London’s first ever board game café recently became the third crowdfunded business in the past year to make its home in Haggerston, Hackney.
The café, Draughts, opened in a converted railway arch on Acton Mews last Saturday, 15 November. It raised a large portion of its funds from a campaign on popular crowdfunding website Kickstarter in August.
Although founder Toby Hamand had already taken out loans to fund his dream venture, he said that the Kickstarter campaign – which raised almost £21,000 in the space of a month – allowed him to make Draughts better than it ever could have been.
“Kickstarter has a huge publicity effect,” said Mr Hamand, 28, a former sound engineer who left his job a year ago to make Draughts a reality.
He and co-founder Nick Curci wanted a strong community around their café.
“Kickstarter allowed us to build up a community from nothing,” he said.
“We had a lot of extra things we wanted to do,” Mr Hamand went on, “and Kickstarter gave us funding for them.”
These included branded glassware, and tokens which could be exchanged for a single gaming session at Draughts, in keeping with the café’s board gaming theme and aesthetic.
Mr Hamand said that he would definitely recommend Kickstarter and crowdfunding to anyone with a great business idea that they want to get off the ground. “I think it’s awesome.”
It seems as though Hackney is the place to be for up-to-the-minute, innovative ventures. Mr Hamand recalled:
“When we started, everyone said, ‘You’re doing this in Hackney, right?’
“It was the place where everyone assumed it would be happening.”
Draughts is following a precedent set by two other crowdfunded small businesses which got their start in Haggerston over the last year. make; coffee was launched by cancer survivor Olivia Abbatt in a van outside Haggerston station, and Turning Earth, an open-access ceramics studio, also opened in a converted railway arch.
Tallie Maughan makes her crowdfunding pitch for her ceramics studio, Turning Earth
“It seems very obvious to me that we’re in an exceptionally privileged time for setting up new businesses,” said Tallie Maughan, the founder of Turning Earth, who used her background in sales to run a highly successful campaign on Crowdfunder. The campaign broke through its £8,000 target in just two days, and raised over £13,000 overall.
“It’s a new form of engagement,” she said. “It’s been an integral part of the business – you can’t separate it out.
“I highly, highly, highly recommend it.”
