berlin.

How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry? 

Personalisation is a growing industry but what sets us apart is a mix of our offering and marketing. We offer hand-engraved jewellery and ship each order within 24 hours if ordered on a weekday. Our pieces (especially during this time) celebrates bonds between loved ones and brings people together which is why have such a strong following of over 200,000 Instagram fans. 

We take pride in our customer service, and have recently been awarded with the Platinum Trusted Service Award, 5 years running.

Keeping an eye on the numbers in any business is important. How do you ensure that you’re always up to date? 

We’re not control freaks, we recruit great talents and trust our employees. We have dashboards where we update figures daily, and also have regular calls with teams to ensure they can hit targets. 

As a company we don’t micro-manage; and it works, our sales consistently increase each year and we have always been profitable. Entrepreneurship within the company is in our values and we want everyone to continuously “try” new things, whether it’s design, marketing, customer service or production.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur? 

Setting up a company from scratch is tough, even if it works well. I’d advise to make sure you’re not alone and surround yourself with support, inside and outside the company. At the start, you’ll do everything but there will come a time when you’ll need to delegate. Accept the fact that not everything will be done the way you would have done them.

What are your thoughts on failure? 

Failure is intrinsic with entrepreneurship. You make 100 decisions per day, and you obviously get some wrong. You also need to accept that your team will fail sometimes – see this is as a learning curve. It proves they continue to try and innovate. Just make sure you and your team make more good decisions than bad ones, that you learn from your failures and share these with the others so they don't re-occur. 

As the company grows, so will you.

What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?

My top tip would to be to test your concept or products before making large investments or quitting your day job. This can be done relatively easily. Your product will rarely be 100% perfect, and you will never be 100% that it’ll work, but by receiving feedback, you can make improvements and go for it. 

Entrepreneurship is hard but it is also extremely fulfilling.

What plans do you have for Merci Maman over the next two years? 

We have expanded a lot geographically over the last 4 years with new offices in Paris and Berlin, and translating the website into Italian and Spanish. In terms of marketing, our plan is to continue to grow by raising brand awareness in the UK and focus on growing our other 4 markets (France, Germany, Italy & Spain).

We are also working to improve our products by innovating and differentiating ourselves even more, and working on a new version of our website for a better customer experience, especially on mobile. Last but not least, and we are working on our Corporate Social Responsibility. This has always been at the heart of our family business, and it is even more important in the current Covid-19 crisis.

How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right? 

This is critical and it shouldn’t be just a buzz word. As the company grows, we want to make sure that all employees share the same vision and the same strategy to achieve it. 

I actually have 2 top tips: 

1. Reflect who you are and what your brand stands for. 

2. Ensure employees “live” your company values, and make sure you refer back to them when you can. 

Our company values are summarised in 4 verbs - Make, Try, Share and Grow and we always discuss them during our bi-annual reviews.

How did you fund the launch of your business and what creative strategies did you use to execute a minimal cash flow? 

We started the business with just £6000, without external investors or bank loans. Our business has grown step by step by re-investing cash flows back into the business to finance the growth. 

Cash flows were very low at the beginning and we invested in machinery and stock. We had to be creative with marketing as we had almost no budget. Social media didn’t exist like it does today. Instead, we looked after our customers to ensure repeat business and positive word of mouth. Today, with social media, we can more easily create a community at low costs being creative.

How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next 10 years? 

Over the last years, we have seen a shift from desktop to mobile. This is here to stay. The next big evolution might be Bid Data and Artificial Intelligence. This may help us in our marketing, but the core of our offering will remain quite far from this as we promote emotions and togetherness with our hand-engraved pieces.

What would be your top marketing tip, to grow a business that is so niche, yet incredibly timeless? 

My top tip to grow a business would be to gain recognition by applying for awards. This is a great and cost-effective way to gain PR. We have won many awards over the years, and more recently received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the category of International Trade for a second time which is a huge achievement.