the times Saturday January 1 2022
Body + Soul 13
marketing agency called Social Chain,
to promote brands on social media.
The company valuation made him
a millionaire two years before his
self-imposed deadline, at 23, and he got
his Range Rover Sport too. By the time
he was 27, in 2019, the business was
worth £300 million and in August 2020
he quit to pursue new projects. He’s on
the board of the nutrition company Huel
and has launched two new enterprises:
Thirdweb, a company creating
blockchain-based applications, and
Flight Story, a marketing platform. His
podcast, The Diary of a CEO, recorded at
his flat in Shoreditch, east London, has
been at or near the top of the business
charts for the past 60 weeks, and his
book is a Sunday Times bestseller.
He is astonishingly single-minded,
but perhaps because he sleeps only
between 2 or 3am and 7am, he has
also managed to fulfil the third goal
in his diary: “hold a long-term
relationship”. Appropriately for a tech
millionaire, he met his girlfriend Melanie
through a direct message on Instagram,
although she lives in Indonesia, so it’s
very much a long-distance relationship
at the moment. His fourth goal — “work
on my body image” — is progressing
nicely since he has been to the gym
pretty much every day since March 2020
(“6.9 days out of 7”).
Bartlett has watched Dragons’ Den
since he was 12. “When the TV people
called me I almost felt I had no
choice but to accept — not just from
childhood nostalgia, but because I felt a
responsibility to show 12-year-old Steve,
who didn’t see himself represented on
the panel, that aspiring entrepreneurs
from under-represented backgrounds
can sit there too.”
He promised himself he would keep
an eye out for the unconventional
candidate and wouldn’t be swayed by
their education — or lack of it. “Being
smart and talented isn’t the same as
passing the test of school.
“It’s important for parents to nurture
what a child is. My mum now tells
everyone she meets that I’m just like
Richard Branson, and that’s fine by me.”
Dragons’ Den starts on January 6
on BBC1tuned electrical signal to the muscles,
causing them to contract. Not to be
confused with devices such as Slendertone
where you lie on a table and get the ma-
chine to do it for you, this is about wearing
a special wired-up gilet or band while you
work out — to increase the effects of mus-
cle building. Studios such as Surge in the
City (surge.co.uk), Vive Fitness (vivefit-
ness.co.uk), E-Pulsive (e-pulsive.co.uk)
and Miha Bodytec studios (miha-bodytec)
are becoming popular with the time-
pressed who are lured by the promise that
EMS training activates up to 30 per cent
more muscle fibres than conventional
strength training — and all in a single
20-30 minute session a week. For home
use, a 23-minute training programme is
recommended with SixPad EMS devices
(eu.sixpad.com), which are available for
everything from arms to abs.
Trainers made from
ocean plastic
There are 25 billion pairs of running shoes
made every year, most of which are made
from plastic, and hardly any of them are
recyclable. Training shoes are set to be-
come more eco friendly in 2022 as manu-
facturers make belated attempts to protect
the environment. Leading the way with its
vegan shoes is the independent British
brand LØCI sneakers, launched in 2021,
which adds some high-top shoes to its
range next year (LØCI Eleven, £150:
lociwear.com). All of its footwear is hand-
made, with insoles made from cork and re-
cycled foam; a lining made from bamboo
and an upper crafted from recycled ocean
plastic sourced from the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic coast of Africa. Produc-
tion is scaled up or down monthly to avoid
mass overproduction.
With a flagship store opening in Regent
Street, London, in 2022, the cult Swiss
brand On (on-running.com) is also taking
steps in the right direction by becoming
the first leading shoe producer to harvest
carbon emissions. They take these emis-
sions from industrial sources such as steel
mills or from landfill sites, captured before
they are released into the atmosphere, and
put them through a fermentation process
using bacteria to ferment the carbon-rich
gas and convert it to liquid ethanol — it’s a
process similar to beer brewing. Ethanol is
then dehydrated to create ethylene, which
is turned into EVA — a spongy foam cush-
ioning for shoes. It’s called CleanCloud.
Anti-stress classes
on demand
The Mindlabs platform (wearemind-
labs.com) launches this month. It is the
self-proclaimed “Peloton of mental
health” that will offer thousands of live and
on-demand classes filmed in its west
London studio. Expect livestream guided
meditation, CBT and breathwork — de-
signed to build mental resilience and over-
come stress, anxiety and low mood. Its in-
structors include an impressive line-up of
world-class mindfulness experts, includ-
ing the breathwork expert Richie Bostock
(who has 42,400 followers on his @the-
breathguy Instagram account), clinical
psychologist Dr Erica McInnis and neuro-
scientist Anne-Sophie Fluri, a research
associate at Imperial College London.
