With Starling, you can bank anywhere. That’s what makes us a great app for business owners out and about at festivals. As part of this support for small businesses, we’re sponsoring Pub in the Park, a series of outdoor festivals around England that brings together award-winning chefs, chart-topping music and all sorts of goods made by small British businesses.
One of the many enterprises that have turned to Starling for business banking is GoodToBee, a small company based in Northamptonshire. GoodToBee sells handmade beeswax products, designed to keep food fresh without using plastic. The company was founded by Madeleine Willis in 2018. She opened her digital business account with Starling in August 2020. With Starling, there are no monthly fees for standard business banking.
Money management on the go
“The Starling app is so comprehensive. Doing festivals means that half of my week is usually spent in a field, so being in financial control through my phone and not a laptop is amazing,” says Madeleine, 51. “In quiet or downtime, I can set up payments to go out for the month’s payroll. I also love the notifications of payments that will go out the next day – I can move money around if I need to and never get caught out.”
Madeleine takes card payments from customers using Zettle by PayPal. Zettle is available through the Starling Business Marketplace and is connected to her Starling business account. “Being able to integrate with other systems through the Marketplace is really useful for us,” she says. The Marketplace is the section of the Starling app where you can connect to a range of third-party products and services.
With her Starling Marketplace integration for Zettle, Madeleine can see key data points through the Starling app, including taxes, fees and total sales from a week at Pub in the Park.
Starling business customers that are new to Zettle can also get an exclusive £9 card reader offer, provided that they sign up before 20th September 2021.*
GoodToBee out and about
“It’s great to be able to talk to your customers, especially when you’re selling a new product,” says Madeleine. The GoodToBee beeswax products include reusable sandwich bags and material for wrapping cheese. They’re sold online, in physical shops such as Waterstones bookshops and at festivals, including Pub in the Park.
Helping families use less plastic
GoodToBee began after Madeleine and her family took part in a BBC Breakfast challenge to collect all of their plastic rubbish for two weeks. “I was absolutely mortified at the end of the first week, sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by a pile of plastic,” she says.
One of the changes they made in the second week was to make and use beeswax wraps. “With that one simple swap, we saved a phenomenal amount of plastic.”
Determined to make beeswax wraps more readily available for other families, Madeleine set to work developing a recipe for beeswax wraps she could sell. Four years on, Madeleine employs a team of nine people and has been shortlisted for Entrepreneur of the Year, 2021, at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.
Ethical banking with Starling
Another aspect of Starling that Madeleine appreciates is the ethical approach to banking. “We try to make every part of our business as waste free, plastic free and ethical as possible. This includes our banking. We did lots of online research and Starling came out on top,” she says.
Starling is a founding member of the Tech Zero Charter, and we’re committed to reducing our own carbon emissions to net zero at the latest by 2050 and hopefully much sooner. Our personal and business debit cards are made from recycled plastic.
Madeleine says: “We love Starling’s commitment to people and planet. And the app makes managing our money easy.”
*The offer of a discounted card reader is for £9 excl. VAT. Offer is valid for one (1) Zettle Reader per new business user who creates a Zettle account before 20 September 2021. Ordinary first card reader price £29 excl. VAT (additional card reader price £59 excl. VAT). Subject to availability.
The Zettle service is subject to terms available here: https://www.zettle.com/gb/legal and the sale and provision of hardware is subject to our delivery terms https://shop.izettle.com/gb/terms-and-conditions.