Entrepreneurs: Freedom to Exist is becoming a booming start-up to watch

Most of us get home from work, gobble dinner and flop in front of a boxset (or, for the three Londoners still in new year’s resolution-mode, hit the gym). Not so Kirsty Whyte and Paul Tanner: she’s the creative director of private members’ club Soho House, he runs Clerkenwell furniture brand Hayche, but when these two reach their Westbourne Park flat of an evening, they “eat a speedy dinner and get to work”.

Work is their “minimalist watches” business Freedom to Exist, so named because the start-up is, explains Whyte, “a side-hustle. It’s always nice to make money while you sleep”.

The office is the duo’s spare room, “with boxes of stock and watch parts everywhere, and a mini post office so we can package everything up and drop it off for delivery on our way to work in the morning”.

Whyte and Tanner met in 2006, when they worked at furniture chain Habitat. They started dating. Tanner first noticed Whyte “when a catering company came into the office to try to win Habitat’s business, and apparently I impressed him by going back for seconds”, she laughs.

They stayed together as their careers moved apart and, in 2015, when Tanner was a senior buyer at Marks & Spencer, and Whyte was design and product manager at furniture brand Heal’s, they decided to launch their watches business on the side.

Whyte, 38, explains: “I couldn’t find a watch I liked, one that was minimal, stylish, brand- and diamante-free, and fitted my petite wrists. We knew there was an audience out there. And with our combined skills we knew we could get the product to market.”

The process from sketch to stock took almost a year, and cost the pair £65,000, funded from their savings. They drew up designs, then commissioned 3D-printed models “so we could have something tangible to size up against various wrists”.

There was a long honing process: “we experimented with many different watch diameters, and felt that 30mm was the perfect size,” Tanner, 39, explains. “Then we discovered that the £2 coin is 30mm, so for a few days Kirsty taped a £2 coin to her wrist as an experiment, thankfully not to many funny looks!”

The entrepreneurs had, between them, worked for a host of design brands including Tom Dixon, BHS and Made.com but they’d never worked on watches. “So to find a manufacturer, we purchased watches in our price-point, around £150, and found the name of our now-supplier listed in their instruction manual.”

They approached the Wembley-based firm, which manufactures watches in Hong Kong using a Swiss watch movement and Italian leather strap, but were initially turned down: “they worked with Vivienne Westwood, Tom Dixon and Barbour; we were too small a business. But we convinced them to let us present our designs and ambitions, and they took a chance on us,” says Whyte.

It was a slow start: initially FTE sold three £130 watches a week, but after the pair turned to Kickstarter, and raised £25,000, they funded a larger production run and greater range.

Today they sell five to 10 watches every day, offer 33 different designs, and have customers from New Zealand to Norfolk, and celebrity fans including comedian Rob Beckett and musician Danny Jones.

There are still plenty of highs (“we love the little wins of hearing the ‘cha-ching’ of a sale; we do a high-five”) and lows: “It’s difficult not to take it personally when you’ve worked so hard to make a sale and a customer decides to return an item. Behind the scenes there is a lot of work that goes into processing returns and dealing with customer queries.”

Tanner and Whyte want to add more designs and cases, faces and straps to the range but acknowledge, “if we really wanted to grow Freedom to Exist at a faster rate, we’d need to invest more time but we love our [day] jobs too. we’re definitely not ready to quit.”

Ten years ago, Tanner says, “it’s unlikely that we would have pursued the project.

“We’d have had to hire a retail space, and drive customers to it. Today you can run a business from your phone, use apps that perform the same tasks that employees would, and launch an affordable retail website.”

And the pair say they even have time to watch box-sets, too: “we’re working our way through the old Friends episodes on Netflix at the moment — we don’t miss out on chilling out.”