Two sisters are helping us find all the bargains for ourselves
The Bradshaw girls' recession-friendly site pinpoints all those post-Tiger discounts, they tell Andrea Byrne
Sunday November 01 2009
You'd think living together, socialising together and playing sport together (hockey) would be sufficient bonding for any pair of sisters, but seemingly it is not enough for Sarah and Emily Bradshaw, who've now set up a business together.
Hearing people moaning about the enforced changes to their lifestyle, the Dublin sisters have set up feeling frugal.ie, a recession-friendly website built on the principle of "change how you spend, not how you live".
Both immaculately dressed and well-spoken, the sisters, who are originally from Glenageary but live in Ringsend, look every inch the entrepreneurs and have no qualms about inquiring what I think doesn't work on the website.
Explaining the inspiration behind the venture, Sarah says, "You might want to go out for dinner and you want to see what special offers are around, but when you go and look for them, you can't find them," with Emily casually and unapologetically interjecting as only a sister could. "I always found before we did this, you'd be walking down the street and you'd see a board outside a restaurant saying two dinners for €20, but unless you actually saw that, there was nowhere else where you could go to specifically find it."
Their respective backgrounds make them more than qualified to excel in business, particularly given the originality of their concept. Both graduates of UCD, Sarah (27) has worked in property, finance and currently works in an advertising agency three days a week, while Emily (24) has worked in marketing and sales and now works part-time in a solicitor's office.
"It could easily be a full-time job," says Emily referring to the growing demands of the website, while Sarah reinforces the sentiment, "Easily! We have so many plans and so much stuff we want to do with it. We want to turn it into a one-stop shop. We got an email yesterday from this lady promoting a play and she said, 'We'll offer reduced priced tickets if you put it up on your site.'"
At the moment the website encompasses weekends away in top hotels around the country as well as deals for restaurants, beauty salons and golf courses. Despite the fact that it has not been operational long, both girls have big plans to cover adventure weekends, alternative stags and hen parties, and perhaps even package holidays.
"If it really takes off, the possibilities are endless. We want to be a browsing site for people looking for something interesting to do, without it costing them a fortune. Everyone says, there's nothing to do in Dublin except go out and drink, but that's not the case," says Emily.
Understandably, their endeavour has been met with great enthusiasm from businesses, many of which have now started to approach them about offering deals to cash-strapped consumers. In just a few days after I interviewed the two sisters, a significant number of new deals appeared on the website, and the number of hits the website gets is rising every day.
In the beginning, the Bradshaw sisters offered businesses a free three-month trial, but, given the speed with which the website has taken off, they have had to renegotiate their revenue policy. Now, businesses pay a fee according to the number of people who download the code to the deal being offered.
Being in their 20s, Sarah and Emily come from a generation that knows the benefits of using social networking sites to promote business, and they both rave about Facebook as a cost-free way of alerting people to the website.
As for the merits of being their own bosses, both break into broad smiles. "We work very well together," says Sarah adding, "When one gets tired, the other encourages."
www.feelingfrugal.ie
- Andrea Byrne
Originally published in
