Black Tomato

They served four years in the corporate triangle but at the back of their minds they always wanted something more. Within a year they had set up all the foundations for a travel group that was one of a kind. They have picked up awards from both the press and travel industry with their quirky “back to reality” kits for customers with ‘post holiday blues’ and their indispensable guide to ‘blackberry free destinations’. Their philosophy is that it’s quite nice not to know what’s going on in the rest of the world for a few days. Their mission statement reads likes a Jimi Hendrix song that wants to ask: are you experienced? Conde Nast Traveller described them as “the ones to watch”, claiming they have “re-defined the way we travel” and Vanity Fair hailed them as being “guys who have zipped travel agents into the contemporary and are supremely professional in everything they do”. The average age of staff in their company is a blossoming 29 years old and they expect to turnover £6.8 million this year alone.

If you speak to any one of the boys, they’ll explain it’s all about the adrenaline rush, witnessing unforgettable, natural phenomena or taking a journey that blows your brains out and expands your horizons. I went to Shoreditch to see what all the fuss was about. So how did Black Tomato come about? “We all knew each other around the time of university. In 1999 we left university and had all comeback from travelling around the world. We were all instinctively quite entrepreneurial by nature. We knew we wanted to all work together in some form of business but we were realistic enough to know that we needed to get a bit of industry experience behind us first, so we left onto different paths for a year. I was working as a business analyst for an IT company and, before I knew it, my then sales director asked if I fancied living in Moscow and I said, ”Yeah!” So I stayed there for a year, then I helped set up an office in Johannesburg for them for six months then came back and got into a ‘proper’ career! I came back to London to work for Ernst and Young as a risk consultant which also gave me some very useful knowledge. James was working for Deloitte and the third founder, Matt, was working for 3M pharmaceuticals as a European product manager and then started travelling in South America. We wanted to be like sponges for those years and bring all our experience to Black Tomato.” Tom, Matt and James are also quite unlikely lads in that they had no other business ventures up their sleeves before Black Tomato. It was their first attempt at enterprise and their first dip into travel, so I ask how they managed the operation side of starting out. “We actually worked a bit with Business Link. You should always sit in with start-up companies and find out what they are trying to achieve.

Ask questions, get an operational audit of all your key areas, from your operations to finance or payroll and then address any problems and Business Link were very useful at the very early stages with those issues. Now we have a couple of non-executives from the luxury, travel and publishing sectors so the three of us are absorbing as much good advice as we can to get good ideas in the pot! Every Tuesday night we’ll have dinner whilst every Friday afternoon, we stop work at three and take ourselves away as a team, look through the reports, get views from each other and think about ideas.” “We are a very people focused business. You have ambitions for your business and we want to bring scalability whilst providing support and understanding. How many people we can deal with at one time was also a factor that we had to deal with. As we grow the online stuff, our offline profile has been good.The first couple of years we had a sort of amnesty that we were not going to do partnerships for a while, mainly to protect our brand, so it would not get diluted or run down by another brand. But over the last year we have worked on a few projects like Egg credit cards, and with a few boutique hotels, under a scheme we now have called Divine. It gives us coverage and lets them use our travel expertise too. It’s very important to choose wisely though with these kind of partnerships. There is a temptation to try and do as many partnerships as possible, in the hope that people will come to your site that way, but you have to make sure it’s truly good for the company in the long-term. So we’re being fairly judicial with the what partners we choose this year.” Their goal? Simple and direct is the classic businessman’s aim: “We want to have a bigger and better team and grow as a brand. If you’re entrepreneurial you will always have ideas kicking around. I have at least half a dozen at the moment. I think what we do know in full agreement is that we always want to work together. Black Tomato is something we want to stick with so it’s great to work with people like that who are for it 100 per cent.”