Spotting problems, creating solutions
What a great week to start my blog! We’ve just been exhibitors at Venturefest 2007, where we were very lucky to have been given a free stand through York St John University.
A lot of preparation went into the event, and our stand displayed flower arrangements to show off our flower gel (sponsored by Lilli Rose, a florist on Micklegate, and also Country Gardens, who are landscape and maintenance people). We also showed an educational product called Plantlet Culture, which we firstly designed for schools and colleges to use, but has now moved on to be an educational toy. We have linked up with NYBEP in the past, and we’ve held events for schools and colleges through them, which have been really interesting.
The idea was to raise the profile of the business again this year. We did gain quite a few new contacts last year at Venturefest, and so we couldn’t really pass up the opportunity to be there this year. Also we want to gauge peoples’ reactions to our new products.
Anyway, more about who I am and what my business is about. My background is in horticulture (I studied at Askham Bryan College for six years), and I specialise in micropropagation - growing plants in test tubes rather than soil.
Don’t Weed it Gel it started about four years ago as our first product (a weed suppressant gel), so it was a horticultural product that we developed first. We now design products in other fields too - we spot problems and find a solution - either in a service or a product. We then move on and develop a product to a workable prototype. We can either develop it further ourselves and then sell it to the end user, or sell it
through third parties or licence our technology to third party companies. Most of our work is based in York or Scarborough, where we have a lab to do research and development in.
We have got a couple of new products in the pipeline but unfortunately due to patent restrictions we can’t actually launch them yet, so watch this space!
