Posted by Lisa Rodwell, CEO, Wool and the Gang
Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Lisa Rodwell, CEO of Wool and the Gang, a handcrafted knitwear brand bringing fashion from factories into the home.
The rise of “maker culture” has revived craftsmanship in the last few years, but our co-founders Aurelie and Jade were ahead of the trend. They started Wool and the Gang back in 2008 to modernize knitting, and began selling DIY “knit kits” through retailers. In 2013, Aurelie and Jade raised funding and hired a team of seven to embark on a new journey: building an online fashion brand powered by the maker movement.
I joined in February of that year, when we moved into our first offices and began selling handmade products knit by our ‘Gangstas,’ the name we've endearingly given our employees. Three months later, we started using Google Apps to work better as a team and communicate with our network of 2,000 makers around the world. As a small and fast-growing company, we had the opportunity to move quickly by testing lots of ideas and focusing on the winners. Thanks to the momentum of the maker movement and the accessibility of powerful, easy-to-use technology, we’ve been able build a successful business in spite of three daunting obstacles:
1. Managing a global network of makers through real-time collaboration
More than 2,000 knitters have applied to be part of our gang, ranging from novices to experts, everywhere from London to Lima. We work with 200 of these “Gang Makers” at any given time, and thanks to Google Apps, communicating and collaborating with them is a breeze. Our Gang Maker manager uses shared Google Sheets to track the progress of all 200 knitters in real time; each one is updated constantly and instantly by knitters, providing greater transparency into our supply chain and enabling us to respond better and faster to market demand. It’s more cost-efficient and far less laborious than building a custom backend solution or emailing version after version of Excel spreadsheets as attachments.
2. Coordinating complex development of a physical product
We launch new products every week and ship them around the world, which poses a significant challenge as a company of 25 people. We coordinate product development more effectively by using Google Drive as a project collaboration platform. Our knit developers, who create the patterns for our knit kits, use Drive as a repository for all pattern-related files. They create pattern templates in Google Docs and share them with tech editors for approval. Then, the knit devs adapt the patterns to InDesign files, which they can upload to Drive and share with designers to finalize. Warehouse staff print the pattern files directly from Drive, then assemble them in a knit kit. Sharing our content easily allows us to reduce the complexity of product development and get our products out the door.
3. Prioritising the most important activities
As a small company, we have seemingly infinite challenges to tackle with limited resources. Google Apps help us make the most of our time and our technology investment. We can test something new, like an at-home knitting party, using tools we already have, like Drive for sharing and
Gmail for communications. And because Apps for Work is easy to use, we don’t have to spend time on extra training. We can spend our energy on improving our products.
Wool and the Gang is all about creating, teaching, sharing experiences, and having fun while doing it. Our technology gets out of the way so we don't have to think about the barriers of growing our business. We can focus on pushing our knitting movement forward.
