Posted by Rob Forkan, Co-Founder, Gandy’s

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Rob Forkan, co-founder of Gandy's, a flip flop brand dedicated to helping orphans.

My brother Paul and I started Gandy’s with the idea that something as simple as a flip flop could be inspiring. In 2004, when Paul was 11 and I was 13, we lost our parents in the Indian Ocean tsunami while on a family trip in Sri Lanka. After returning to London and finishing our education, we wanted to find a way to honor our parents’ spirits while helping children less fortunate than ourselves. We decided to create a sustainable brand to give back to children in need.

Since 2011, we’ve sold more than a quarter of a million pairs of flip flops, online and in department stores, to people around the world. The proceeds have funded a children’s home in Sri Lanka, and we plan to keep building more as the Gandy’s movement grows. Inspiration goes a long way toward building a company, but we also needed the right technology. Google Apps for Work tools have helped us lower the barriers to entry in the following ways:

1. Starting a company around an idea rather than infrastructure
From day one, we faced the challenge of immersing ourselves in Gandy’s without worrying about IT issues. We started with an enthusiastic group of young people, many who worked part-time from home, and needed technology that matched our flexible style. Google Apps helped us get the team set up quickly, easily and cost-effectively. It took me five minutes to give the whole company their own accounts. Because everyone had used Google technology before in their personal lives, I didn’t have to train anyone, which allowed us to focus on the product. A year and a half ago, we bought Chromebooks for our team of seven so they could work from home, our kitchen table, a music festival, or wherever they happened to be.

2. Competing with established players by moving quickly
As we started selling our flip flops, we realized we faced competition from companies that had been in the business for decades. Our success depends on reacting quickly to trends and adapting to consumer desires. We use Apps to work more efficiently, whether that’s viewing one another’s calendars to set up meetings or using Google Drive to share a photo of artwork that could inspire a new flip flop design. We rely on the mobility of Gmail, Docs and Drive to share ideas as they strike, and keep on track of our work when we’re on the go.

3. Staying organized in the face of complexity
One of the first barriers we faced was breaking into both wholesale and online retail, two different markets with different processes. We started using Drive to keep track of our product designs, marketing materials and merchandising assets so we can stay united as a team. Shared folders organize everything product-related, which lets us work faster on design and ensure our final products look great. Our designers easily store and share inspiration artwork, product sketches and design files. Once the design is complete and the product manufactured, we share photos with retailers so they can see how the product will look on the floor as well as on a computer or mobile screen.

We face a different challenge every day, especially as we continue to set our sights higher. Hundreds of thousands of flip flops and cups of coffee later, we’ve proven to ourselves that we can overcome these challenges using the fast and flexible technology of Google Apps.

Click to expand the full infographic below.

Posted by Kiyan Foroughi, Founder and CEO, Boticca

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Kiyan Foroughi, founder and CEO of Boticca, a curated global marketplace for original fashion accessories.

While traveling in Morocco in 2008, I met a jewelry maker named Myriam who commuted four hours daily between her village in the Atlas Mountains and the market in Medina. I knew there had to be a better way for talented independent designers to sell to consumers and share their stories with the world. I returned to my role in finance with my interest piqued in solving this new problem. After a year of research and planning I quit my job to start building an initial team and website. Since launching in October 2010, Boticca has connected global customers with high-quality, handcrafted fashion accessories, designed all over the world.

We built our website with the vision for a different way of buying: telling a unique story for each product, and shipping directly from the designer. By creating Boticca, I’ve learned how technology can connect a global community and overcome the challenges of building a company from the ground up. Here are four of the biggest barriers we faced in growing our business, and how we broke through them with technology:



1. Finding a cost-effective solution that supports our growth
In the early days, we had to move quickly despite the constraints of a limited budget. Our team of six used separate tools for email, calendars and document-sharing, but when you stacked them together, our Frankenstein solution cost up to £30 per user each month. In July 2010, we switched to Google Apps to bring email, calendar, docs and sheets together into a single product. Since we can pay on a monthly basis with Apps, we didn’t have to invest a large sum upfront or sign a binding contract, as is common practice with other vendors. I can add accounts for staff as they’re hired rather than buying 100 licenses but using only 40. Besides saving us money, Apps gives us flexibility.

2. Creating seamless workflows with freelancers and external partners
Before we built our editorial team, we relied on clusters of freelancers to outsource work. We wanted to give external partners access to our workflows, brand guidelines and internal information in an efficient way. Google Apps helped make the experience working with freelancers seamless. When we worked with a freelance editor to write the product descriptions on our website, we used Google Sheets to share product URLs and deadlines for each 100-word description. Our development team could open the shared Sheets to see the descriptions take shape as the writer typed them, and then use the content to populate the website right away.

3. Focusing on product and service instead of administration
One of the first balancing acts we faced as a new company was managing the administrative side of the business while building our product. We like to test our product, break it, then re-test something new. If we had burdensome IT concerns about our tools, we wouldn’t be so nimble. Fortunately, Google Apps is easy enough for us to manage on our own. It’s so easy to use that the technical team can focus on running our platform and addressing customers, rather than managing users. When a we hire a new person to their team, we have access to set up a new account in the admin panel ourselves.

4. Communicating effectively to build an inclusive culture
As we grow, we need to maintain a culture enabled by technology rather than hindered by it. Google Apps tools help us maintain transparency and inclusion through immediate communication and easy sharing. One of our style-hunters uses Google Slides to create weekly presentations about new brands she has found to join our website. People working remotely can follow along with the latest version in Google Drive without having to email her for the file. Effective communication is the first step toward empowering each person in the company to take ownership.

