Case Study: Mulberry Workshop

Mulberry Workshop design and manufactures bespoke furniture, structures, and products. They have lots of ideas for growth but needed some help to find clarity and develop a plan of action. We caught up with founder Jaime Mora to hear how the Gather one-to-one service helped.

What’s Mulberry Workshop all about?

We are specialists in custom-fabrication using digital manufacturing to make unique products and structures for all kinds of purposes and clients. I look after the whole process – concepts, 3D design, CNC routing and laser cutting.

How did the business start?

I guess it started with me coming to Liverpool from Spain in 2012 to learn English! Fast forward a little and I studied industrial design at John Moores University and then spent some time working at Sensor City helping small businesses with technical challenges around design. After a couple of years working in Manchester designing IOT devices for a business, I decided to set up on my own and the rest is history.

Why did you approach Gather for support?

From my workspace at MAKE CIC in the North Docks I was producing great things, but struggling to reach a wider clientele. It was a bit like fight club – what happened in the workshop, stayed in the workshop! No-one really knew about us, and I had lots of ideas but needed some advice to develop a growth strategy.

I knew I needed to change some things to make the business a success and talking to Gather helped me to drill down into that. I really needed that conversation, and it aligned me to the right path.

Even when you have an understanding of business it doesn’t always prepare you for being a small business owner. Gather helped me to remove some blockers I’d put in the way of us scaling and supported me to develop a plan to target the right clients and projects that will help the business to grow.

How has the business changed since?

I wanted to grow the services we offered but talking it through helped me to see that first we need to get the right clients and projects – then we can start to sustainably grow. All the advice was realistic and really relevant and has helped me think about different ways to reach new clients. Getting out there and connecting with people in the city, architects, business owners, other creative communities has brought new opportunities. Everything from designing and making lightboxes for a spooky Halloween forest, to the giant letters for the recent Gather event – it’s work that is more rewarding and has more impact.

What does the future look like for Mulberry Workshop?

To continue on that journey really – connecting with more clients that allow us to work on large scale projects and structures, that’s the goal. There’s so much potential to use our technology on projects with more visual and design impact. I'd like to grow the team in the future too – I love to collaborate so in the long-term it would be great to have an apprentice who wants to learn about the technology and the processes.

Got questions you need answers to? Looking for direction but can’t find the headspace? Find out more about how a Gather consultant can help