As we look back at the year, it's fair to say 2022 was a huge year of change for Pivot! Our Founder, Alice shares her insights into one of our largest projects from last year.

Finding Time

Since we started trading at the beginning of 2020, we’ve been so focused on getting our hostel programmes up and running and designing our jewellery collections, that we’ve never had enough resources to get our teeth into nailing how we present ourselves to the big wide world…

So we finally collated our resources, our energy and many helping hands last summer, and rebranded Pivot!

The Wrong Trousers

As many people do, we started our e-commerce lives on a simple SquareSpace website - using a basic template not thinking we’d need more capabilities than it offered us. How wrong we were. 

Not to damn SquareSpace - the platform, like a familiar pair of jeans that just won't do up any longer, just can’t do what we need it to do. It isn’t the right fit for us anymore. 

It’s long been my ambition to build what I term “a proper website”, but starting from scratch with limited cash to put into it has always been daunting and let’s face it, pretty impossible. What’s more, when we have had spare cash, of course we’ve chosen to put it towards our programmes: a dilemma that many social enterprises and charities face. You’re constantly faced with the conundrum of whether to grow the business and therefore increase social output, or focus on the social output without having a bigger picture of strategic growth. 

This summer things shifted for us: we won some large chunks of funding from two banks along with securing a very generous loan agreement from another. It meant that - finally - we could go about creating the “proper” thing - the real deal.

How did we do it?

Firstly I knew we needed to make a very good hire. We spent weeks putting up job ads and searching for the right hire for our small team. We were so fortunate to find Bella who joined us at the beginning of July and who has taken our start-up chaos in her stride. An unbelievably talented photographer (credit to her taking 3000 photographs on a one-day shoot in August) and graphic design, the immaculate design of the branding and website is really down to her alone.

The next challenge was to work out what we wanted. It sounds strange to say, but this was probably the most challenging part for me personally. Pivot had appeared after an 8-week venture lab, essentially an experiment… and then we hit Covid. I had been propelled into a lonely world of running a business during a pandemic, and I never had space to work out what we needed as a business. To Bella’s credit, she really teased it out of us and over time, we’ve all become more confident in knowing how to say who we are and what we stand for. This is probably best encapsulated in our new catch phrase: “Look Good, Do Good”. 

The final part of the conundrum is of course, doing the actual work. We knew we wanted to relaunch before the Christmas season and so the end of September was realistically our final cut off. I think the whole team will agree with me that it’s been tight! 

90 days of hard work!

From the beginning of July until September - 3 months, 12 weeks, or 90 days, we managed to:

• Design an entire range of sustainable and ethical silver jewellery 
• Worked out how to manufacture said new jewellery line
• Re-work our brass classic collection
• Create over 270 pieces of jewellery for our customers to be able to purchase when we go live
• Re-design our company logo and strapline
• Re-brand EVERYTHING including new colour palette, new logos, new packaging…
• Re-design our social media assets
• And finally… rebuild this very website! 

I wanted to write a real account of how we’ve got to this point - it's been a real journey, and an intense one at that, but we have worked so hard and so well as a team to get this all together. 

Welcome to the new fresh face of Pivot, let's see what 2023 holds!