Luxury food and drink gift company Imp & Maker has won £500k investment to clear its debt and push it into the next phase of growth.
Made by an unnamed angel investor in exchange for 25% of Imp & Maker’s equity, the deal valued the Lincolnshire e-commerce brand at £2m.
Sarah Louise Fairburn, the hamper firm’s founder, said the investment was “game-changing”.
“It’s a real validation of what we’re building at Imp & Maker, and of me personally,” she said.
While £200k of the investment will be used to repay prior funding from the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II and the Regional Growth Fund, the remaining £300k will be invested in securing higher-margin purchasing agreements with suppliers and further strengthening the firm’s e-commerce platform.
Founded in 2020 after Fairburn left her family’s egg-packing business – which she helped to propel from £10m in turnover to over £100m – Imp & Maker provides bespoke hampers and food and drink gift packages to consumers and business customers alike.
“I used to receive a lot of corporate gifts in my previous role, and I felt food and drink gifting hadn’t evolved that much,” she explained.
Pivoting away from a hamper-first model that “hampered” the business, Imp & Maker then targeted year-round business.
“We changed the brand to [reflect] a modern way to give food and drink, and moved away from hampers: now we do bespoke branding for a lot of corporates that want to do employee appreciation year-round, and we’re big on birthdays and wedding gifts, because they’re more experience [driven],” Fairburn said.
The latest investment has been a vote of confidence after a difficult couple of years for the firm, where it pushed aggressively for growth at a high price.
“We lost a lot of money, but acquired a lot of customers,” Fairburn said, adding the team – now slimmed down to eight from its peak of 18 – had “learned a lot of lessons”.
“The past 18 months have been about transforming the business so we’re laser-focused on delivering the best gifts. We’ve reduced the range, because we now know what our customers are buying regularly, and we have massively invested in the e-commerce side of the business to make the customer journey as streamlined as possible.”
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