Business outlook: Small business leaders reveal trends and predictions

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

While 2020 has been a challenging time for businesses, multiple stories of resilience and innovation have emerged to keep us all inspired to weather the storm. We speak to growth business leaders (either based in or trading in the UK) on how they have adapted and innovated to survive and evolve during a truly extraordinary 2020, and how they plan to apply these lessons for a successful 2021.

2021 Business Outlook

Please use the list below to flip through each small business story.

Table of contents

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Table of contents

The Folio Society

Joanna Reynolds

CEO, The Folio Society

Company overview: For over 70 years, The Folio Society has been publishing beautiful illustrated editions of the world’s greatest books. It believes that the literary content of a book should be matched by its physical form. With specially researched images or newly commissioned illustrations, many of its editions are further enhanced with introductions written by leading figures in their fields: novelists, journalists, academics, scientists and artists. Exceptional in content and craftsmanship, and maintaining the very highest standards of fine book production, Folio Society editions last for generations.

Company location: London

What have been key challenges for your sector in 2020?

Challenge 1: For traditional publishers, the closure of bookshops and specialist book retailers due to the pandemic. Books have sold well during the pandemic but mainly through aggregate websites where the publisher pays a high charge and gets no access to the data. For Folio and e-commerce sellers of books, our greatest challenge was ensuring that books could be printed and delivered to the warehouse. We also faced the significant challenge of delivering to customers overseas.
Challenge 2: Developing new titles whilst working remotely. The Folio team has been amazing and continues to produce stunning books, but ensuring that the creative input and sharing of ideas is possible, takes a huge amount of effort. Remote working across all the business has been challenging, although also resulted in some great news ideas!

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year?

Lesson 1: We can all work effectively from home if required and, having seen the pandemic coming, Folio took active steps to ensure it was possible. But the office is still important, especially for creative businesses who need to be together to create the best. Working is now totally flexible with people switching between home and the office. The pandemic drove step change throughout the business for instance launching the Autumn Collection online only with no printed catalogue, but also taught us what was at the heart of our business, which has to be the people and the creativity across all aspects of our working.
Lesson 2: That change is constant. There is no doubt that trading internationally will be more challenging going forward and we all need to be flexible, keep watching the outside world and react with speed, but also open-mindedness. There is huge opportunity but also risks at a level I haven’t seen in my entire career.

Joanna Reynolds, The Folio Society

What key innovations have you seen in your sector in 2020?

Innovation 1: Step change in the move to online and digital buying. This has been increasing for the last 5 years, but the pandemic drove everybody online, even those who previously were unsure, and now well over 90% of all orders come via the website, digital and social. Omni-channel marketing continues to be important printed catalogues and emails help in the decision process but when it comes to buying, customers are going online. Providing customer service across channels remains important.
Innovation 2: The continuing trend of growth in hardback books. This is part of the vintage revolution; vinyl, beautiful old clothes, books that look gorgeous, and the longevity of books demonstrates the crucial place they have in many people’s lives.

What are your predictions for your sector in 2021 and beyond

Prediction 1: The move to digital and direct sales will continue. I would encourage publishers to build their own websites to know who is buying their books and what their preferences are. This will allow publishers to deliver more books that readers want whilst helping move into a new genre. It is an alien world to many publishers where retail has been overwhelming for so long. Whilst many bookshops will thrive there is a need to have effective, simple and responsive direct selling.
Prediction 2: Alongside the continuing growth of audio books, expect a resurgence of the quality printed hardback book. Folio books are objects of beauty in their own right to be appreciated by readers who want a special edition of a favourite book, by lovers of traditional book making craft, or just by homeworkers wanting a better backdrop for their Zoom calls; this is a strong example of the appeal of the physical in an ever more virtual world.

What are your new year’s resolutions?

As a business, over 80% of our books come through the EU and we have customers in every country in the world so resolution No 1 — To continue trading successfully across the globe after leaving the EU
Acquire more new customers whilst keeping our existing customers fulfilled, happy and buying
Launch the next big, breakthrough title/series
Continue to build on our great team

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Please use the list below to flip through each business story.

