Campaign Success: Common Objective

Common Objective (CO) is a B2B sourcing and information platform for the sustainable fashion industry. The company is currently live on Crowdcube and has raised over £380k from 250+ investors. We caught up with Founder and CEO, Tamsin Lejeune to find out more about their Crowdcube success story.  

What attracted you to equity crowdfunding?

Common Objective brings together a global community in the fashion industry, most of our founding investors are also clients and members, and we have found this to be a win-win, so crowdfunding was a natural net step. Our shareholders have been our biggest champions and helped us to achieve our growth over the last two years – they have also contributed to the development of the product.

Were there any resources or external support services you used for your Crowdcube campaign?

There is a lot of information our there, but much of it is biased towards rewards-based crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, which require a different sort of campaign. I found Crowdcube’s suite of resources by far the most comprehensive and helpful when it came to planning for and running our campaign. If I’d known about Crowdfunding Champions when planning our campaign, I definitely would have checked out your resources.

For our video, we hired Be Inspired Films who did a really good job.  

What’s been the most challenging part of the process?

We launched our Crowdcube campaign a week before Covid-19 escalated, so we lost a lot of the momentum we had initially created through our pre-registration campaign, and some of the larger investors became more cautious and wanted more time to make decisions. Most of our investors come from industry, and the fashion industry was severely affected early on. With such an uncertain climate and in the middle of the lockdown, we had to take a different approach, targeting a range of different sorts of investors, and more small-mid size investments.

Hear more about Tamsin’s experience of Crowdfunding during the Coronavirus pandemic in our dedicated post here.

If you could go back, what would you have done differently?

1. Launch earlier to avoid Covid-19
2. Allow more time for the pre-registration campaign. The larger ticket investors usually want two weeks to look at the deck and supporting materials, so it’s good to give them time to do this before launching live so that you can get more substantial investments coming in in the first few days.
3. Get more input from some of our existing investors earlier in the planning stages of deck, pitch and video. There is so much to do in planning for a campaign that it is easy to overlook taking into account external input, but it’s worth planning into the timeline.

What do you think has been the key to your Crowdcube success?

We raised a good percentage of the target in advance of going live. We got a gold star rating for our pitch from NextFin, which helped, and we won an award during the campaign which helped drive momentum. Our initial plan included a high profile event with one of our investors, a well-known designer in the fashion industry. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the event due to Covid-19, but in normal circumstances, this would have been an important catalyst for our raise.