The Lovely Gift Group, Brough, East Yorkshire
Business Growth Story
At the heart of The Lovely Gift Group’s success is a motto: Caring, Quality and Creative.
Founder Helen Davies says: “These three words are key to everything we do.” Helen launched her company 10 years ago and it has grown exponentially, particularly since Finance Yorkshire invested £300,000 from its seedcorn fund in 2023.
“The investment helped us to reach for the stars,” says Helen. “Finance Yorkshire understood the markets we were targeting and the investment gave oxygen to our plans for growth.”
The Lovely Gift Group manufactures and supplies a range of personalised gifts and keepsakes and has three retail brands selling online and in stores across the UK. Bestsellers include personalised wooden keepsake boxes, comfort bears incorporating tins for cremation ashes or voice recorders, hand or pawprint frames and meaningful baubles that are especially popular at Christmas.
Last year the company reported turnover of £1.85m, almost 100% up on the previous year. “It’s a huge team achievement looking at where we have come from,” says Helen. “We have had to be patient, be focussed on our markets and be acutely aware of our costs and cost efficiencies. Being on top of the financial analysis has been critical to growing the business with so many different products and sales channels.”
Helen now employs 14 people full time and three part time. The business has a full design team, production team, warehouse management and customer service function.
The Lovely Gift Group now operates from four units at Jet Park, Brough after Helen originally launched the business from her kitchen table. “The cash injection from Finance Yorkshire was key to us moving the business out of our home,” says Helen. “We’d reached a critical fork in the road where organic growth was not possible to take advantage of opportunities at that time and investment was vital.”
The inspiration for the business came when Helen gave birth to premature baby twins who then spent 10 weeks in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Hull Royal Infirmary.
Helen said: “It was such a unique, scary but precious time in the NICU and when the nurses gave me mementoes like the twins’ oxygen masks, I didn’t have a keepsake box to put them in.
“That experience got the grey matter working and for the next two years I researched what was available and developed that germ of an idea into keepsake business to give people innovative ideas to enjoy, cherish and protect special items from people, places or moments from occasions all through life.”
The company, which launched in 2015, now has three retail product brands, six consumer online stores, two trade wholesale online stores and several white label gift websites.
The Lovely Gift Group works with Pets at Home, Co-operative, Blue Cross, B&Q, Just for Pets, Klondyke and Notcutts Garden Centres and The Range.
The company also supplies independents such as hospices, crematoriums and gift companies as well as selling online via its own websites and platforms such as Tik Tok.
Helen says: “I worked for five years to assess where the opportunities were before launching our expansion plan. Our products are lifetime gifts which bring comfort or joy driven by the thought and care of giving or receiving something.
“Our personalised gifts in particular are an innovative way to cherish a moment and there is always an emotional attachment to a gift which is what makes this company such a privilege to work in.”
The Lovely Gift Group continues to seek opportunities to innovate and attract additional retail stockists. The company is also working with a stonemason in Ireland who produces stone benches and garden stones direct to The Lovely Gift Group customers.
Helen has ambitions to make two of her own brand products household names. “I am extraordinarily confident where this business is heading because we really do know our markets and take the time to talk to the businesses that our selling our products.
“The bonus is that our Direct-to-Consumer sales are growing at a terrific rate, giving evidence to retailers that, whilst these are new categories and listings in many cases, there is clearly a desire from the retail public for them.”
Helen added: “We needed an investment partner who could provide finance but we also wanted a partner who was willing to provide support, back up and encouragement and Finance Yorkshire has done just that.
“As with any fast growing business there have been bumps in the road and plenty of hiccups. However, it has been comforting to have an investor who is by our side and on our side yet allows us the freedom and flexibility to still operate our own businesses as we wish.
“This retains the entrepreneurial spirit and the caring, quality and creative aspects that keeps our business genuine and grounded. We are appreciative of the support Finance Yorkshire continues to deliver.”