Customers love being surprised and inspired, over and over again. With this in mind, we strive to come up with new ways to fulfill our purchasing philosophy. Tools like Google Apps step out of the way and let us focus on consistently delivering these ideals to both our customers and designers. If we didn’t have the ability to work and communicate together so nimbly — both inside and outside the company — Boticca wouldn’t have been able to achieve the success we have today.

Posted by Ben Pugh, Founder, FarmDrop

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Ben Pugh, founder of FarmDrop, the UK's first "click-to-harvest" online farmer's market.

Technology has the potential to bring consumers and producers together to make food tastier, more convenient and more sustainable. In 2012, I left my career in finance to test this potential and started talking with farmers, fishermen and consumers about how to improve the food supply chain. The following March, after months of researching and experimenting, we launched the FarmDrop pilot. More than 8,000 customers and 400 independent, local producers across the UK have signed up since and thousands of pounds of local food is being bought and sold through the platform each week.

For us, building a high-growth company has been about getting consumers and food producers excited about our online farmer’s market vision and assembling a team of talented people who believe in it even more. From scratch, Google Apps helped us tackle three of our biggest challenges head-on:

1. Establishing instant credibility without costly business tools
We started FarmDrop with no funding, but using Google Apps for Work right from the start helped shorten the otherwise difficult financial barrier to entry. Inexpensive email and collaboration tools equipped the team for work within a matter of hours, avoiding the complexity of software licenses, pricing structures and IT administration. A seemingly small thing like having an @farmdrop.co.uk email addresses made our day-old company feel like a real business. Apps helps us present ourselves professionally, which boosted morale and built trust among partners and customers from the outset.

2. Creating transparency throughout the company from day one
Joining a startup is a risk but it’s also great adventure and it’s important that everyone in the company feels like they are part of the adventure. For that to happen, everyone needs to know what’s going on in the business. It sounds simple and easy but with so much going on all the time it isn’t. Google Drive allows us to share business strategy documents, goals and performance metrics, as well as product roadmaps, even as they evolve. We’ve created a detailed timeline in Google Sheets that tracks all of our activities leading up to a major launch, so anyone can check team progress in real time. With granular sharing controls, I can grant view-only access to protect crucial data while still providing team members with access to information.

3. Enabling team members to work flexibly from anywhere
Flexibility is an important benefit of startup culture, but we don’t want it to interrupt work. On any given day, we’ll have a handful of people in the office, another handful working from home, and the rest on a farm, meeting fishermen and bakers or meeting people from new pick-up points. Apps connects us no matter where we are or what device we’re using. The development team uses Google Hangouts for their daily meeting, and can easily share their screens or move the camera to a whiteboard to share information with team members who are working remotely.

With our growth accelerating, we need to retain our sense of mission whilst the team expands. That means working together in total collaboration and being connected as a team which Google Apps enables. Our love of authentic, sustainable food and the people who make it will continue to drive us forwards to a world of better food and a healthier planet.

Posted by Lisa Rodwell, CEO, Wool and the Gang

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today, we hear from Lisa Rodwell, CEO of Wool and the Gang, a handcrafted knitwear brand bringing fashion from factories into the home.

The rise of “maker culture” has revived craftsmanship in the last few years, but our co-founders Aurelie and Jade were ahead of the trend. They started Wool and the Gang back in 2008 to modernize knitting, and began selling DIY “knit kits” through retailers. In 2013, Aurelie and Jade raised funding and hired a team of seven to embark on a new journey: building an online fashion brand powered by the maker movement.

I joined in February of that year, when we moved into our first offices and began selling handmade products knit by our ‘Gangstas,’ the name we've endearingly given our employees. Three months later, we started using Google Apps to work better as a team and communicate with our network of 2,000 makers around the world. As a small and fast-growing company, we had the opportunity to move quickly by testing lots of ideas and focusing on the winners. Thanks to the momentum of the maker movement and the accessibility of powerful, easy-to-use technology, we’ve been able build a successful business in spite of three daunting obstacles:

1. Managing a global network of makers through real-time collaboration
More than 2,000 knitters have applied to be part of our gang, ranging from novices to experts, everywhere from London to Lima. We work with 200 of these “Gang Makers” at any given time, and thanks to Google Apps, communicating and collaborating with them is a breeze. Our Gang Maker manager uses shared Google Sheets to track the progress of all 200 knitters in real time; each one is updated constantly and instantly by knitters, providing greater transparency into our supply chain and enabling us to respond better and faster to market demand. It’s more cost-efficient and far less laborious than building a custom backend solution or emailing version after version of Excel spreadsheets as attachments.

2. Coordinating complex development of a physical product
We launch new products every week and ship them around the world, which poses a significant challenge as a company of 25 people. We coordinate product development more effectively by using Google Drive as a project collaboration platform. Our knit developers, who create the patterns for our knit kits, use Drive as a repository for all pattern-related files. They create pattern templates in Google Docs and share them with tech editors for approval. Then, the knit devs adapt the patterns to InDesign files, which they can upload to Drive and share with designers to finalize. Warehouse staff print the pattern files directly from Drive, then assemble them in a knit kit. Sharing our content easily allows us to reduce the complexity of product development and get our products out the door.

3. Prioritising the most important activities
As a small company, we have seemingly infinite challenges to tackle with limited resources. Google Apps help us make the most of our time and our technology investment. We can test something new, like an at-home knitting party, using tools we already have, like Drive for sharing and Gmail for communications. And because Apps for Work is easy to use, we don’t have to spend time on extra training. We can spend our energy on improving our products.

