Peter Dakin and Nick O’Quinn are the founders of Hibana, the first story-led marketplace – or what they like to call the ‘spark’ between independent brands with some truly inspiring stories to tell and conscious shoppers who want more from their purchases.

What inspired you to launch Hibana and what is the end goal?

We created Hibana during the 2020 lockdown, where there was no offline retail and a sudden reliance on online shopping. We noticed that while convenient, online shopping was void of real joy or inspiration, and smaller independent brands were getting lost in the shadows. With the rapid rise of conscious consumerism and mission-led independent brands, we set out to build a platform and community that was better for brands, better for people, and better for the planet, too.

Describe Hibana in three words

Story-led shopping. 

How did you fund Hibana in the early stages?

After developing the idea during 2020, we bootstrapped our product to market with an initial friends and family funding round. Excitingly, only a few weeks after soft-launching in February, we secured VC funding with Fuel Ventures to help us take Hibana to a wider audience. 

What does Hibana offer its target audience?

Hibana is about connecting conscious consumers with purpose-driven independent brands with incredible stories to tell. We’re on a mission to pour the soul back into online shopping, and create a space where consumers can get to know the passionate people behind the products. 

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

From the get-go, we wanted Hibana to be more than a place for people to buy beautiful things. We wanted to create a collective: a community of innovative brands who put purposeful, ethical and sustainable practices at the heart of their business.

That’s why, rather than creating a marketplace made for endless scrolling through pages of products, we’re putting these incredible brand stories at the heart of the Hibana shopping experience. It’s not so much about buying something as it is buying ‘into’ something – connecting consumers with brands, but also connecting brands with each other by creating a like-minded community. 

A good example of this focus on connection and storytelling is our podcast, Four Wheels and a Founder. Over the course of a week-long road trip, we travelled across the UK to interview the founders of five of the brands on Hibana, to uncover more about these brands and the fascinating stories behind them. These stories then formed the basis for a six-part video and podcast series that took our community along with us for the ride. 

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

We harbour a big ambition for Hibana to stretch beyond just being a marketplace, sitting somewhere at the intersection of commerce, content and community. We want to re-imagine and reshape the way people discover and shop online by creating a more personalised, data-driven and story-led shopping experience — think the ‘Pinterest or Netflix of independent shopping’. This will mean bringing more brands onto Hibana in a considered way, evolving the way we tell brands’ stories (i.e., on the Hibana website, through content and eventually an app) and how we personalise the shopping experience. 

How is digitisation empowering your business?

Our entire business model is built on this idea of bringing the discovery of in real life shopping to the digital world. The challenge for us, and the real opportunity, is how do we replicate and take even further the pleasures, the connections and experiences of wandering down a high street and shopping from these brilliant independent brands in person? The answer, we believe, is in storytelling. Our ambition will be to find ways of using technology to better tell the fascinating stories  — whether that’s through our marketplace, social media or something like our podcast: Four Wheels and a Founder.

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

In the last 10 years, the driving force of technological change in online retail has all been centred around one thing: convenience. From shortening the path-to-purchase, to next-day - and even same-day(!) - delivery. While that has brought many great things, it’s also led to the commodification of online shopping. What’s in store for the next 10 years? We think it’s about elevating online shopping beyond the transaction, and finding ways to use technology to create more interesting, intriguing, inspiring and intimate shopping experiences. Technology will be used to fuse commerce with content and community in increasingly interesting ways. 

Thinking about the future, do you have any strategic partnerships or upgrades in the pipeline?

When it comes to the future, our focus is twofold. Firstly, we have an ambition to relentlessly improve the customer experience of our platform, optimising our product to deliver more personalised and more inspiring shopping experiences, and continuing to find ways to tell stories through engaging content (like our podcast ‘Four Wheels and a Founder’). Secondly, we want to continue building a community of the best independent brands. We’re always looking for partnerships and brands that strengthen our mission and align with our values; we have some game-changing brands in the pipeline that will continue to elevate the customer experience. 

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

The biggest lesson we’ve learnt as entrepreneurs is that momentum is more important than perfection. It can be easy to hold off on starting something until it’s ‘perfect’ — but the reality is you just need to start somewhere, somehow, and keep moving forward.

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

We were fortunate enough to hear lessons firshand from a range of inspiring founders in our podcast series ‘Four Wheels and a Founder’. A lot of things resonated with our own experience, but the most important one was about having a clear purpose and a mission you believe in. Starting a business is hard, and it comes with many ups and downs. The businesses that succeed are when the founders are passionately dedicated to their cause, and are able to galvanise others around that same mission and move forward together.