Startups

The COVID-19 crisis has resulted in many businesses facing an uncertain future, rethinking how they will make money. Many entrepreneurs have found a silver lining from their new circumstances in being given an unexpected opportunity to work on sustainable and ethical ideas as they reinvent their business. Making your start-up or existing business sustainable or ethical is also a smart, future-proof option. Customers are now much more informed and aware of the environmental impact of their purchases. A more sustainable product or service will create a positive brand image and reputation that will impact the bottom line of many businesses.

As the impact of the COVID–19 outbreak intensifies, businesses across Dublin are finding ways to diversify to survive the crisis and retain their staff. The virus is hitting our economy hard, and it’s creating a situation that’s well beyond the experience of most business owners. However, in these difficult times, many businesses have managed, with the support of their Local Enterprise Office, to adapt and shift to new products and services quickly. UNIFORMAL Uniformal, an established uniform and corporate wear provider based in South Dublin, have been supplying Irish businesses with bespoke and premium ready-to-wear uniform solutions and workwear fo

It’s a tough time for business but there are supports in place for Dublin businesses via the Local Enterprise Offices and central government. Local Enterprise Offices Dublin City ( info@leo.dublincity.ie / 01 222 5611 ) South Dublin ( info@leo.sdublincoco.ie / 01 414 9000 ) Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown (

Conall Laverty is the founder and CEO of WIA, a start-up company that works with property owners and developers to deploy Internet of Things hardware to reduce cost and improve their buildings’ performance. WIA provides a simple way for people and things to communicate with just a few lines of code. With over 10,000 clients across 100 countries, it has attracted €1 million in venture capital funding with backers including Suir Valley Ventures, Enterprise Ireland and NDRC. As a result, Conall has become a key figure in the global Internet of Things ecosystem. Conall is one to watch. He h

The Liberties is one of Dublin’s most characterful and historic districts. It owes its name to the fact that it was originally outside the jurisdiction of the city. So it was free to follow its own rules. In many ways it’s still doing that today. In medieval times the Liberties was an area of the city in which brewing, distilling, tanning and other traditional industries were located. The world famous St James Gate brewery, home of Guinness, continues the tradition. Meanwhile distilling is enjoying a big revival in the area, with the arrival of the Pearse Lyons, Teeling, Roe & Co and Dublin Liberties dist

Stress baking. It’s a thing, you know. It’s what Caryna Camerino used to do after another difficult day in her old job in human resources. Caryna Camerino, a first generation Canadian who has lived in Dublin for the past 14 years, wasn’t always a baker. But food was a big deal at home – partly because her father, from Rome, is a stickler for authentic Italian cooking. Such a stickler in fact that she loved going to friends’ houses where she could enjoy a regular tv dinner like normal folk do. Intending to visit Ireland for a couple of days after she left college, she’s never left. The job in HR was courtesy of an engineering company

Roisin Lyons, who is a professor in entrepreneurship at DCU, has no time for the mindset that says, in effect, ‘Innovation? Oh that’s just for innovators’. “Everyone needs to be innovative”, she believes, “everyone needs to be enterprising, particularly with growing issues of sustainability in Ireland. People have to be more inventive about solutions”.

The second annual Dublin Startup Week, which took place from October 21st – 25th 2019, was a celebration of the city’s innovation and startup ecosystem. With five days of networking events, keynotes, panels and workshops – all free of charge – the event was aimed at future, current, and repeat startup founders. Find out more at dublinstartupweek.com Next up in this mini-series, we meet Natalie Novick, another of the event’s track captains. Natalie Novick is a University of California San Diego PhD student who now resides in Edinburgh. She live

The second annual Dublin Startup Week, which took place from October 21st – 25th 2019, was a celebration of the city’s innovation and startup ecosystem. With five days of networking events, keynotes, panels and workshops – all free of charge – the event was aimed at future, current, and repeat startup founders. Find out more at dublinstartupweek.com First up in this mini-series, we meet Colin Keogh, one of the event’s leading lights. David R Pollard, Gene Murphy and Colin Keogh are founders and organisers of Startup Week Dublin. Keogh is also

Skytango is an online platform for the buying and selling of drone video footage. Irish woman Susan Flynn is Skytango’s chief operating officer. Her husband Steve, from Minnesota, is its chief executive, a job he’s been preparing for since he was seven years old: “Back in the day, you’d spend three months building a balsa wood and styrofoam airplane and it would take-off and you might have a thirty-second flight and it would explode into pieces, and you’d go back and work for three months to rebuild it. Now you can pull a drone out of a box and launch it, and it’s really fun. ItR

‘So your bar is there’, says Clare. ‘You have to have that and give me an appraisal’. ‘You can be honest’, she adds. That’s a terrible idea, Clare, I think to myself. I‘m a hopeless chocolate snob. ‘Dairy-free milk chocolate’? How is that even possible? As Clare herself admits, when you say the word ‘vegan’, people assume it’s going to be horrible. She reckons that ‘oh my God it probably tastes like sawdust!’ is what they’re thinking. But guess what? This Chocolatey Clare’s Salted Peanut bar tastes great. Not too sweet and icky like lots of non-milk milk chocolate. Not too pale and wishy-washy. This milk chocolate has a hefty 5

GROWN is a tiny Dublin company that prints beautiful simple designs on ethically-sourced, environmentally friendly shirts and t-shirts from a shop on Francis Street in Dublin’s Liberties. Its origins lie in conversations between three friends as they journeyed back and forth between Dublin and the West of Ireland, on swimming, surfing and scuba-diving trips. The ocean-loving friends were Neil McCabe, Stephen O’Reilly and Damien Bligh.  They’d noticed rubbish in the water and on beaches. It made them think about the ecological impact of plastics and modern fabrics, and how we produce and consume everything from food and drink to coffee and clothes. That got them rese