SAM
BOEX
These must be exciting times for Flexi-Hex? It’s super exciting. We are growing rapidly. We’ve just turned over what we did last year in the first six months of this year. We’re now up to 13 people from a staff point of view and starting to move globally with our strategy as well, starting to open up the US market and also the Asia Australasia markets as well. 80%-90% of our revenue currently is in the drink space within the UK. And we’ve started to push that out into Europe, but there we are also starting to get traction into new market sectors such as cosmetics and electronics.
of a poor consumer experience we had of buying a surfboard online, arriving covered in bubble wrap. Both myself and Will took it on as a project to see if we could develop a packaging solution for surfboards. So, the first six to eight months of the business was 100% in the board sports markets and exploring where we could go with that. But we quickly realised the opportunities in a number of other markets and even now, the further we get into the business the potential just becomes greater and greater with how the product can be applied to different markets and different products.
A fascination of creating form in three dimensional ways and exploring different materials
When you first came up with the concept, was the drinks market the first one in mind? No, the product was originally designed for surfboards. The idea came off the back
We brought in an account manager for board sports, but that’s now becoming all sports, using Flexi-Hex potentially for tennis rackets, for snowboards, for skis. The product works really well for all these awkward shaped
Sam
products. It just flows around and forms this shell-like protection around the product. I received a bottle through the post the other day, with the Flexi-Hex packaging. I must say it’s a thing of beauty, but I’m guessing quite expensive to produce? We are starting to become pretty competitive in the market, but yes, it was a chicken and egg thing when we first started. It’s incredibly difficult. We started the business just buying one pallet of product and you can’t compete on that. But we are starting to get to a point where we’re looking at automation for the products, and that is going to have a big effect on the unit price. We’re currently probably around 25% more expensive than plastic products on the market. But we have a number of unique USPs with the product and we can get upwards of 9,000 bottle sleaves on a single pallet. So yes, there is a slight difference in the prices of the products, but that’s getting more competitive.
Boex
12 | BUSINESS CORNWALL
