Ana Attlee and Emily Lambert | Seedball
“The thing with YES is that if you have a little something in your head, YES will pull it out. Going to YES really gave us huge amounts of confidence to go for it in business. It gave us everything we needed to leave that room and start a company.”
A mini ecosystem
Emily Lambert and Ana Attlee took part in Environment YES back in 2010 while studying conservation at the University of Aberdeen. Taking part in the competition gave the team the idea to develop small balls containing the seeds to create a mini ecosystem – Seedball was born!
Follow your passion for career success
Emily says that starting a company was the perfect path to a career in conservation:
I had known for a long time that I wanted to work in conservation and Seedball is the vehicle to achieve this. You can follow your passion in life and taking part in YES means you really don’t need to wait and do another course before starting your business – YES gives you the skills to go ahead and pursue your business idea right away.
You don't need to be a natural entrepreneur to succeed, but you do need to massively believe in both your idea and yourself to make it succeed.
Nine years later and the team has grown to 16 part-time employees and Seedball’s products are now on sale in 600 stores across the UK. They have also ventured into new markets with matchbox-sized pods containing six seedballs, developed as both wedding favours and for the promotions market.
Validation through collaboration
As a promo gift, Seedballs are the perfect eco giveaway for brands, offering an alternative to the usual pens and mugs.
Promo pods have been given away by retailer M&S and to punters at Edinburgh Science Festival. The BBC has just placed an order for 10,000 matchboxes emblazoned with their logo for various promotions.
The Seedball tins are still the main way to package the product for retail and now include exciting collaborations with the Natural History Museum where scientists have developed mixes specifically to attract bats, birds or beetles (available via the Seedball website) and with Kew Gardens which is stocking the tins as an exclusive.
These collaborations are a real highlight for Emily who says:
Working with these organisations was brilliant validation for us. We are all trying to save garden wildlife and be part of the story with them.
Learning from your mistakes
For garden centres, the team have produced cardboard packaging to resonate with gardeners looking to buy seeds for their own gardens after research found that the tins were viewed more as a gift purchase. The new packaging works at the £5 price point and is also stocked by Anthropologie.
Emily cites this packaging re-development project as an opportunity to use the learnings from their mistakes inevitably made back when designing the original tin:
We have made lots of mistakes in the past and nowadays, if we come across something we don’t know, we will work it out. We still make plenty of mistakes and that’s OK.
Seedball is a social enterprise with the goal of creating more wildflower habitats to protect biodiversity by raising awareness and inspiring people to grow wildflowers. The company is a non-profit social enterprise, and the success so far has been realised whilst growing the business organically. Emily says this is a slow process but has the benefit of putting less pressure on the team. The ultimate aim is to buy and re-wild land with the profits from Seedball. The goal is to purchase this first area of land in 2020.
Leading voice and influencer
Social media has been Seedball’s core marketing channel to date. The focus here is on positioning Seedball as a conservation organisation and becoming a leading voice and influencer in wildlife gardening. Instagram is the cornerstone of Seedball’s social media presence with the visual nature of the channel lending itself perfectly to beautiful photos of wildflowers and bees. Seedball’s followers love to show off their own wildflower gardens and an online community has grown around the wildflower movement.
Seedball have won numerous accolades since their launch, winning two awards in 2017: Gift of the Year (Eco Friendly Category) and Garden Retail Awards (Best New Gardening Growing Product).
2018 saw TV fame when the team took part in Channel 4’s Buy It Now. Emily and Ana successfully pitched their product to a panel of retailers with all of the retailers on the show placing an order. Such was the interest in the product that the Seedball website momentarily crashed as viewers flocked to the site to buy the tins for themselves.
In the future, there are plans to launch more new products, including one where 10% of profits will go to conservation charity Plantlife.
More Information
You can follow Seedball’s progress on their dream to create more wildflower habitats in the UK via their website and Instagram @seed_ball