A Spalding businesswoman is turning to a new way of raising funds to help her expand her business.
Nicola Raven has been running her DDC Vinyl business from her home for a couple of years, but until now has been limited to a single colour for printing on promotional materials such as mugs, coasters and even cars.
But she is hoping crowdfunding might provide the answer she needs to buy a vital piece of equipment which will enable her to print full colour and grow her business.
It will mean she can grow the service she offers to individuals and businesses to provide things such as t-shirts, picture frames, stickers and labels, printed with company logos or family photos
The printer cutter machine costs £9,500 – way out of Nicola’s reach – but she is hoping to find support to help her buy it in exchange for rewards.
She said: “Rewards based crowd funding is a fairly new way of doing things where people pledge to support your project in exchange for rewards.
“I need £9,500 and so I have signed up on crowdfunder.com where people can pledge from as little as £5 up to £1,000 in exchange for rewards, such as discounts, free products or links from my website.”
She is just waiting from her project to be approved by crowdfunder.com, but anyone interested in pledging their support can find out more about Nicola’s effort at crowdfunder.co.uk/ddcvinyl.
Nicola hopes that by expanding her business she can help other small businesses to advertise themselves and get off the ground by providing affordable promotional materials.
She said: “When you are a small business and want to order just a small number of items you end up paying a premium. I don’t think that’s fair and I don’t like to see the small people suffer just because they are small.
“I’ve had a lot of support from other businesses as I’ve tried to get my business off the ground and now I want to offer that same sort of support to others.
“But £9,500 is out of my reach – I will never be able to get that kind of money through Government grants – so I’m hoping crowdfunding will enable me to reach that target.
“And it means that those people who are willing to support me will get rewards in exchange – it’s kind of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
