A five thousand pound investment back in 2014 has seen a Manchester based Company grow with a turnover of a million pounds and despite the Covid-19 pandemic they have ambitions for the future
Make Up or Break Up sells biodegradable glitter and eco-friendly gay pride products, donating 30% of their profits to three Manchester-based charities.
Owners Jason Guy and Ian Welham started selling glitter from Affleck’s Market in 2014 and have grown it to a million pound a year business. Members of the LGBTQ+ community come from all over the UK to visit their store. They also sell stock through their online websites, Festival Glitter and Gay Pride Shop.
At the beginning of the year they just had bought hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock, then coronavirus struck and sales plummeted while the store closed. After a few unsuccessful loan attempts and only £1,000 left in the bank, they managed to secure a bounce back loan with Starling Bank within a couple of days of applying which ‘literally saved the business’.
Since then, things have improved and they’ve managed to launch a new product – their Progress Pride face mask, which has additional colours to include the transgender community and communities of colour.
Co owner Jason holds down a full time job outside of the business, he is head of Marketing for a Finance Company, and tells us that it makes his week a full on for seven days.
But back first to 2014 when they started trading in Affleck’s Palace in the centre of Manchester, selling lots of glitter which back then was full of micro plastics. Nobody then was talking about biodegradable materials but they found one person in Europe that manufactured it.
They quickly cornered the market and as Jason says, it snowballed form there.”We were in the right place at the right time,” Now everybody is using it but as Jason adds whereas Primark have six styles, we have ninety.
Three years later, and its Manchester Pride time and the Company was supplying all sorts of regalia on the back of the festival.Now they have the largest Gay pride outlet in the UK, they have six units in Afflecks.
They would have turned over a million pounds this year before the pandemic struck but they are still planning to expand in other areas,working on a deal with the Team UK swimming team and hoping to launch a new range of clothing.
They have moved into face masks, having a range of twenty of those, they are selling faster than they can be produced.
As with many Company’s the furlough scheme has been a godsend, they employ three staff at Afflecks who they would have had to let go, but they are all back now.
They took the full bounce-back loan from the Government of £50,000 but only after changing banks after waiting six weeks to hear from their High Street bank, £47K is still sitting in the bank.It’s a buffer with so much uncertainty still out there.Will Nightclubs reopen, will there be any Pride events and will there be tourists?
They are of course in a lucky position, their stock is not perishable, Afflecks landlord has been generous with the rent holiday and now they are talking to the Business Growth hub in Greater Manchester.