Classes will range in length from 10 to 40
minutes and there are plans to launch an
accompanying range of wearable gadgets
such as an EEG (electroencephalogram)
headband that will measure your brain-
waves. There is evidence that meditation
and mindfulness techniques can alter the
structure of your brain in a beneficial way
and, after successful trials, MindLabs says
its mission is to “rewire your brain” for less
stress, better sleep and boosted mood.
W
hen Steven
Bartlett dropped
out of university
after his first
lecture, his mum
thought he’d
thrown away
his life chances and refused to speak
to him for two years. But the company
he subsequently built from his bedroom
made him a millionaire by 23, so it’s not
surprising that the newest investor on
the BBC’s Dragons’ Den has no regrets
(even his mum is proud of him now).
Bartlett, 29, will be the youngest
Dragon yet in the 19th series of the
TV show, which airs next week, and is
hoping his unconventional background
will encourage entrepreneurs like him
who have taken a less obvious path.
He says that he decided his course in
business management at Manchester
Metropolitan University wasn’t for him
after only a few minutes. “Looking
around in my first lecture and seeing
everyone hungover — no one actually
cared about business, they were there
because they didn’t know what else
to pick. The lecturer at the front was
handing out felt tips to make a poster for
a hypothetical business. I just thought,
‘This is awful and a waste of money.’
“University is a total scam for the
vast majority of people. You walk away
with a £50,000 debt if you’re lucky —
and for what? A piece of paper that is
less relevant than ever before. It’s archaic
in a world where everything is on a
screen in the palm of your hand to
think that the best way to learn is from
textbooks written decades ago and from
someone standing at the front of a room
flicking through slides.”
However, he says he can understand
his parents’ horrified reaction when he
dropped out. He grew up in Plymouth,
Devon, the youngest of four. His sister
studied law; one brother got a first-class
degree at LSE and works in finance, and
the other is an accountant. By contrast,
he scraped through GCSEs and A-levels,
which was followed by Ucas Clearing —
although as a sixth-former he was
already revealing his inner Dragon,
brokering deals with a vending machine
company for the school and organising
trips and taking a cut.
His upbringing sounds somewhat
eccentric. Both parents worked all hours,
his father as a structural engineer and
his mother as a wannabe but ultimately
unsuccessful entrepreneur. She is
Nigerian and left school aged
seven not being able to read
or write. “She had no chance
of an education, and she went
through pain and failure in
business. So when her son rings
and says, ‘I’m going to walk the
path you did and disregard
education,’ I see why her love
manifested in anger,” he says.
“It was my mum’s addiction to
starting businesses — an estate
agency, a beauty salon, several
corner shops, to name a few —
which caused us to be pretty
much bankrupt for at least the
last decade of my childhood.”
In his book, Happy Sexy
Millionaire (Yellow Kite), he
describes their dilapidated
family house in the “nice
middle-class area” that so
embarrassed the young Steven.“Our back garden was decorated with
fridges, VCRs and other miscellaneous
objects littered throughout the waist-
high grass. My parents optimistically
started a building project when I was
seven that they never had the money to
finish, so the back of our house remained
a semi-demolished building for the best
part of two decades.”
His parents might not have realised
it, but they were creating the perfect
environment for a would-be millionaire:
their lack of presence plus his sense of
inadequacy and embarrassment about
their poverty. “You create this wood of
independence in a child’s life where he
can disappear for days, and then you
make him tremendously insecure
because he’s the only black kid in a
school of 1,500 pupils and is so poor
that there are no Christmas or birthday
presents. I made that link very early that
everything you get is a direct result of
your own actions — it’s what drove me.”
After leaving university he was so
broke that he resorted to stealing leftover
food from local takeaways and if they
had a sit-in area rummaging down the
back of the seats for loose change. One
lucky day he managed to find £13.40.
Around that time he wrote a diary
entry in which he listed four goals: the
first two were to become a “technical
millionaire” by 25 and for a Range Rover
to be his first car. That day
seemed a long way off until he
came up with an idea for his
first business. “I was in a
city with 100,000 students, but
there was no central online
noticeboard for us all to
connect, so I thought, ‘Why
don’t I do it?’ ”
He worked solidly on the
business, called Wallpark, with
a friend, gathering funding for
18 months. He even applied to
Dragons’ Den, but never heard
back. “The idea I was applying
for actually did fail because
although we reached seven
cities, we were overtaken by
social media,” Bartlett says.
Realising where the future
lay, he swiftly set up the second
venture with his partner, aby Rachel
Carlyle
Being smart
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vFrom left: Deborah Meaden, Steven Bartlett and Peter Jones on the BBC’s Dragons’ DenANDREW FARRINGTON/BBC; MICHAEL LECKIE FOR THE TIMESMeet the latest Dragon, Steven Bartlett
— university dropout, millionaire by 23
Bartlett at home