Wool and the Gang is all about creating, teaching, sharing experiences, and having fun while doing it. Our technology gets out of the way so we don't have to think about the barriers of growing our business. We can focus on pushing our knitting movement forward.

Posted by Alex Klein, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Kano

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. During Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’ll promote entrepreneurship in the UK through a handful of stories from early-stage disrupters and trailblazers who are using Google Apps for Work to overcome the challenges of starting a new company and inspiring others to start businesses. Today we hear from Alex Klein, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Kano, a London-based startup building DIY computer kits that are inspiring a new generation of coders.

At Kano, we're creating a new type of computer that anyone, anywhere, can build and code themselves — we've designed it for all ages, all over the world. It's part of our vision to democratize computing, to give the majority world a way to take control, make, and play with technology -- instead of just consuming it. We started off in November 2012, when my little cousin Micah challenged us to create a computer he could make himself, "as simple and fun as Lego." Just under a year later, our Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign exceeded its goal of £59,000 in 18 hours and went on to raise £900,000. Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak pledged for a kit.

To tackle the major challenges we knew we would face on our journey to a new, physical, worldwide product — shipping to 87 countries — we needed to deploy tools that would allow us to work in the best possible way. We also needed technology to help us overcome barriers we would face in getting Kano to market. Here are a few ways Google Apps for Work helped us overcome our challenges.



1. Developing an idea into a company, from anywhere in the world
The idea for Kano started in a Google Doc, quite literally, right at the very beginning of our journey. I was in the UK and my other co-founder, Yonatan, was in Israel so we wrote the story of our business in Docs, commenting back and forth frequently. Then, we would get on Hangouts to discuss the ideas. This went on all night, and by the next day we had a beautiful launch plan. Google Apps helped us overcome geographic barriers from the outset, enabling us to work from anywhere and reach early collaborators and advisors from the UK, US and Israel. All our collective ideas melded together in one living, breathing document, taking Kano from concept to company.

2. Selecting a collaboration platform to supercharge our product development
We’re fast, agile workers who thrive on getting creative ideas suggested, digested and tested as fast as possible. In order to keep up with the fast pace of product development, we needed a collaboration platform that could store all our thinking, content and planning. When we looked at Google Drive for our storage needs and weighed it against other options, like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, we concluded the latter environments were too static. We needed the fluidity that Google offers with an interconnected family of Apps. Google Drive plays a key role in storing, sharing and syncing our ideas and planning. Given the pace at which we work, we can’t be held back by working in silos. Drive enables us to work in a new way by enabling our spontaneity, giving us freedom to improvise against many brainwaves at once.

3. Connecting with customers simply and effectively
We weren’t initially sure how much mass appeal Kano would have. Today we’ve delivered our first 20,000 units to over 80 countries. Suddenly, we have thousands of customers with valuable insights that can help us grow. I found a great way of getting insights from them on how to improve Kano was through Google Forms, which we used to assemble our first customer insights survey. We reached 13,000 customers and got over 1000 responses in 12 hours. The form only took 45 minutes to assemble. We learnt that if we compiled a resource of ten easy projects and put them front and center in our online community, we’d have Kano kids engaging for longer. At our next board meeting, we impressed investors with the customer love Kano received, as well as the granularity of the feedback we were soliciting. It’s key to our culture that we have the freedom to reach our customers instantly. Their feedback allows us to iterate Kano faster, and keep our ears to the product pulse.

4. Bringing the tools we use as consumers to work
We’re a small team of 20-somethings with eclectic backgrounds. Google Apps speak to our generation’s business needs. We expect the same technology at work as we do in our personal lives. I’m 24 years old and, like my co-workers, wouldn’t expect anything other than Google at work. The regular stream of Google Apps product updates make us confident we can continue stay nimble and work better together. What really matters is the way all these services integrate harmoniously, with simple setup, and allow us, the entrepreneurs, to focus on our main mission — delighting our customers. With busy travel schedules we stay connected with Hangouts and the Gmail app on our mobile devices. We collaborate and store all of our business files in Drive and ensure we stay in sync with deadlines by using shared Calendars.

We like to think of computers as open boxes, filled with possibility — once you dive in and learn how to change the rules, you unlock new powers, and new ways to play. Our goal is to help you find a way into this exciting world. What we’ve done with Kano is a starting point. We’re extraordinarily excited to see it reshaped and re-imagined in the hands of thousands around the world.

Posted by Yoann Martin, Technical Director, Notonthehighstreet.com

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Yoann Martin, Technical Director at notonthehighstreet.com, an online marketplace that supports growing small businesses by offering a route to market for designer-makers who would otherwise lose out in the battle with retail giants.

As Holly Tucker, co-founder of notonthehighstreet.com, attended a London design market to sell her beautiful, homemade door wreaths in 2005, she had an idea: small businesses from around the world should able to sell their items beyond the physical spaces of marketplace stalls like the one she currently stood at. Holly instantly knew that her former advertising agency colleague, Sophie Cornish, would be an ideal partner in the quest to take less ordinary, independent and beautiful products to a global audience.

In 2006, they built a platform to bring together the most original items from the best small businesses globally, making it easy for consumers to browse and buy. Since then, our company has grown to a team of 180 across three offices, and our online store now brings together more than 150,000 original lifestyle products from more than 5,000 of the UK’s most creative small businesses.