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Jelly Drops

Lewis Hornby

Founder, Jelly Drops

Company overview: Jelly Drops is a London startup that has created a product to help people boost their water intake. Jelly Drops are sweets made from 95% water, and are sugar-free, vegan and created in six delicious natural flavours. Originally created for people with dementia or those wanting a water boost, the bite-sized sweets come in six bright colours to attract attention and a teardrop shape that makes them easy to pick up. Jelly Drops also empowers elderly and those with dementia to feed themselves independently throughout the day as well as promotes enjoyable interactions between carers, family members and residents. There are no laxative effects and the product is vegan.

Company location: Hackney, London

What have been key challenges for your sector in 2020″

Challenge 1: Keeping production facilities going at the required pace, while making it covid secure and without jeopardising employee satisfaction. We have had to rethink every aspect of operations, and for every step along the way it’s been important to make all members of staff stay updated and understand the ‘why’, not just the ‘what’.
Challenge 2: Staying at the forefront of innovation while working remotely. We have been scaling during lockdown, and had to grow a team of experts on a distance, setting up development labs in people’s kitchens etc. Also, not being able to visit suppliers/factories/partners slows everything down and makes it tempting to go for the easy option, instead of the right one. We’ve also had to develop alternative mechanisms to gain customer insights, as usually, we would have been out in care homes interacting directly with residents and carers.

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year”

Lesson 1: Keep your experts closer! (Quality over quantity – invest in close relationships). We are very fortunate to have been able to attract people at the top of their field, early on. Having a clear company mission – helping people with dementia, has allowed us to be selective and align with experts who are genuinely excited about what we do. Inviting them to be part of the bigger picture and having closer relationships, has allowed us to develop our product more efficiently and ultimately getting it to the people who need it sooner.
Lesson 2: Keeping it in house has great benefits! Due to the uniqueness of our product we had to take our production in house. This was not the initial plan and it felt like a big undertaking. We were able to build our own production facility in 6 months and while it was a challenge to set up, it means now that we can be responsive to both our customers’ feedback and the market changes, which made us very resilient during the pandemic. Currently, our NPD-lab is just a few doors from the actual factory. Next year we plan to scale and one of the main challenges will be how to keep facilitating this level of collaboration, when we grow.

What are your predictions for your sector in 2021 and beyond

Prediction 1: If there is one thing we’ve learnt, it’s that predictions can only take you so far. We never expected to launch in the middle of a pandemic. Given that 2020 presented so many uncertainties, I think we will see startups find different ways to spread the risk and stay relevant to a wider audience – develop their brands and online presence etc.
Prediction 2: I think we will see more innovation with a social purpose. This year has reminded us what’s really important in life and hopefully we will see that more of the incredible competence and resources within the sector will be used towards launching initiatives with a positive footprint.

What are your new year’s resolutions?

See more of my family, not via Zoom that is.

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Please use the list below to flip through each business story.

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Nextatlas

Mario Coletti
Managing director, Nextatlas
Company overview: Trend fore-sighting platform
Company location: London

What have been key challenges for your sector in 2020?

Challenge 1: keeping momentum and staying in touch with clients in moments when focus and priorities have completely shifted.
Challenge 2: Balancing internal resources, remaining motivated, motivating and encouraging team members while adjusting to new practices and ways of working.

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year”

Lesson 1: The end of short-termism. For many years, corporations, mostly their management, have been focused on short-term objectives, immediate results, on the assumption that business would go steady for as long as they were in the job. This has weakened organisations’ capability to cope with sudden changes, to apply an emergency plan, to provide clear directions to their people. This is true both for the government/public sector and the private sector, and in both cases, has made clearer and more evident the difference between good leadership and no leadership. Learning: ensure you have a clear long-term vision and a ready to implement ‘plan B’ in the back pocket in case things suddenly get worse.
Lesson 2: Purpose is not just a buzzword. For years the need for an ethical purpose within a business reason to exist has been evangelised, and often seen as a ‘nice to have’ – a sensible and responsible thing to have in a brand manifesto. But when the world falls apart around you, certainties are no longer certain, needs go back to the survival basics of the Maslow pyramid, and brands without purpose very quickly become disposable and redundant, along with their business. Learning: as the impossible can always happen, beliefs become an essential part of the survival kit.

What key innovations have you seen in your sector in 2020?

