The Tiny Start-up Movement

Micro and small enterprises form an overwhelming majority in the economy. In Switzerland alone, their share of the total number of companies is a good 99% (according to bfs.admin.ch), in Germany 96.8% (destatis.de) and in Austria 98% (bmdw.gv.at). However, it is not just the quantity, but the diversity and innovative strength that makes this movement so exciting. Their products range from sustainable all-purpose cleaners, fruit spreads from the tube or vegan instant soups, to food-saving trade or sustainable micro-farms. The ideas are geared towards social challenges and are tailored to real customer needs in a contemporary way. They often reassemble or optimize existing products and transfer the benefits to the sustainable or digital world.

From Tiny House to Tiny Start-up

Tiny houses" are the pioneers of the tiny house movement. The idea of living a self-determined and self-sufficient life according to your own ideas in the smallest of spaces comes from the USA. It has since evolved and spread worldwide. In the spirit of the circular economy, offers today range from used shipping containers that are returned to the cycle of use to customized, energy-efficient tiny houses with a minimalist design. The providers themselves are micro or small companies. The Stuttgart-based founding duo of "TechTinyHouse", for example, work with one employee. Everything that goes beyond the development, construction and planning of the high-tech tiny houses, such as metal and timber construction as well as the building envelope and installations, is carried out by complementary partners, most of whom are micro-enterprises. This results in private homes, mini-offices, hostels or hairdressing salons, such as the "Tiny Hairhouse" in the canton of Zug.

Tiny start-ups are adapting

Small-scale entrepreneurship can be realized in a wide variety of life situations. Parallel to studying, for example. The Berlin franchise system "Fitbox" focuses on this and appeals directly to students. The Tiny-Startupper:innen from the Swiss Glühweinwerk are also students: "We experience entrepreneurship first-hand and can demonstrate our innovative strength. Of course, our start-up is also a source of income alongside our studies." For others, it is an ideal model for combining family and career, as is the case for the founders of "Stadtlandkind", who score highly with their Swiss online concept store: "As parents of three children, free time management is worth more than a top salary. We are flexible and can work from anywhere in the world," say Roberta and Tobias Zingg.

The later phase of life, for example after retirement, can also be a good time to get started. Elke Jensen has invented her "CityCaddy", which is a shopper, trolley and modern walking aid all in one. The 71-year-old founded her "CityCaddy UG" in Hamburg. She was denied financial assistance from the bank, but was able to realize her modern business idea with a loan from Family & Friends. The proportion of older founders is increasing, partly because they finally want to realize something that has been dormant for a long time.

Tiny Impact Start-ups

Small companies can achieve big things - as demonstrated by Arbofino AG from Männedorf. The family business was founded in 2014 by ecopreneur Dominic Ziegler. Arbofino offers impact investments with the planting of teak trees in Ecuador and parallel natural forest reforestation. To date, 52 local employees have already planted around 30,000 trees and established over 124 hectares of nature reserve. Let's stay with CO2 storage, more precisely with bamboo. In China, around 80 million chopsticks are produced from it every year and flown around 9,000 km to us before they end up in the bin after a single use. This gave the founders of the Canadian environmental impact start-up "Chop Value" an exciting idea in 2016. The now B-certified start-up collects them from restaurants, cleans, disinfects and shreds them and uses an eco-friendly, mechanical process to produce wooden tiles from the wood pulp, which it then processes into sustainable items for the home. To date, the start-up has recycled over 55 million chopsticks and produced 32 million wooden tiles from them, saving 76,764.54 kg of CO2. Chop Value is expanding via franchising in Asia, Canada, Mexico and Europe, where franchise partners are setting up micro-factories for the production processes.

Résumé

Tiny start-ups are as individual as the market as a whole. They differ in their founding motivations, goals, business concepts, management and success. They are a huge experimental laboratory that quickly tries out new trends and tests them for market compatibility. They are valuable innovative drivers for sustainable developments and indispensable for our economy.

• Microenterprises: up to three employees
• Microenterprises: up to nine employees and turnover of less than EUR 2 million per year
• Small companies: up to 49 employees and sales revenue of less than 10 million euros per year

* Prof. Veronika Bellone has been in the franchise business since 1986. She founded her own franchise consultancy in 1991. She is a professor at the FHNW in the Marketing and Entrepreneurship department and at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where she teaches franchising in the CAS Services Marketing program.