In the early days, we worked together by walking to each other’s desks, but as we grew in both size and geographical distribution, we knew we needed a better way to collaborate systematically and from different locations. So, in 2012, when we had 96 employees, we moved to Google Apps. We no longer need to be at headquarters to share information and feel like a team.

Over the last few years and across the company, our ability to make decisions based on data has improved thanks to immediate sharing via Google Drive, Docs and Sheets. We’ve equipped teams to be more responsive, with greater visibility into their data, files and planning materials. Above all, we’ve connected different teams across departments and offices, maintaining the close communication that helped us thrive when we were just a three-person team. Here are the ways in which we’ve streamlined our ways of working:

• A culture of documentation: The product team diagrams their workflows in Docs and uses Sheets to keep track of the terms for new service providers. Within the software engineering team, engineers, testers and product managers can all store campaign-related updates in a single shared Sheet.
• Unified campaign assets: We develop marketing campaigns faster thanks to centralised Drive folders containing planning docs, briefs for creative agencies, pdfs, pictures and video assets. The settings in Drive allow us to easily share these assets internally and with our agencies.
• Cross-team customer service: Account managers and customer service reps use Sheets to track customer queries that need attention. If there’s a customer service or inventory issue, a representative can quickly flag it by entering a comment into a shared Sheet, and the account manager can call the seller to get more information.
• Mobility: Our account managers travel across the UK to maintain relationships with our thousands of sellers. While meeting with a client, an account manager can access a Google Sheet to pull up statistics about commercial sales, SEO ranking, and merchandising. Because Sheets is stored in the cloud and constantly updated, we know the data is fresh.

The success of the site depends on the quality of products, and we work closely with our sellers on an ongoing basis to support their needs, particularly when it comes to challenging areas such as product development and scaling to meet huge demand. For instance, we’ve worked with Wendy Harrison, founder of a personalised print company called Letterfest, since autumn 2008. The business began with Wendy operating out of her spare room, and now she employs 10 full-time staff and four freelancers. Letterfest brought in more than £1 million in transactions through our platform last year. Our priority is to continue to evolve the way we work. For this, Google Apps has broken traditional barriers, making our lives easier and enabling our teams to work better and more collaboratively.

Posted by Bec Astley Clarke, Founder and Chairman, Astley Clarke

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Bec Astley Clarke, Founder and Chairman of Astley Clarke, a leading luxury jewelry brand born and bred in London.

I started Astley Clarke seven years ago with a team of three people working from my flat. We designed the website from my kitchen table, photographed products in my living room, and even stored the actual necklaces and bracelets in a safe under my bed. Today, we have a team of 40 spread across London, Paris, Scotland and the U.S. We’ve built a successful online luxury brand by embracing the latest in technology, using tools like Google Apps for Work along the way to improve our creative process, communicate face-to-face, and build strong relationships with our extended team of global suppliers and vendors.

We started using Google Apps at the start of 2012, adopting Gmail, Docs, Drive and Hangouts and quickly making them a part of our daily operations. Since then, the tools have become a natural part of our creative process from scratch to sale. Now, we develop our jewelry faster by sharing concept sketches, images of gemstones and prototype photographs through Google Drive. We create and execute marketing campaigns more efficiently by meeting via Google Hangouts from our mobile phones and laptops. With Hangouts, our creative director in London, our graphic designer in Paris and our web developer in Scotland can all view the latest marketing collateral, discuss their feedback on the spot, and quickly make decisions — like which images we’ll use to showcase our Biography Collection on the website.



Because we make fine jewelry, it’s important to check in face-to-face to visualize how a product is developing and assure our brand is displayed consistently in retail locations. Hangouts help us understand the details of one another’s feedback so we can ensure a bracelet, necklace or ring looks exactly how our designer envisioned it at all stages of development. Our creative director also uses Hangouts to check in with suppliers across the world — something she used to do painstakingly via fax machine.

We have a big vision: to build a new kind of luxury brand on an international scale. Google Apps helps us work better internally as well as externally, with our suppliers and vendors, to bring the best in fine jewelry to customers around the world. It’s become natural to share large photo files internationally, edit the same document at the same time, and book meetings with people overseas in the middle of the night. It’s an organic process that fits our creative flow.

Posted by Chris Morton, Co-founder and CEO, Lyst

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Chris Morton, Co-founder and CEO of Lyst, a platform that aggregates the world's fashion commerce sites in a single place.

Six years ago, I shared both a house and a common frustration with two fashion forward women: we loved shopping online, but couldn’t stand how impersonal and time-consuming it was to jump from site to site in search of a new jacket or pair of jeans. I knew there must be a better way for people to find the fashion that fit their personal style without having to explore and buy from dozens of different websites. In 2010, my co-founder and I created Lyst, an online destination that allows shoppers to customize their feed of clothes and accessories and buy from multiple brands and retailers through a single platform. Today, we’re a team of 60 with offices in London and New York, generating hundreds of millions in dollars in sales for the fashion industry.

Our unique culture has helped us challenge the way the fashion industry works, not only because we can attract great talent, but because we’ve built an environment that encourages everyone to contribute. Here are a few ways we’ve built the kind of inclusive, creative culture that define fast-moving startups like Lyst.

Cultivating autonomy, ownership and creative problem-solving
We hire people who thrive on freedom — they do their best work without someone giving them constant direction. We emphasize this sense of ownership from the moment they join our team: in every employment contract, the responsibilities for the role include “proactively thinking of ways to make Lyst better.” We brainstorm often, both formally and informally, with everyone from founders to new hires, college grads to industry veterans. We evaluate ideas not by who shared them but how much impact they’d have on our business.