Innovation 1: As necessity is the mother of all inventions, the main innovation is about “fast learning to do without” – so, having nothing to do with “things”, “devices” or “technology”, the key innovation has been about ‘behavioural change”; adapting quickly to remote working, changing routines, adapting to new spaces, living and sharing with our families instead of our colleagues, as well as learning to spend long periods without seeing loved ones, friends or acquaintances.
Innovation 2: The adoption of already existing solutions, such as the use of AI and SM data instead of traditional market research methodology, has been accelerated by many factors caused by the pandemic, such as data scarcity or different data provenance. The pandemic has limited innovations that are sparked by working closely with others, has highlighted the need for ‘less’ and accelerated the adoption of solutions that were struggling to flourish due to resistance to change.

Mario Coletti, NextAtlas

What are your predictions for your sector in 2021 and beyond

Prediction 1: The rise of trend predictions. We can expect the growth in demand for more sophisticated forecasting tools, that are not just projecting historical data but can analyse multidimensional factors, including behavioural and ethnographical, in order to increase demand management both for the short and the ‘very’ long term. e.g. what will be the next six months x consumption, and when, and what will be the ‘next pandemic’?
Prediction 2: Goodbye offline, but Cybersecurity paramount. As work will become ubiquitous, the same will need to happen for working tools. But as safety and data security are at risk, there will be an acceleration of user-friendly secure solutions to protect privacy and data confidentiality in general.

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Please use the list below to flip through each business story.

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Attic Self Storage

Frederic de Ryckman de Betz

CEO and founder, Attic Self Storage

Company overview: London-based personal and business self-storage provider with a difference

Company location: London

What have been key challenges for your sector in 2020?

Challenge 1: Our people have been both our greatest asset and our greatest challenge. Our greatest asset for supporting us, and each other throughout 2020. But a challenge, because keeping people energised, motivated, positive and generally mentally healthy through the ups & downs of Covid-19 has not been easy. That’s particularly the case when you consider that everyone, at every level in the organisation has been affected by the pandemic in some way.
Challenge 2: Keeping the machine moving! 2020 has brought many challenges to many people in many industries. Our business relies on a steady throughput of new site acquisitions, building these to a timetable, and then leasing them up in a predictable way. Site acquisitions have been all over the place, construction was halted, then started, then halted, then started again but with conditions. Planning new store launches, including staffing and marketing, is rendered much more difficult when the sand under our feet keeps changing.

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year”

Lesson 1: People can be remarkably resilient and adaptable. We have a great team. When the first lockdown happened, our business reacted quickly to put in place the processes, systems and controls to enable us to keep trading safely. The speed with which the team adapted to working from home, using new technology and respecting a new process was revelatory. Perhaps we underestimate our own capacity to deal with change.
Lesson 2: Investment in technology, done properly, is almost always a good thing. We have been investing in our digital and online technology steadily since 2016, increasing the pace since our funders, Metric Capital, came on board. That tech meant we were able to adapt to the requirements of trading through a pandemic, and to do so quickly. It’s doubled our resolve to continue to push the boundaries with digital.

What key innovations have you seen in your sector in 2020?

Innovation 1: In self storage, there has been a rapid move towards online check-in throughout 2020. We witnessed this with a wry smile, having made the move ourselves in 2016, but better late than never! Self storage is not known as being a forward thinking, innovative industry so we welcomed this meaningful step, and hope for more to come.
Innovation 2: The use of electronic locks has also seen a sudden increase through 2020. These enable customers to access their storage units 24 hours a day, using an app on their phone to open our gates and ultimately their storage units. Combined with online check-in, you have a 100% contactless move experience, which customers have found reassuring.

Frederic De Ryckman De Betz, Attic Self Storage

What are your predictions for your sector in 2021 and beyond

Prediction 1: 2021 will see strong growth in our industry. Self storage has performed strongly throughout 2020, proving once again the resilience of the sector through various economic downturns and challenges. Underpinned by strong asset values, we have seen institutional investor interest grow significantly and there is now a lot of capital looking to get invested. Expect that to manifest itself with an acceleration in supply.
Prediction 2: Operators who don’t invest in digital and technology will get left behind. Customer expectations, and the benefits of that investment, are only accelerating and it will become increasingly difficult to catch up. I expect operators for whom this is all rather too much simply to exit to the more sophisticated ones who get it.

What are your new year’s resolutions?

With any luck, 2021 will afford us better opportunities to achieve our resolutions! For me that means getting more than 3 months in the gym in one stretch, and taking more holidays with the family. I also aim to work from home 2 days a week and make it home by seven thirty every evening to see the kids. Why not, something good has got to come out of Covid-19?

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Please use the list below to flip through each business story.

