FlairMakers has closed a £500k pre-Seed round led by SFC Capital, with participation from angel investors and existing backers of the company.
FlairMakers is a talent-as-a-service platform live in the UK and Romania that is purpose-built for hospitality. It connects hospitality businesses with vetted freelance professionals from the floor to the boardroom, handling training, compliance, contracts, payments and quality.
The pre-Seed investment will fund product and technology development and the expansion of FlairMakers’ UK venue network.
The startup says 83% of hospitality employees rate flexible hours as an important benefit, yet only a third of UK employers of frontline workers offer flexibility in scheduling shifts and rotas.
In a sector employing 3.6 million people in the UK, the FlairMakers says that is not a niche preference, and is instead the “future of work arriving in hospitality.”
“Hospitality has always assumed there are two ways to work: employment or agencies,” says Raluca Epureanu, co-founder and CEO at FlairMakers. “There is a third, and the industry’s best professionals are already living it – the same sommelier working shifts across three venues, teaching wine-tasting classes and consulting on wine lists. One skill set, several income streams.
“Nobody built the system that makes that work, so it runs on WhatsApp groups and favours. We are building it. The industry keeps asking how to get people back – the answer is to stop asking them to fit a model they’ve already rejected.”
