Why wine and chess is a recipe for success
By
Senior Writer
Jody Clarke Sep 18, 2006
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Like most graduates, University of Birmingham friends Michael Smith, 32 and Tom Boardman got sensible jobs after finishing their studies; Tom designing breathalysers for Cardiff’s police force and Michael “temping and doing other bits and bobs”.
But what they really wanted was to set up their own company and run it together. And although they had no business experience, “we said that it had to be fun and something really exciting”, says Smith. “We didn’t want to work 60 hours a week on something that wasn’t.” One idea that stuck was selling quirky gadgets, often featured in the back pages of magazines such as Stuff and FHM.
Firebox: starting out
In May 1998, they had neither premises nor funds. Then “my mum gave us £1,000 for computers and fax machines”, Smith says, while Boardman’s parents provided them with the attic in their Cardiff townhouse, where the pair began to put in 16-hour days. Because they couldn’t afford a shop, they started selling products over the internet. Friends and family made up their customer base for three months. Then they came up with the idea for a chessboard with an “in-built handicap”. “We thought it would be cool if instead of ordinary chess pieces, you used little shot glasses instead.”
With one side filled with white wine and the other with red, “although you might be winning, you were getting progressively drunker”. The shot glass chess set got rave reviews and with the help of 30 days’ credit from the Cardiff suppliers, the original 100 made for £30 each immediately sold out at £100 each – a “pretty good margin”.
The chess set sold in its thousands and the pair moved to north London, where they rented a small, three-bedroom house with three other friends from university, hiding their computers whenever the landlord came by.
In late 1999, they secured half a million pounds in venture capital, and bought an office on the South Bank and a warehouse for their toys and gadgets, from cocktail shakers to penknives.
Firebox: precarious times
But the path to success wasn’t entirely smooth. The company was originally called Hotbox, but the pair had to find a new name when they discovered that Hotbox.com was a highly successful American porn website. The company expanded rapidly in the dotcom boom. Then a disastrous expansion into Sweden and the tech crash came at
once, and suddenly “things got very precarious”. We thought we could
raise more finance, “but investors got cold feet”, says Smith, who was forced to lay off staff as the business came close to bankruptcy. “We had to slam the brakes on very quickly; it was a very, very painful period… but we learnt some valuable lessons.” The most important of these was that Firebox would have to grow organically. It’s been doing so ever since, finally pushing into profit in 2002.
With a turnover last year of £8.3m and a staff of 35, it’s expanding into the US this Christmas. “Now we have a really good, solid business and we don’t try to grow too quickly,” says Smith.
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