This week we had three dinners going on, we started the week off on Monday with diners joining Solvej Biddle, a dragon’s den success story and an inspiring female entrepreneur. Tuesday night saw a collective of beauty bloggers and brands hear Hayley Carr of London Beauty Queen blog talk on digital beauty, as well as Joel Freeman, the co-Founder of Grabble discuss the success of his fashion app. Here’s the lowdown on what went on:

The recipe for success – mix courage, humility and passion in equal measures
Monday night’s dinner with Solvej Biddle was a classic TableCrowd night at Aubaine, Heddon St. To set the scene, 12 ladies dined in an intimate setting around a huge and beautifully laid table, with delicious food and fascinating conversation, each sharing their stories and ideas. Solvej spoke knowledgeably throughout the evening on three main topics:

1. Having a decent idea
2. Finding and making contacts
3. Passion

For the first topic, Solvej talked about her original idea of creating an intimate dark space for babies to sleep, the highs and lows she went through, including being a woman running a business, being a sole founder, and the work involved in building a brand. She moved on to the need to surround yourself with people who know more than you in order to gain knowledge. This will help your business in more ways than you can imagine. Finally, and the most important subject of all, Solvej covered the underlying need to be passionate about your product or business, so much so that it is infectious and is passed on from buyer to buyer.

If you are courageous, have humility and keep your passion through all the hardships – you will get there!

The evening was concluded with a lovely round the table discussion with answers to such questions as, is being a sole founder a good thing? What are the difficulties of negative social media? And trying to understand the surreal world of trade shows.

Use buzzwords to impress people
The diners at our fashion dinner at Rocket, The City, with the co-founder of Grabble, Joel Freeman, heard the whole story of Grabble including all the mistakes they made to get to where they are today. Humour was scattered throughout Joel’s talk as he provided his top seven tips for how to get funding; with a big one being to ask the investor at the end of the first meeting if they are going to invest in you. This way you won’t waste any more time with them if they’re not; it also means that you have the opportunity to find out why they’re not going to commit right there and then. An honest reply can be really hard to get in follow-up emails. Joel emphasised the importance on the way you talk about your business, and how much of a difference it can make.

Don’t take no for an answer!

Engagement and interaction is key
Our final dinner of the week was co-hosted with MyBeautyMatches and featured London Beauty Queen blogger, Hayley Carr, speaking on social media for the beauty industry. Dining at Jamie’s Italian, Piccadilly, our diners argued over who had the most delicious dessert! Hayley’s talk covered the social media landscape and why we can’t ignore importance of social media in 2015.

75% of companies are not investing at all in social media.

What Hayley really honed in on was the importance of your audience, to reward them, to interact and engage with them, and to mix up your content across your social media channels. Find out when they are online, establish the best time to engage with them, and use questions to get your audience to interact with you. Make it clear what you want them to do – explicitly tell them if you want them to ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ something. Interestingly, only 8% of bloggers make a full-time living from blogging. If there’s one thing to take away from the evening, it would be using the 80/20 rule for content on social media; 80% of content should be about related topics, with the remaining 20% being about your business.

Our speakers were joined by: Le-Ster, Seren, Brilliant Basics, Street Stream, Auburn&Ivy, StreetHub, WonderLuk, TreatNOW, Yours Truly Organics, I Heart Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics, The Library of Fragrance, ila-Spa amongst others.

Here’s some snippets from the evenings:

Big thanks go out to Solvej Biddle, Hayley Carr and Joel Freeman for speaking, and our partner Taylor Wessing.

Take a look at our upcoming dinners and book your seat today.