Eniye Okah, founder of suncream brand, BEAME, and Andrew Flynn, founder & designer, POTR, the flatpack self-watering plant pot brand, shared their crowdfunding-led success stories at CoCreate London 2025.
The duo both turned to Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, to secure vital funds to get started but also for insights. Okah need £4,000 for SPF testing alone. “I also wanted to create a purposeful brand that people will buy,” she told delegates. One of her key learnings through the process was to move from a mist pump to an aerosol.
For Flynn, a former lead of product design at Dyson, POTR required £50,000 to cover tooling costs.
“Kickstarter gave us that but also a community,” he said.
Sustainability was the catalyst for the POTR business, Flynn said. The company also bought people into the brand early on with an Instagram campaign featuring origami and plants in the first four months of set up.
“It’s never too early to start building a brand – the Instagram account really helped,” he said.
As a result, POTR smashed its sales target by 4,500%. “We had not planned for the number of units we needed to make,” Flynn said, who hired a team comprising friends and family in order to deliver the numbers.
Okah, a former buyer, said strong branding was an essential element of her business and advised delegates to “hire someone who is really good at design – both branding and storytelling”.
There were challenges for both businesses along the way, however.
Planning global logistics was a challenge for POTR but the company is now exporting to Japan, the US and Europe and is launching in South Korea shortly. Okah, meanwhile, discovered she could not ship her aerosols by air but that the quality of BEAME’s personalised online product pages made a massive impact.
Both companies are planning future launches. Flynn said he was launching two new Kickstarter projects next year including a new category, which would reinvent how you grow your own food at home.
Okah revealed BEAME would be pivoting into other products such as patches, which tell you when to reapply the SPF product.
