From Moonpig to Dragon
We were delighted to welcome Nick Jenkins to deliver the latest Thomas Arnold Lecture earlier this week. Mr Jenkins is the founder of Moonpig.com, the online greetings card company.
Mr Jenkins read Russian at University before spending eight years living and working in Moscow as a sugar trader. In 1998, after finding a death threat nailed to his front door, he decided it was time to come home and while studying for an MBA at Cranfield University he decided to set up his own business. He wrote five business plans, one of which was for an online personalised greeting card retailer which turned into Moonpig.com. After growing sales but still losing money, the business finally made a profit in 2005 and by 2011 had four million customers worldwide. Nick sold most of the business to Photobox in July 2011 and now splits his time between working in the voluntary sector and investing in and advising other businesses. Nick is a new “Dragon” on the Dragons' Den panel, which is being filmed now and will air from July.
Speaking for the best part of an hour, without notes or any form of presentation material, Mr Jenkins delivered a witty, animated and entertaining speech to a packed auditorium. The audience were greatly impressed with his skill as a speaker and his honesty in sharing nuggets of wisdom gained from his experience in business. His tips for the future young entrepreneurs in the Warminster audience included: look after your customers; make sure your product is something people want and keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing.
His talk was both light-hearted and informative and full of hilarious anecdotes about his career and the building up of Moonpig from scratch. As the latest “successful entrepreneur” to become a BBC2 Dragon he also delighted his audience with a few Dragons' Den secrets!
Sixth Former Emily Storey Walker gave the vote of thanks. She described his lecture as “A lesson to all Sixth Formers present – the need to be flexible and resilient in our future careers.” The School is very grateful to Mr Jenkins for taking the time to visit and deliver such an interesting lecture. We look forward to seeing him on Dragons' Den next month!