We work with flexibility, recognising those instances that demand what we call the “screwdriver mode”, which involves tweaking and optimizing fine details. Sometimes we work differently, applying our “sledgehammer mode” when we literally need to break down one element of our business and rebuild it from scratch.

Encouraging personal communication and recognizing great work
As we grow, we need to be intentional about building a shared culture through meaningful communication. Google Docs helps us work more closely together, whether we’re collaborating on a press release or gathering feedback on an investor deck. Because it’s not always practical to fly our New York team to London, our two offices meet via Google Hangouts for bi-monthly all-hands meetings, where we share company news, celebrate sales milestones, and tip our hats to people coming up with great ideas — like a data scientist’s suggestion to use search data to understand buying patterns around bomber jackets versus varsity jackets. We’re considering setting up a permanent Hangout so people can get to know their colleagues from across the pond over a cup of virtual tea.

We also track progress in shared Google Sheets, so everyone on the team knows the status of key projects across the team. For instance, our product team use shared Sheets to record development updates on implementing various campaigns and releases. And when it’s time for my 1:1 with our Head of Product, I can follow along with every update by looking at each line item in the Sheet.

Empowering employees to work however they want
Building a culture unique to Lyst also means enabling employees to keep up with their colleagues no matter where they are and how they like to work. Google Apps helps us get the information we need at any time and capture inspiration whenever it hits. We often source styles on the go, whether it’s a particular outfit someone sees on the street or trends spotted from the front row at New York Fashion Week. Drive and Gmail apps on mobile let us quickly share the photos we snap and the notes we take with the rest of our team for internal reference and to publish as part of our editorial content.

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At Lyst, we embrace the fact that everyone is different by creating customized experiences for every shopper. Self-expression transcends fashion, and we want to build our company culture on this same premise. By obsessing over the quality of people we hire, encouraging autonomy and creativity, recognizing excellent work, and giving our team the tools they need to do their best, we’ve created an engaging environment and a unique culture that helps us achieve our goals.

Posted by Sharon Cooper, CTO, BMJ

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Sharon Cooper, CTO of BMJ a subsidiary of the British Medical Association that advances healthcare worldwide by sharing knowledge and expertise.

BMJ published our first medical journal in 1840 and moved to BMA House, an Edwardian building in London, in 1925 where we still operate. We have evolved as a digital business and the way we work has changed significantly over the years. While covering the discovery of chloroform and reporting on the controversy of the MMR vaccine, we’ve also transformed from a print-based publisher to a digital information services provider with a team spread across 12 countries.

It wasn’t always that way: until our recent effort to make our business more inherently digital, technology used to hold us back. Our antiquated email and calendars randomly deleted appointments, which caused us to miss crucial senior sales meetings, delaying projects and even derailing sales opportunities — issues that we estimated cost £30K a month of lost revenue. Because inbox storage was so limited, people forwarded emails to their personal accounts. We had no BYOD policy, so we relied on company-provided hardware, and sent UK PCs out to staff in India.

Our ongoing investment in cloud-based technologies lead to a decision last year to invest in Google Apps for Work. We now work together more seamlessly and share ideas more readily, whether we’re brainstorming around a ping pong table in our London office or meeting via Hangout with a colleague working from India. Here are four ways we’ve started working together differently over the past year.

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Delivering new business faster through closer collaborative working
The way we respond to government tender documents exemplifies our new way of working. These 100-page documents, full of dozens of complex tables, used to take two weeks to complete. Now, we create a Google Doc and work collaboratively. Whenever we need someone to insert information or provide specific feedback, we tag them in a comment and they know to jump in and add their edits or suggestions. We save time and avoid confusion by relying on Docs for this kind of collaboration rather than turning to long chains of emails with version after version of attachments. It’s a radically different, more streamlined process.

Connecting face-to-face across miles and time zones
Technology has changed the way we meet. My London developer team uses an always-on video connection through Chromebox and Hangouts to connect with our team developers in Cardiff, so we feel like we’re one team in a single office, despite the distance between our desks. Teams throughout BMJ coordinate meetings using Google Calendar, create agendas in Docs, and host Townhalls for our whole staff using Hangouts On Air — that way, anyone can join whether they’re in Portland, Oregon or Dubai. Getting all 500 employees involved requires zero cost and minimal planning or technical expertise.

Brainstorming, testing and ideating with a new office design
We’ve redesigned our physical environment to brainstorm and test new product ideas with our users. People can write and draw on the walls, which are covered in whiteboards and post-it notes, then take photos of the notes and save the images in Drive, so they can refer to them later and share them with people who couldn’t be there in person.

Working from trains, planes and automobiles
A year ago, we were tethered to our desks. Now, we can access our email and files on smartphones and tablets, thanks to the Gmail and Drive mobile apps. This means our executives can run our portfolio of over 30 products whether they’re in the office or travelling around the world. Our Editor-in-Chief, who frequently travels for work, quickly views and approves the weekly digital and print issues while on the go, using Docs and the Drive app on her mobile phone.

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Thanks to Google Apps, each year we save £135,000 in software licensing fees and hardware costs and an additional 126,500 hours of productivity. But perhaps more importantly, we’ve changed the way BMJ works together to build a healthier world.

Click to expand the full infographic below.

Posted by Dan Hartley, Global Innovation Manager at AllSaints

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today’s guest blogger is Dan Hartley, Global Innovation Manager at AllSaints, a global contemporary fashion brand based out of East London.

