Art Pact 117

The founding of the new company (as we assumed was almost always the case) did not go off entirely without a hitch. The administrative side, admirably handled by Leila, went nice and smooth. All the papers were filed in good time, the lawyers involved did their jobs quickly and professionally, and since we'd worked out so many of the details and contingencies first there was little enough work for them to do at any rate. The name was registered with Companies House, through one of those agencies that for a fee register dozens of generically-described companies whose remits cover the entire gamut of human endeavour and which can then be retitled as desired.

Office and workspace, however, proved a different kettle of fish. None of us had had any experience renting commercial space before - we'd all tended to work in our own homes - and finding a unit at a reasonable cost that matched our requirements turned out to be awkward. There were fully-furnished managed office suites in the new business park, but they were modern and new and priced accordingly, so expensive that we could only afford the smallest possible footage of floorspace they would lease in a single lot. This amounted to two offices and no out-of-office workspace, clearly a non-starter. We reasoned that we could make do with one or two offices between the twelve of us - it would save money, and probably only one or two of us would need to have access to a desk and a computer at any one time anyway (in fact we could have made do with one, but two gave us the luxury of alloting one office permanently to clerical work and orders coming in, keeping the other free for research and development).

At the other end of the spectrum there were medium-to-large factory sites on the south side, out past the dual carriageway. Built forty years ago they were still good buildings, but they'd clearly been designed for small manufacturing companies supplying shops, and (although it needn't have), the internet age had not been kind to the original inhabitants. The buildings were well equipped for light manufacturing, but (according to Candice) they were too fixed to easily convert into bodyshops, out-of-town gyms, and the other concerns that have tended in recent years to take over such empty buildings. For our purposes they were overkill - cheap for what they were, but still far too expensive for us to maintain. If there were thirty of us, perhaps, and we were sure that the order rate would be constant... but we were still unsure as to whether our early successes were anything more than a flash in the pan.

Bronwen (the most finance-minded of us, having gone out for many years with the deputy manager of the Bangor branch of Natwest), found this uncertainty maddening. She had allowed herself to be drawn into the agreement largely by the Katie's enthusiasm, but having put herself in a position where she could not easily back out she immediately began to worry at the problem of whether we were right in thinking that our work would be profitable. It had been profitable for each of us individually, of course, and even in the small groups that had grown informally to make the first batches of active dresses. But our finger-in-the-air predictions of demand and our informal polling of our customers did nothing to satisfy her uncertainty. She wanted a full written analysis of the potential markets, focus-groups and street polls, the whole shebang. She met with small-business gurus like my mum met with psychics: often, and placing exaggerated weight on their pronouncements.

Now, there was a lot of eye-rolling and winking behind Bronwen's back about this. Obviously to some extent she was right - we would have benefited from a more businesslike approach, clearly with hindsight that was the case. But if we'd listened to her we would never have done anything, and her doom-saying was turning out to be quite a drag on morale, already somewhat damaged by the slow progress in finding premises. If she'd been a bit more upbeat about it perhaps we might have followed her ideas, but it seemed too much like backseat moaning.

"If I wanted someone sat on their fat arse whinging that everything I did was wrong," Pru said (after one particularly vexing argument with Bronwen), "I could have stayed with Tim."

It was, however, ultimately Bronwen who was to solve the location problem. She came back from one of her business-guru appointments with the news that she'd stopped on the way back to pick up a Yorkie (another of her tedious habits, she took exaggerated pleasure in buying the "it's not for girls" Yorkie bars, as if it were an amazing act of rebellion rather than the whole aim of that prickish campaign).

"That's not the news, though," she went on. "Over the road from the newsagents was an old dressmaking factory, and an agent's sign. I called - it's up for lease, cheap rates if we're prepared to do a bit of tidying up and renovating ourselves! They were only down the road, they came over with some keys and let me in . It is perfect."

It was, as well - a low post-war building in pre-war style, two small offices perched over a floor with just enough space for a stock and materials warehouse, five large cutting-tables, and small workbenches for the sewing machines and Katie's electronics station. It was utterly filthy, of course - it had been empty and unheated for close to a decade, and when Alice tried the stairs she announced that no-one larger than Leila and Candice should go up until she'd been able to fix some of the steps, but other than that the structure was sound. We could save money by clearing it out ourselves, and the agent hinted that if we were willing to make the place look nice the owner was likely to look very favourably on the idea of a discount - as long as we weren't so attached to the place that we minded the possibility of him leasing it to someone else at the end of the three-year period.

"If we do well enough for that to be a problem," Candice said bluntly, "I will be happy whatever happens."