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Spoon Guru

Markus Stripf

Co-founder, Spoon Guru

Company overview: Established in 2015, Spoon Guru is a global AI nutrition technology start-up that has developed a unique Health & Wellness platform to cater for individuals with specific dietary food requirements or health objectives. A world leading end-to-end solution, Spoon Guru combines AI and machine learning with nutritional expertise to enable food retailers to deliver a highly personalised experience tailored to each consumer, based on their distinct and unique dietary, health and wellness needs. The platform processes billions of data points on a daily basis and analyses every ingredient as well as its nutritional value to allocate the appropriate dietary tags to each product or recipe, enabling large and unstructured data sets to be easily searched and accurately filtered to deliver relevant choices.

Company location: London & Los Angeles

What have been key challenges for your sector in 2020?

Challenge 1: The dominant impact of COVID for food retailers was of course to ensure the supply chain doesn’t break down and that people can get the groceries they need, either from stores or delivered at home. Vulnerable people were particularly exposed but the industry rallied with impressive efficiency to ensure appropriate measures were implemented.
Challenge 2: From a business perspective, the way all of us work changed over night. We closed the office early to ensure staff safety. We are an international company with clients on 3 continents. Face to face client meetings were the norm.That had to stop too of course so all of us in the retail sector had to adapt to conducting business via zoom.

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year?

Lesson 1: The importance of being agile is a key requirement. You can’t call yourself a proficient sea captain if you have never weathered a storm so the huge anomalies of 2020 have forced companies around the world to react and respond to the new world order practically overnight. Being agile is of course in the DNA of startups but I think it’s made all of us re-consider how we respond more effectively when things change overnight, regardless of the size of our companies.
Lesson 2: Business is like a game of chess. It doesn’t matter how bad it looks, there is always one best move. The trick is to find it when you are up against it.

What key innovations have you seen in your sector in 2020?

Innovation 1: Technology has taken a central role now in helping ensure groceries get delivered to shoppers with minimal disruption. Whether it’s using robots for pick & pack, e-commerce for ordering or AI for providing more personalised nutrition.
Innovation 2: The vast majority of us want to lead healthier lives, in the wake of COVID now more so than ever. Shoppers are embracing digital enablers to help them make better, healthier food choices, set goals, and track their progress.

What are your predictions for your sector in 2021 and beyond

Prediction 1: Shoppers will be even more health-conscious and the need for personalised nutrition will continue to grow.
Prediction 2: Regarding food consumption, we see 3 specific trends:
- a move towards plant-based foods
- growing interest in healing foods
- greater demand for long-life/shelf stable products

What are your new year’s resolutions?

To be the best version of myself.

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Please use the list below to flip through each business story.

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Sunrise

Laurent Martinot

CEO,Sunrise

Company overview: Next generation sleep apnea solutions

Company location: Belgium

What have been key challenges for your sector in 2020″

Challenge 1: Clinical activities regarding sleep apnea have been vastly interrupted during the COVID-19 epidemic throughout Europe, which has caused unprecedented changes in provided health care services. Diagnosis of sleep apnea and initiation of treatment pose specific problems that need to be addressed to preserve safety of the patients and health personnel. Patients diagnosed with sleep disordered breathing are subject to a higher risk of worse outcomes than from COVID-19, due to the high prevalence of co-existent co-morbidities. In this context, sleep medicine practices are entering a new era and need to adapt rapidly to these circumstances, in order to provide the best care for patients affected with sleep apnea. Novel approaches, such as telemedicine, have played an important role in the management of these patients.
Challenge 2: Sleep disorders affect a substantial number of people worldwide and may be increasing in prevalence. Unfortunately, many of these disorders can go unrecognised and untreated in clinical practice. Although physicians understand that good sleep is essential to a patient’s health, approaching the issue is regularly glossed over in the primary care setting. Importantly, recent data also suggests that sleep disorders are becoming increasingly recognised in developing nations. Sleep, like nutrition and physical activity, is a critical determinant of health and well-being. Yet sleep apnea, a serious disease and a major cause of fatigue worldwide, remains largely undiagnosed today, with only 20% of the persons concerned aware of their condition.

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year?

