Jennifer Timony’s office is the last in a suite overlooking Donegal town’s main street, upstairs from a gastropub sandwiched between the town centre and the pier on the estuary of the River Eske. 

In the largest room, lined with storage shelves stocked with individual product pouches, her colleague Emma Brady, who goes by the title of customer service guru, smiles a greeting as she handles a Royal Mail post bag twice her size.

Timony’s own space is divided between a pop-up shop for local customers, complete with a clothes rail and fitting room, and her desk opposite a bookshelf revealing eclectic business readings from Warren Buffet to Naomi Klein via Jack Ma.

This is where we record this week’s podcast. “We’re bursting at the seams,” Timony says of her current search for larger premises – an appropriate phrase for FitPink, the athleisure clothing brand she launched two years ago this week.

This segment of fashion has been red hot over the period and, while leggings are its most common illustration, Timony offers a more thought-out definition: “We do activewear for women that is well-fitting and flattering and quite technical in nature – it’s sweatproof, high waisted and washes well.”

From “two styles of leggings and a few T-shirts” in 2019, FitPink has grown to offer 45 products, with another dozen in production for next winter, and Timony boasts 10,000 customers.

She remembers returning to fitness after the birth of her first child five years ago and finding only low-waisted, unflattering, uncomfortable leggings. “I researched the market a little bit and realised that athleisure was the fastest-growing category in clothing.”

The research turned into back-and-forth sampling with suppliers in China to arrive at the designs Timony wanted to put in the market. This allowed her to build a lasting relationship with the factories, which are still supplying FitPink two years on even though her plans to visit them have been thwarted by the pandemic.

Timony established the brand around a website she built herself to sell primarily online, a small number of retailers stocking its products in Ireland and direct engagement with customers. She highlights two key points in this engagement:

• “Authenticity” – “You’ll never see our photographs taken inside a gym, we’re outdoors all the time, and we’re not overly made up… We’re not just for the hardcore exercisers”; and
• “I think a lot of brands pay lip service to customer service – we live customer service. We have a chatbox on our website and we attend to that chatbox from 7am to 11pm, seven days a week.”

FitPink resonates with women in a wide age range from 25 to 65 and over, Timony says, including growing numbers who wear leggings at work, such as medical professionals and teachers. Around 80 per cent of sales are in Ireland, 12 per cent in the UK and the rest elsewhere.

She freely admits that Covid-19 has accelerated FitPink’s growth, between increased demand for comfy clothes to wear at home and the shift to online shopping. “We’re two years ahead of where we’d hope to be before the pandemic hit.” For a two-year-old business, this is some time compression. And even though she noticed a dip in trade when bricks-and-mortar retailers re-opened, she says online sales have now recovered to lockdown levels.

All this has already turned FitPink into a self-sustaining business. “We were profitable last year for our first full financial year,” with a €70,000 net profit out of €470,000 in sales, Timony says. “We’ve been very strong from day one.” She employs three staff, one of whom is about to return from maternity leave.

If the 46-year-old entrepreneur is enjoying FitPink’s success, it is partly down to previous experience – and things did not always go so well for her.

After her family emigrated to Australia in the 1980s recession, Timony came back to Ireland with her secondary school education complete – only to find out that this was not recognised for her to enter college here. Instead, aged 18, she opened a cafe in Donegal town.

She quickly realised that demand for pre-packed fresh sandwiches offered an avenue for expansion and her Doolittles business supplied a range of customers from Aldi stores to Aer Arann and Topaz service stations. “Over the course of about seven years, we grew that business to about €3.5 million of a turnover, with 35 full-time staff,” she says.

But when the recession hit, Doolittles was an early victim of consumers tightening their belts or stopping to buy lunch after losing their jobs. “In 2008, we were probably one of the first businesses to go into liquidation,” Timony says.

“The second time around, I’d be much more conscious of what type of business I’m going into.”

The lessons she learned during that period are useful to FitPink now. “I learned a lot about the type of business you go into,” she says. “With the food business, I sort of fell into that, because it was an easy option. And it was there. And I think that the second time around, I’d be much more conscious of what type of business I’m going into and sort of the dynamics of that sector.”

While Timony always wanted to start a second business, she knew it wouldn’t be in food, having experienced thin margins, constant cash-flow worries and frustration at not being able to help staff develop.

By comparison, she makes it sound nearly effortless to get a new fashion brand off the ground. “It’s a totally different business, it’s just far less stressful and easier to grow a more engaged customer base. So we’re profitable, we are growing, we are cashflow-positive.”

Now Timony has her eye on scale. This means growing out of Ireland, primarily in the UK but also on the continent. “Next year, we hope we would bring on one to two country-specific websites tailored to local languages and local payment options,” she says. Keeping up customer service standards will be the main challenge, but new working patterns mean she is confident in her capacity to work remotely with an expanding team in Donegal, in expanding markets or elsewhere.

Timony will also soon reveal the address of FitPink’s first own store in a prime Irish city shopping location – as an experiment on a short-term lease, again facilitated by the pandemic. 

Crowdfunding equity raise targets €3m valuation

To roll out all these projects and hire skilled marketing professionals, FitPink is currently raising funds. Timony explains how she is going about it:

Jenni Timony (JT): Spark Crowdfunding is, I think, the only Irish crowdfunding platform. The way it works is the investors go together as a crowd to invest the amount of money we’re looking for. We report back to one nominee shareholder quarterly as you would to any shareholder, who reports back to the group.

Over the last number of weeks, since we started on Spark Crowdfunding, I’ve been able to talk to a lot of different people that have invested in the business that I wouldn’t have known that have great knowledge or insights or experience that they can bring to the business or at least tell me about. So, it’s been a fantastic learning experience.

Thomas Hubert (TH): You’re talking about shareholders. So that’s an equity raise.

JT: Yes, we’re raising €300,000 on Spark for 10.7 per cent of the business.

TH: Okay, so you’re saying, “We’re worth €3 million as a company”?

JT: Yes, we were valued at €2.5 million based on our figures last year and our monthly run rate. It’s a lucrative business in that companies like Lululemon – which would be a global leader in athleisure – their stock had soared something of 375 per cent over the last three or four years. 

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FitPink’s profile on Spark Crowdfunding forecasts sales of €1.3 million and net profit of €240,000 this year. The company targets €10 million revenue and €2 million Ebitda by 2025. Successful fundraising would see Timony, currently the sole owner of the business, open its share capital for the first time.

One thing is certain, Timony wants to keep FitPink’s headquarters in Donegal. In fact, she never considered locating it anywhere else. “This is where I live. This is where my children go to school. This is my base,” she says, highlighting the quality of the support agencies and the community of businesspeople around her – not to mention the Donegal diaspora.

Asked if she feels part of the county’s historic textile tradition, her answer is a resounding yes. “My operations manager Laura Harron was in senior management in Magee 1866 just literally across the road from us,” Timony says. If the 150-year-old iconic Donegal tweed brand has proven anything, it’s that the county is still a good place to sell clothing from.