What happens when a mission-led business trusts the default advice on ownership and capital, without asking if there's another way? Sugru built a global community and record-breaking community capital, and still found money outweighing mission when it mattered most. Its founder, Jane ní Dhulchaointigh, reflects on what she'd design differently today.
Jane ní Dhulchaointigh hit on the idea for a mouldable glue in 2003, while studying product design at the Royal College of Art. She co-founded FormFormForm Ltd in 2004 with her now-husband James Carrigan and entrepreneur Roger Ashby, spending more than 5,000 hours in the lab and around £0.5m in private funding before Sugru existed as a company. It launched in 2010, into a post-crash zeitgeist for anti-waste, resourceful products, building a global community of “fixers” on YouTube years before that was a standard startup playbook. Sugru ranked 22nd on TIME magazine's 50 Best Inventions of the Year, and its community went on to use it in more than 170 countries, keeping an estimated 20 million things out of landfill.
Growth was financed by around £10 million raised over roughly a decade, mostly through two rounds of equity crowdfunding on Crowdcube in 2015 and 2017, the first a record-breaking UK raise at the time: one of the earliest examples of a values-led brand scaling through thousands of small backers rather than venture capital.
On company structure, ní Dhulchaointigh followed standard practice at the time: ordinary A-shares for everyone, no special preferences. “It made common sense to me,” she says. “We'll just go standard, ordinary shares for everybody, no preferences to founders or investors. We're doing vanilla, we're not trying to be clever or complicated.” It was 2005; the vocabulary of purpose-led business, B-Corp or steward ownership didn't exist yet, and there was no obvious alternative on offer.
As the business scaled, that default solidified into something harder to escape: growth increasingly won out over caution in day-to-day decisions. One example stands out. A distributor placed an order worth around £300k; looking at the numbers store by store, the team could see the risk of packs sitting unsold on shelves. “We should advise them to make a smaller order and grow from there,” ní Dhulchaointigh remembers the team wrangling with the decision together. “The pressure to take the order that we all felt, and back the decision up with plans to work even harder to support the distributor or retailers, was symptomatic of a way of working that put growth first due to the underlying design of the ownership and capital structure.”
Why It Ended in change of ownership
By the end of 2017 the tension had become existential. Sugru's growth plan leaned heavily on North American retail, including Target and national DIY chains, but the bet didn't pay off: in-store purchase was need-based rather than values-based, unlike the demand that had built the brand online. Revenue was around £5 million a year, but Sugru's cost base as a small London manufacturer was too high without doubling volumes that no longer looked reachable.
A merger with a larger, mission-aligned company kept the product, team and mission intact: tesa SE, a hundred-year-old, mission-aligned adhesives brand, acquired the company in 2018 and went on to scale the brand in Europe. The £7.6 million sale price mostly repaid debt and creditors; shareholders who'd backed the crowdfunding rounds at a £30 million valuation lost most of their investment. Ní Dhulchaointigh and her team stayed visible through the fallout: “Our community were the heart of the business, and seeing the relationship we'd so carefully built with them damaged was really tough.”
Ní Dhulchaointigh is candid about the lesson for other founders and funders: “20 years on, the landscape is so different. Today there are many more ways mission-led founders like us could design the governance, ownership and capital structures of the business, that could align motivations for everyone involved and ultimately be much healthier for the longevity of the business.”
Sugru's crowdfunding raise shows what's possible when a mission-led business finances growth through its own community rather than conventional investors. Its governance shows what happens when that same business defaults to conventional governance structures for lack of an alternative. The alternatives Sugru didn't have in 2005, steward ownership among them, exist now, backed by a growing field of founders with real track records. Designing ownership and governance on purpose, before financial pressure forces a decision, is now a real option.