Lick: The Business Quite Literally Shaking Up The Paint Industry
This week we caught up with CEO and co-founder of Lick Home, Lucas London. Lick is a brand that is quite literally shaking up an industry that has gone untouched for years, home decoration; more specifically, paint and wallpaper.
It is safe to say that 2020 will be the year that we rack up the most amount of time spent in one particular place — our home. And all this time at home has encouraged more and more of us to invest in upgrades and improvements.
“Lick ended up launching on the very same day that the UK was put into lockdown by the government, so it’s safe to say we have been kept busy. It’s a very strange time to launch a business, but this newfound appreciation for our homes (after all, they’re wearing so many hats at the moment) means that more people than ever have been looking to inject some colour into their DIY efforts and we’re happy we can help.”
It was a bold move to launch a new business at a time when so many others were just beginning to batten down the hatches. However, every cloud and all that… And Lick most definitely found a silver lining.
Wait, so what exactly do Lick do?
Lick, alongside their team of interior designers, have curated a manageable collection of 49 paint colours and 25 wallpaper designs. You can order peel-and-stick samples and then buy the paint directly off their website once you find the colour you like. Voila, no more weekends spent strolling down the aisles of your local hardware store!
No way, someone has to have already done that…?
Yep, thought the same. But no.
With Lick, we have a business that feels like it has really done its homework and there is no surprise given the pedigree of its founding team.
Before Lick, Lucas was VP International of GMV jobs marketplace Airtasker — a $140m business. Having set up a core base in Australia, Lucas was tasked with its global expansion and grew the UK market to $4.5m GMV within 12 months.
So why paint?
“Whilst working at Aritasker my co-founder Sam Bradley and I became interested in the decorating market. We wanted to understand the reasons that such a large consumer industry ($93bn market in Europe) was predominantly offline.
The duo set about researching the space and began understanding more about the opportunity. Modern consumers didn’t have a brand that resonated with them, the product choice was complicated and there was little support. Added to this; it is a cumbersome end-to-end journey that customers rarely enjoyed.
“We found that the users started their journey online with large and engaged communities of people interested in DIY, design and decorating on platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. When it came to the purchase of the products required to decorate, we found it was mostly completed in hardware stores. Few enjoyed spending their weekends walking down those aisles.”
Lick had a concept and a team willing to give this a go; but to really work, it needed its own edge. A difficult part of the launch was going to be re-educating people’s consumption habits. Whilst we might not like our trips to the hardware store, it’s the only way we know how. So Lick was going to have to show potential customers why their solution was the path of least resistance.
“We started by simplifying the product range, creating a durable environmentally responsible paint that required fewer coats, needed no primer and could be applied to all surfaces. We worked with interior designers and decorators to curate a colour palette and we looked at how we could improve the online UX. One of Lick Home’s most compelling innovations — its peel-and-stick samples which are all a true colour-match — replaces the traditional messy, expensive sample pots that ruin walls.”
I know right, smart.
And it’s no surprise that things have taken off quickly for the business. Lick closed its first fundraising round in late 2019 and following their early success, took a further £3million in funding this year, from non-other than Felix Capital — the digital-lifestyle focused venture capital firm which has previously backed leading global platforms such as Farfetch, Peloton, goop and Deliveroo.
We have received amazing feedback from our community on our products, colours, designs and brand. Existing brands focus on the higher-end interior design market but we found our community is made up of a huge range of people who want to express themselves through their homes in individual ways.
Lick is on an impressive trajectory and it will be exciting to see how the business evolves over the coming months and years. Lick recently signed up ex ASOS and Net-A-Porter employee Monika Tamics to lead product as well as Marina Gorey as Head of People — Marina was Head of People at Seedcamp and co-founder and CPO of SuperAwesome.
We have some really exciting plans in the pipeline with the continued development of our product range with new colours and new designs available soon. We will be launching blinds in October, further supporting our customers with room transformations. It has been a huge few months but we have only just started!
Whilst Lick is Lucas’ focus, he is involved in a number of other projects and startups.
I have always enjoyed working with a number of startups including as an Investor Director at events marketplace Feast It and was a Director & co-founder of coworking space Karma Kitchen. I also mentored on the Virgin StartUp and Escape The City programs, winning Virgin Mentoring Star of 2017.
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This is instalment 1.4 in the mini-series, “Why’d You Do It?”. A chain of interviews where I ask a simple question to the founders of some of the most exciting up-and-coming brands in the UK.
Follow along for me.