Lesson 1: Definitely remote care, which is a mega trend in the entire industry. In the field of sleep medicine, a shift is observed in how the sleep world is approaching home sleep apnea testing. We believe this is good news for reaching the 80% undiagnosed patients estimated to have sleep apnea in Europe and other parts of the world. Utilizing home sleep testing is a way physicians can improve the overall experience for patients. Patient benefits include being in the comfort of their home or bed, incurring lower costs compared to in-lab testing, and completing the test faster. Since an open bed in a lab is not needed, scheduling and completing the process takes a fraction of the time.
Lesson 2: We are learning that the benefit of Sunrise’s instant availability of test results to users is a significant benefit. Early indications are that it is creating new value, such as reduction in time to therapy, which in turn may increase the chance of patients getting on compliant therapy and higher conversion rates to therapy in the direct to consumer segment. Physicians also benefit from home sleep testing by having access to sleep results much faster. Instead of having to wait weeks for results of an in-lab study, results of an home sleep test are typically available within a few minutes after the night, when performed with Sunrise technology. Keeping track of patient data is easier as well, since home sleep testing units are largely compatible with electronic medical record platforms.

What key innovations have you seen in your sector in 2020?

Innovation 1: Sleep providers have moved diagnosis delivery to patients” homes, without an in-facility visit. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) has recommended disposable home sleep tests and advised that reusable devices be removed from service for at least 72 hours in addition to disinfection before the next use. The AASM also states that patients should not have to leave their home to receive or return the device. Video (versus live in-person) patient instruction have been incorporated more often for home sleep testing device use, and new online CPAP supplies stores give patients the option of ordering the only disposable at-home sleep test on the market, and obtaining or renewing their CPAP prescription online, along with offering price-matching on CPAP machines, masks, and other supplies from top manufacturers.
Innovation 2: Today we can find several sleep monitoring tools, but very few examine issues pertaining to sleep loss and sleep disorders. To address this, the team at Sunrise has discovered a better way for measuring sleep: mandibular movements have the prime advantage of being a direct proxy of how the brain regulates sleep and respiration at night. This technology allows us to observe live the adjustments performed by the brain to preserve quality sleep (read through the movements generated by upper airway muscle contractions). We have now access to an online understanding of the sleep events and the corrective measures taken by the brain to address them. Published clinical studies have also demonstrated this 3-gram sensor is very accurate when compared to in-lab sleep studies, and capable of measuring key clinical parameters that were not possible to capture outside a sleep-lab until now (respiratory effort, sleep fragmentation, bruxism or precise sleeping time).

Laurent Martinot, Sunrise

What are your predictions for your sector in 2021 and beyond

Prediction 1: One in five adults in the US have mild sleep apnea, whilst one in fifteen adults have moderate to severe sleep apnea. This number is expected to increase in the next few years, primarily due to increasing incidences of sleep-related disorders. The other factors anticipated to augment the market is increasing awareness about adverse effects of sleep apnea and technological advancements resulting in the development of novel products for treating sleep apnea. Increasing the awareness and improving the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders necessitates a multi-pronged effort that includes three key components: public education, training for health professionals, and surveillance and monitoring.
Prediction 2: The long-term horizon for home-based care in general and home sleep testing in particular, looks more promising than ever. The home-based innovative technology and the digital health platform we have built to deliver simple and reliable solutions for the diagnosis and management of sleep apnea without the patient needing to leave home or be exposed to infection, is ideally positioned to answer the growing need for sleep testing. Increasing use of disposable home sleep apnea tests, adoption of digital platforms, and sleep apnea being recognised as a population health management challenge will be reality in the next few years.

What are your new year’s resolutions?

Our resolutions for 2021 are to continue expanding our presence by opening 3 new markets in the course of next year. This ambitious goal participates in our global plan focused on raising awareness about sleep apnea and giving access to the largest number of validated technologies that are both medical yet simple. It will be important that we all understand that breathing is at the heart of our nights, and continue paying more attention to potential sleep disorders.

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Please use the list below to flip through each business story.