For 20 years, AllSaints has mixed old world craftsmanship with new world design to create contemporary clothing that’s as fashionable and relevant on the sidewalks of New Delhi as it is on the streets of New York, Paris and LA. Our aesthetic is sharp and innovative. After all, we’re named after All Saints Road in Notting Hill, a hub for new music and art.

We’re driven by experimentation and creativity and constantly test out new approaches to our style, whether it’s our photography, marketing videos, music sessions or even showroom furniture. Until recently though, our employees were burdened by a technology platform that made it hard to take creative risks or move quickly. That is, until we moved to Google Apps which transformed the way we work.

A video made by AllSaints about collaboration and innovation.

Google’s tools help make our teams feel closer and more connected to each other, from the designers at AllSaints Studios in East London, to our factories and regional offices in Turkey, Portugal and Hong Kong, to our retail stores throughout the world. We don’t have to rely on email to request an up-to-date document and wait a full day for someone from another region to send it back as an attachment, only to discover their version is obsolete because someone else edited a different copy. Now, our 2,500 employees across 120 stores and 10 regional offices store all their files in Drive, and can rest assured they’re always working on the most up-to-date version. This has also encouraged and developed a much more cross functional working environment, leading to ideas and solutions that may have otherwise never been imagined.

Google Drive has transformed how we store and share files of all kinds across the entire organisation. In AllSaints Studios, we used to have one shared network drive to store all of our files, which suffered from slow load times since so many people used it at once. It got to a point where our photo department used a separate hard drive to handle their own large file formats. With Google Drive, everyone — including the photo department — can access documents anytime, without any performance issues. We use desktop sync, an application installed on the computer that puts a Drive folder on the desktop, to automatically store large files on our computers as well.

We’ve also replaced our old intranet for retail managers with department specific Google+ Communities that are open to the entire organisation. Each week, we release a set of directives that outline where to place new styles on the shop floor. Before moving to Google, we published this information in a PDF on our intranet, and if anything changed during the week, retail managers would receive an email alert and have to find the file on the intranet, download it, then print a number of copies of the new version to hand out to their team. Now, we have a shared Drive folder for Directives, and each manager can pull up the file from their Nexus tablet as they walk around the shop floor, knowing what they’re looking at is always up to date.

We’ve found a technology partner in Google that improves our workflow and processes and enables us to concentrate on the creative work. With Google Drive, we have the tools at our fingertips to turn ideas into fashion, films and other works that inspire and ignite confidence and independence.

Posted by Tom Percival, CTO, graze

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today, we hear from Tom Percival, CTO of graze, who chronicles a selection of technology milestones behind graze’s growth and explains the role Google Apps for Work is playing in their growth story.

graze is a snack company with a technology-centric culture. What started as an idea between friends in 2007 has spiralled into an international snack business, employing 350 staff and generating over £50m in annual revenues. Along the course of our healthy snacks revolution, we’ve learnt how smart technology decisions can often hold the keys to growth opportunities. I’m delighted to highlight several milestones where we drove some incredible growth through inventive technology decision making.

Muscle up new technology with robotics
In 2010, two years into our journey, graze began investing in infrastructure for it’s first fully-automated production line, for faster and larger production. We rallied our smartest brains to collaborate with the top engineering firms in the world to invent a giant robotic food weigher that could pack product 24 hours a day. Within a year, we’d increased production (and sales) so much that we’d outgrown our space and needed more room to both breath and grow. Now, we’re operating out of a new top-secret “mega-factory” in West London.

Personalisation is the key to our customer’s heart
graze snacks are personal: we love that customers can find the snacks they love, no matter the palate or diet. Serving personalised snack combinations is both challenging and rewarding: we rely heavily on our proprietary algorithm, DARWIN, to enable us to create 4 million box combinations from over 200 products, each individually composed. This data is driven by our intense attention to detail around customer feedback — over 300 million customer ratings — which ultimately feed into our database to make our graze machine even smarter.

Constraint can inspire invention
In 2013 we made the leap across the pond and launched the graze service in the United States. We built a powerful postal ‘brain’ to monitor deliveries there in order to efficiently route packages nationwide, which we tested by posting 10,000 cardboard rabbits and monitoring their progress across the U.S. in real-time. Within 24 hours we had a customer in every state and within 2 weeks - 20,000 customers nationwide. Our postal brain really captures how much we have a technology-first approach in our DNA.

48 hour turnarounds on new product inspiration
At the heart of our advantage over traditional FMCG companies is our ability to rapidly design and release a new product. Because of the close relationship we have with our consumers we get rapid and detailed feedback on the products that we send out. Custom built analytics tools allow us to easily and quickly spot trends that help us reformulate our range. The tight vertical integration we have achieved thanks to our custom built supply chain platform means that our manufacturing and logistics can react just as quickly. This means we can now conceive of, design, manufacture and release a new product within 48 hours. Our ability to react to customer feedback meant that within 6 months of launching the US we had localised 40% of our range. This is an agility that traditional food companies cannot achieve.

Transforming our teams with Google Apps for Work
Our priority has been to pick tools that can transform our business — and for this we rely on Google Apps for Work. Moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for Work saved us 50% in IT costs alone. But beyond the financial savings, Gmail and Calendar connect our team and their applications under single-sign on, so we can stay on track and secure. By successfully migrating our platform to Google Apps for Work we’re noticing improved speed, easier unleashing good ideas and improvements in how we collaborate as a team. Combined, these improvements are helping our company to grow and to bring healthy snacks to customers in the UK and US.

Click to expand the full infographic below.

