We started our first diamond business 5 years ago in rainy Manchester out of Innospace – a start-up incubator for students and alumni in Manchester. It was a no brainer. I think at the time it cost us something like £250 per person, per year. It now sounds so cheap that as I’m typing this I’m having doubts about my memory of the actual cost.

Funded by Manchester Metropolitan University, I believe it was the first start-up incubator in Manchester. I remember being fascinated by the fact that a university ranked much lower than the University of Manchester, was so much more modern in its understanding of what young people really needed (Manchester University did follow with their own incubator a few years later on).

While the cost was really low, there wasn’t much in terms of real support, mentoring or benefits. The attempts to introduce any of these never seemed to stick. Nonetheless, we were spending time amongst other entrepreneurs and had an office where we could work together. It was a great place for us to start learning and making mistakes.

The low cost made it possible for us to bootstrap in Manchester for about a year – perhaps, we even got a little too comfortable not making any money for longer than we should have.

As we launched our first website, we decided to move down to London. That’s where our customers were and that’s where, we thought, we’d find investment and talent we could hire. It was only once we moved that we truly realised how sheltered we’d been in Manchester. We could no longer afford any office and worked out of David’s apartment for a year. For me it felt like going to the office. I had my own workstation and I came in the morning and left in the evening. I know some of us liked working from home, others really disliked it and wanted to keep their home and work separate.

Through our first website we were making no sales and David decided to leave for Hong Kong to open up an office there. We needed earn an income and so, we were back in the wholesale trade doing what David already knew. Out of David’s apartment we would phone diamond suppliers and customers around the world at all times of the day and night, closing sales and buying diamonds. For a year working like this we made enough money to pay ourselves a salary to invest a small amount into the development of our new website –RarePink.com.

David’s flat would host interns, suppliers, customers and it was there that we made our first online sale. We still have the $7 profit we made on the diamond in a frame on our wall!

As we got closer to launching the new website we realised, we could not continue in the apartment. I Googled “incubators in London” and found a handful that were reasonably located. The first was a London University one, in Shoreditch. It seemed perfect – very much the London version of Innospace, but about 20 times more expensive at £500 per person per month.

Still, we had to make a move and I tried to get us into it. Sadly, they had no space and I was put on the waiting list. We waited for a few weeks to hear back from them and when we didn’t, and my follow-ups were ignored. I went back on the search, this time Googling “best co-working spaces in London”. I found a blog post in which one company stood out. It was called, Bathtub 2 Boardroom – or the Tub, as we now call it.

The Bathtub was a miracle find. Affordable, close to us (in Bethnal Green) and it was extremely cool and vibrant. Awesome creative, tech and fashion people were starting and growing awesome companies and we started the next week.

It was in the Tub that we launched the Rare Pink website, and met our first customers in person. The location was cool, but not luxury-brand cool. Somehow our customers liked what we did and how we did it (despite the scary road to get to the office) and we started showing and growing sales.

Behind the scenes, Paddy, the CEO of Bathtub was working on a deal to secure a commercial property in The City, just seconds away from Bank Station. When we found out that the Bathtub would be expanding to Frederick’s Place, we were the first to move and we’re still there today.

The Bathtub was a really important part of our journey and I will always be grateful to Paddy for adjusting to our MANY needs.

We now have a showroom on the ground floor where we host our customers and an office area upstairs where the magic happens.

Some of my colleagues who are new to the business think the property is a little run down and would like for us to move. We will move eventually. To be truly brand-consistent we would like to have a lobby with a reception, better lighting and a more modern interior – but that’s perfection. For now, the Bathtub is our home and it is also the place that enabled us to test our “click-and-bricks” business model and to track how well people who have consultations convert, compared to those who just shop online. The numbers are really incredible, in fact, 81% of our consultations make a purchase, and 1/3 of our UK customers come through our doors.

It is here too, in the Tub, that my friend Hector has chosen to pilot their partner-in-residence programme for included.co. Included aims to help companies like ours grow and get the kind of support we were not able to find when we started. Co-working spaces like Innospace and Bathtub 2 Boardroom provide the desks and meeting rooms, but there is a lot more that start-ups need to grow – a curated listed of solutions for the challenges that all start-ups share (at group-bought prices) is a good start. I know Hector will continue to deliver on his vision to make it easier for founders everywhere to start and grow companies.

Now that we’re getting ready to grow, our vision to scale up by decentralising our sales team to co-working spaces across the US and Asia – one person per city would allow us to invite customers in those cities for consultations, which would in-turn directly boost our conversions in that city, while keeping costs low.

We’ll be sure to keep you posted on how we progress with this strategy!