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breathe ilo

Bastian R’ther
CEO, breathe ilo
Company overview: breathe ilo is the world’s first fertility tracker that uses breath analysis to identify a woman’s ovulation pattern and fertile window in a way that is easy and comfortable. The brainchild of Professor Dr. Ludwig Wildt and Dr. Horst R’ther, breathe ilo is a small handheld device synced to an app that reads the breath’s CO2 saturation to determine where a woman is in her cycle with incredible accuracy and can be done at any time of the day. Launched in 2019, breathe ilo is an Austrian female empowerment tech start-up on a mission to break the taboo which surrounds speaking out about trying to conceive and cycle tracking.
Company location: Austria

What have been key challenges for your sector in 2020″

Challenge 1: For any health tech company generating study data became a more difficult challenge in 2020 due to COVID. On the one hand it was harder to find test persons willing to see the clinical partners frequently. On the other hand, medical institutions could provide less focus to support clinical research as a result of increased workload due to the pandemic and the increased safety measures.
Challenge 2: Another important challenge for FemTech/HealthTech companies is the limited physical access to medical experts via conferences and fairs. Broad trust and support by healthcare experts is an important success factor for new innovative healthtech products. Limited access to these important stakeholders due to the cancellation of conferences, congresses and fairs was a limiting factor for market access of new innovative products.

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year?

Lesson 1: Keep your business always ready to dynamically react to a major change in market circumstances. A pandemic like COVID-19 is a great example for such a major change. However, with the constant increasing speed in implementing radical new innovations to the market, companies will be faced several times with such tremendous changes in the future.
Lesson 2: While physical meetings and physical presence might be of importance for certain important business meetings, there is a great variety of processes, projects and tasks that can be done fully remote. Being aware of that can entirely open the opportunities even for small companies to look into global talent when recruiting staff, but also when looking into partnerships.

What key innovations have you seen in your sector in 2020?

Innovation 1: We have seen a trend of innovations to help women to integrate pregnancy better in their career path. Either by growing demand for products like breast pumps etc. that allow a faster re-integration in the job after pregnancy or by company provided pregnancy plans to allow more flexibility during this important phase in life.
Innovation 2: 1 in of 5 women is affected by mental health problems such as depression (compared to 1 out of 8 men). As a result wellness & health applications for mental treatment and well being for women are heavily on the rise. (e.g. Calm, Bellabeat, happify)

Bastian Ruther, breathe ilo

What are your predictions for your sector in” 2021 and beyond

Prediction 1: With femtech being forecasted to become a very important future market we expect the industry to grow in yearly double digit growth rates in 2021 reaching 50 billion USD market volume in 2025.
Prediction 2: We expect femtech to become one of the top attractive fields for investments. As a result, some of the global leading VC funds will declare femtech to one out of their top 3 investment focus areas in 2021.

What are your new year’s resolutions?

To help at least three times more couples on their desire to conceive than in 2020. Furthermore, to further develop breathe ilo for the application for women with cycle disease such as PCOS.

Real Business showcases small businesses that have exemplified innovation in 2020 on their outlook for the year ahead.

Please use the list below to flip through each business story.

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SmileDirectClub

David Cran

Vice President UK, Ireland & Iberia, SmileDirectClub

Company overview: The oral care leader with the first medtech platform for teeth straightening

Company location: London

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as a business this year?

Lesson 1: For SmileDirectClub, this year really demonstrated our business, strength and resilience. As the world changed, we were able to pivot our business in many ways to suit our customers needs. .
For example, as we closed our Smile Shops to abide by government guidelines, we saw a huge surge in consumer demand for our impression kits as people realised that they could safely straighten their teeth at home. As the public became used to remote services, we moved our focus to meet consumer demand and support our customers at home.
Lesson 2: It’s important to stay connected and continuously find solutions. This year, the internal team adapted to new ways of working, harnessing platforms such as Teams and Zoom to stay connected and keep our winning team spirit and drive outstanding results for our business.

David Cran, SmileDirectClub

What key innovations have you seen in your sector in 2020?

Lesson 1: The biggest innovation in our sector this year has to be the adoption of telehealth or telemedicine. It is something that SmileDirectClub has pioneered but in 2020, interest, understanding, and adoption skyrocketed. Internet searches for telemedicine went up by 335% – whether it was to see a GP, counselling for mental health or to consult with a dentist. To stay relevant, the industry had to adapt as a whole to meet consumer demands.

Lesson 2: We saw amazing innovation at our SmileHouse manufacturing facility, where we switched a lot of our production to manufacture and supply much needed PPE for the US health system. We used our huge 3D printing capacity to make high quality face visors for health professionals and for our own SmileShop teams around the world.

Written By Praseeda Nair

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Business outlook: Small business leaders reveal trends and predictions

The Folio Society

Jelly Drops

Nextatlas

Attic Self Storage

Spoon Guru

Sunrise

breathe ilo

SmileDirectClub

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