Posted by Taavet Hinrikus Executive Chairman, TransferWise

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today, we hear from Taavet Hinrikus, Executive Chairman of TransferWise, a company disrupting the international money transfer marketplace. He shared his insights on managing fast growth with a culture of collaboration and flexibility, with Google Apps for Work.

The story of Transferwise started with a pair of frustrated Estonian ex-pats. My co-founder, Kristo, and I were both living in London but getting paid and paying mortgages in Euros, leaving us with a trail of bank fees incurred from transferring money between currencies. We knew there was a better and less financially painful way to handle these transfers, and created a peer-to-peer network with complete transparency and no hidden fees. Since launching in 2011, we’ve processed 1 billion pound sterling in transfers, and in the last year alone, we’ve gone from 20 to 120 employees. What follows is a series of five insights we’ve learned along the way that we hope may help other businesses seeking a path of fast growth.

1. Seek to offer a better service. It’s really easy to say but hard to do.
We’re focused on making things faster and cheaper, but when you boil that down, what really matters is keeping our customers’ needs at the core of our strategy. We focus on making their experience as enjoyable as possible, and constantly tracking customer satisfaction across all touch points of the business helps drive the strategy that fuels our growth. And since our customers are so passionate about our service that they want to share it with their friends and relatives, virality has driven a lot of our growth over the past three years.

2. Measure satisfaction constantly and fix problems quickly
When we discover an issue or source of dissatisfaction, we set out to fix it — If we fix a problem that’s affecting one person, it’s likely we’re fixing potential problems for 100 future customers. We want to build a trusted financial service that people want to use every time they need to send money abroad. Part and parcel of that aim is keeping proactive perspective of specific issues users that could become larger. To do this, we place a heavy emphasis on measuring customer satisfaction to ensure that every customer has an excellent experience.

3. Recruit people who understand and evangelize your value proposition
We’re on a mission to make international money transfers more transparent, and we’ve built a team that’s passionate about making it a reality. A big part of our culture is our belief that the financial services industry needs to change. It shouldn’t be slow, out of touch or painful; it should be dusted off and reinvigorated. That’s why we look to hire creative and focused people who can help us shake up the old system; they understand that we’re making a difference to people’s lives by making it fairer, easier and quicker to move money around the world.

4. Invest in technology that allows your teams to work anywhere, on any device
These days, we can work anytime from anywhere. Productivity doesn’t depend on being in the right place; it depends on being in the right state of mind. We’re no longer limited to working in an office space because we have technology that enables us to access our work when we need to, no matter where we are. Google Drive makes sharing quick, efficient and simple across the company. Since we have offices in London and Estonia, it’s important that we can store and work on documents simultaneously from different locations. Google Drive is intuitive, makes us a flexible team, and allows us to turn ideas around quickly. This speed and agility helps set us apart from our competitors.

5. Keep teams in touch with the bigger picture
Communication becomes increasingly crucial as growth momentum accelerates, especially when it comes to keeping the whole team aware of the big picture and high level strategy of the company. We use Google Hangouts to drive these essential check-ins between our Estonian and London offices via a real-time video stream, so we feel like we’re all in the same room together. We even view and edit documents from within the Hangout by sharing our screens, so it’s almost as if we’re reviewing documents next to one another in person. We also host a bi-weekly company meeting over Hangouts, where we introduce new team members and update the company on big news, ideas and developments. And that’s just the beginning. Hangouts has enabled us to foster a unified vision, collaborative workflow and single culture across our office locations.

Posted by Rytis Vitkauskas, Co-founder and CEO of YPlan

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today we hear from Rytis Vitkauskas, co-founder and CEO of YPlan, a mobile app that lets users discover amazing experiences they can do that same night.

For many, planning a night out on the town means grabbing the local weekly newspaper and thumbing through it to find entertainment and club listings. My co-founder Viktoras Jucikas and I think there’s a better way to plan an exciting night out with our mobile app. YPlan provides curated entertainment listings for London, Edinburgh, New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas, and gives our users the ability to easily buy tickets with two taps on a smartphone. The app has surpassed one million downloads to date and our company has swelled to 60 employees. Growing rapidly, we’ve learned some valuable lessons. The following are five insights that might help business leaders stay focused and keep momentum when growing their business.

1. Identify a real problem — the more personal the better — then try to fix it
YPlan started as a solution to solve a personal problem. My co-founder Viktoras and I previously worked in finance but quit our jobs to travel to San Francisco to find inspiration. In San Francisco, we found it challenging to easily find things to do on our free nights. There wasn’t a central destination to find events and book tickets. So we decided to create an app to solve that problem.

2. Model early and often 
In the early stages of our business idea, we came up with 50 different project ideas before finally settling on YPlan. We constructed a business model, subjected it to an intense process of testing, then eventually scrapped it and started over. When we returned back to London we started the concept for YPlan. We conducted user testing that included Viktoras and I running around to make sure people had their tickets on time (we hadn’t finished the e-ticket mechanism by that point). Testing heavily during the first few months highlights problems you might not have anticipated and gives you the opportunity adapt your product accordingly.

3. Growth stems from your culture and early DNA 
From early on, we established a culture of creativity, collaboration and a relentless focus on our customers, which has been a foundation for our future growth. From the first day we stopped negative office patterns of blaming and arguing, and instilled frequent communication, positive reinforcement and team problem-solving. Our primary focus is to deliver the best experience for our users and our employees tackle that task creatively on a daily basis.

