News | May 2012 Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Awards Winners Announced
The 4 young entrepreneurs below have been named as the Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Award winners for May 2012. Each will receive a £1,000 cash boost for their business.
Jules Quinn (The *Teashed)
The *TeaShed is a design-led tea and teaware company, born and brewed in Britain. Based in Gateshead, they sell their delicious teas and other tea-related products in over 80 stockists across the UK and also in Switzerland, Ireland, Oman, Kuwait and Dubai. The *TeaShed will also be launched nationwide in 23 John Lewis stores this Autumn. They only use quality whole leaf tea, which they import from Sri Lanka. This tea is then held inside a silky pyramid teabag - a style of teabag growing increasingly in popularity due to the fantastic quality of tea. To stand out, The *TeaShed packages 20 of these delicious teabags inside a paper cup, so rather than a box, which you would just throw away, you have a cup to use and then recycle!
Alexander Finlayson (MedicineAfrica)
MedicineAfrica is an online application designed to put social networking together with the global health workforce and patient management. They are trying to provide the technology for healthcare workers around the world to communicate and enable patients to be managed independent of political and economic borders. So far, they have managed to extract 150,000 hours of NHS staff time as volunteers to contribute to clinical advice mentoring and education to isolated health workers in fragile states, including all graduating doctors in Somaliland and many elsewhere. They have also produced a service with the Royal College of Paediatrics to provide a funded programme in Rwanda, with further plans for post-graduate healthcare education across the whole Somaliland Health Sector.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang (coeur)
coeur is the playfully preppy new menswear lifestyle brand for the modern day dandy. Inspired by classics like Brideshead Revisited, the DNA of preppy is updated for everyday living with slim cut clothing and quirky neckwear for the youthful and confident gentleman.
Ingrained into the clothing is the signature 100% silk jacquard fabric woven exclusively at one of England's finest fabric mills. coeur will not only be nurturing their own design aesthetics with textiles, but supporting British manufacturing and skill sets not associated with brand directly such as the machinery technicians, fabric technologists and dye specialists to promote ‘Brand Britain’.
Ry Morgan (PleaseCycle)
PleaseCycle provides innovative employee-engagement software to help organisations get more people commuting by bike - a proven way of reducing absenteeism, increasing productivity and saving carbon. They create client-branded Cycle Hubs (online portals) which allow staff to learn about cycling, plan safe routes, log journeys, compete against colleagues and earn rewards/discounts for their total mileage - akin to an 'air miles' for bikes.
This also gives the company an omniscient perspective of cycling as an overall entity - including calories burned and carbon saved - something very powerful for healt /sustainability targets. In sum, it's an employee engagement, benefit and CSR tool rolled into one which offers Triple-Bottom-Line value - people, profits, planet - for both the company and individuals.
Commiserations to Piers Ebdon (Footie Arena Limited), Anthony Gerrard (u18 Ltd.), Adviya Khan (Miss Kaan), Jody Osborn (The Backscratchers), Dennis Owusu-Sem (Revision App) and Rebecca Sweetman (Tutudesk UK) who were shortlisted but did not win this round.
Win funding for your business
If you're aged 16-30, based in the UK and have been running your business for less than 12 months (or need a little bit of cash to get started), apply online now for our £1,000 Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Awards.