4. Communication and collaboration fuels growth 
YPlan’s success is largely due to successful collaboration and integration with our partners. With our teams working in at least three time zones simultaneously, Google Drive allows us to collaborate globally in real-time. It’s our central communication hub for content sharing and project collaboration. Having files accessible from anywhere on a mobile device is big plus. This has enabled seamless working and communication with our local teams, which has directly affected our global success and allowed us to expand.

5. Growth opportunities start with the user 
When surveying growth options, look to your users and learn from that data. We’re constantly analysing the data we have on our existing users to see how we can improve our services. At any one time we have two thousand versions of the app running in parallel, undergoing a highly selective process of A/B testing, which means the app is constantly being refined. Closely studying our user data led to us introducing “collections.” We knew people wanted to choose from a wide variety of events, but had to present numerous selections in a way that wasn’t a boring list of options. By adapting our interface to meet the needs of users, we now provide a curated experience, which in turn leads to consistently high retention rates after download.

Posted by Samir Desai, CEO, Funding Circle

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today we hear from Samir Desai Co-founder and CEO of Funding Circle, the world’s leading marketplace for small business loans.

At Funding Circle, we’ve built the world’s leading marketplace for individuals to lend money directly to small and medium-sized businesses in the US and the UK. Since our launch in 2010, we've experienced rapid growth, lending more than half a billion dollars to over 5,500 businesses. Google Apps for Work equips our teams to work across geographies which keeps business strategy on track as the company grows. Today, I’ll share four insights that are relevant for other businesses looking for growth opportunities.

1. Use data to your advantage
We use a combination of data and risk analytics to effectively grade our loans in more detail than traditional lending institutions and to differentiate ourselves from what other banks offer. Because of our deep analytical understanding, we can offer loans to businesses that banks might turn away. We also publish the performance of every loan we’ve ever originated on our marketplace so this information is downloadable to investors. As a result, we’ve attracted 30,000 individual investors, the Government, 10 local councils, a university and a range of financial institutions, who are all willing to lend their money because of how transparent we are about performance.

2. Invest in technology that allows your business to scale and grow
We’ve embraced the cloud from the outset. We select technology that enables us to save money, increase productivity and collaboration, like Google Apps for Work. Google Docs and Sheets are particularly valuable tools for the press releases and centralised documents we edit and share across geographies. For example, we recently announced our latest funding round of $65 million and our communications team, based in the UK and US worked very closely together. Docs and Sheets allowed them to collectively craft a strong story about the announcement and share updates. We are using Google Hangouts to help our UK and US offices keep in touch. The tech team is often in Hangouts as they review our web platform and refine our code. The collaborative and inexpensive nature of Hangouts also helps us save money when it comes to travel. The immediacy you get from Hangouts connects you when it matters, where ever you are.



3. People work better when they socialise together
We set out to create a place where people want to work. We bring smart people together and offer them a place to tackle large challenges, and have fun. Our offices are equipped with gaming consoles, ping pong tables, our beloved mini-bar ‘Fundabar’, as well as breakout areas where quick meetings can happen away from your desk. Nurturing the working environment can create a fabric that connects employees even when they’re new to the team. People work better when they socialise with each other and spend their valuable time in a comfortable office environment.

4. Reflect constantly to reinvent how you grow
We’re relentlessly assessing how to reinvent the company and change things. As we grow in size it’s important to avoid being complacent. We maintain a startup culture of moving fast and trying new things. Just because we’ve done things a certain way for the last 6 months or even 4 years, doesn’t mean there isn’t suddenly a better, more efficient way of moving forward. It’s better to take cues from what doesn’t test well, such as a marketing channel or a particular part of the website, and change course rapidly, putting the company in a better position to capture better results and offer a better service. We’re committed to providing the best experience for our customers. This only happens with a constant evaluation of the service and a neverending drive for efficiency.

Posted by Ning Li, CEO, Made.com

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today we hear from Ning Li, Co-founder and CEO of Made.com, an online retailer that offers designer furniture at affordable prices.

Made.com was born in 2010 out of a desire to provide designer furniture for anybody, without a compromise on quality. We think customers pay too much for nice furniture, so we cut out the middleman for the furniture we love. Pieces like the Fonteyn Coffee Table and Lulu Scoop Chair reveal our eclectic, contemporary design selections that don’t demand a high price tag.

Along the way, we’ve sought to disrupt the traditional furnishing industry model, which typically relies on long product cycles, large floor room displays and a slow turnaround. We produce a new design every two weeks — quite fast for a furniture company — and rely on sales data to frequently adjust our inventory — most of which is online. We’ve established a culture that celebrates speed and innovation, and we rely on Google Apps for Work to help our team connect, communicate and collaborate as effectively as possible.

We began using Google Apps during our humble beginnings as three co-founders in a four square-meter room. With no IT staff, Google provided an easy to use technology foundation that has kept pace with our rapid growth to the present day. Now we have more than 150 staff members in four countries, who use Gmail and Calendar as part of our daily routines. Their integration keeps us in sync and on track for meetings with suppliers, designers and our logistics partners.

Since we’re a very visual business communicating quickly about creative decisions is key. Google Drive takes away the frustration of being out of the office, especially when some of our employees travel throughout the world finding furniture designs. Whether it’s reviewing and directing new design concepts in Google Slides or browsing through new trends, our employees have the freedom to work wherever they may be and access the same information they would in the office.

If you’re going to disrupt an industry you need to outpace the competition and constantly delight customers like we’re doing today. You need to work in seamless new collaborative ways with tools that are quick, efficient and simple. For that we look to Google Apps for Work.