Grace Beverley reveals exactly how she secured her £4.2mil recent investment in Tala

The activewear brand only launched a couple of years ago but has already bought in millions of pounds of sales

2 years ago

It’s fair to say Grace Beverley is a bit of an icon. Back in 2019 she founded Tala, which has gone on to be an incredibly successful sustainable activewear brand, whilst finishing her degree at Oxford. No biggie. She’s gone from being a fitness influencer (remember when she was called Grace Fit?!) and uni student to a full-on businesswoman – and now she’s secured a pretty wild $5.7 million (the equivalent of about £4.2m) worth of investment for Tala, aged just 24.

Grace Beverley spoke to Business Insider and shared her pitch deck both there and on her Instagram, which reveals exactly how she managed to secure her millions of dollars’ worth of investment in Tala. A pitch deck is basically a short presentation you do to potential clients or investors, and it gives an overview of your business, product, growth and business plan. Last April, the Times reported Tala had made over £10m worth of sales since its launch in 2019, and it’s safe to say the company has blown up everywhere since its inception.

She said she wanted to attract investors who were just as passionate about inclusivity and diversity as she is, using images from her campaigns that represent as many body types as possible. “It’s not just what we shout about externally, it’s what we do internally too. We wanted investors who believed in the same.”

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On Grace’s Instagram post about her pitch deck, she’s included one image that Insider didn’t – a slide about Tala’s inclusivity and diversity. The slide says Tala “manifests” both of these both internally in the business, and externally in its output.

Next in the pitch deck is a slide explaining some background – it says how Tala was founded in 2019, and gives some of Grace’s achievements such as being named in the Forbes 30 under 30 list, her degree from Oxford and newspapers and magazines she has featured in.

The pitch deck then goes on to explain Grace’s previous success in business including her fitness app Shreddy, her Working Hard, Hardly Working book and successful podcast alongside it. She told Insider: “The way I’ve done things hasn’t necessarily been the traditional route of entrepreneurship or business. All these things really fed into my building of Tala.”

Next comes a timeline of Tala, from its launch, pop-up store, collaborations with brands such as Depop in July 2020 and ASOS in March 2021. It shows just how fast Tala has grown since it launched only a couple of years ago.

The whole pitch deck highlights sustainability, which is one of Tala’s main selling points. One slide shows some wild stats – it says that in Tala’s first year alone through sustainable manufacturing processes it saved almost 3.5m litres of water, over 220,000 kg of CO2, and recycled almost 70k water bottles.

Grace says Tala was born out of her own desire to make more sustainable purchasing decisions, which she found difficult when it came to activewear – she says sustainable activewear had been a “neglected” industry before, especially when it came to young people who can’t just drop £80 on a single pair of leggings.

via Instagram @gracebeverley

Next in the Tala pitch deck is a breakdown of who else works for the company alongside Grace. She says their team is 81 per cent women and 36 per cent people of colour, and the slide highlights the previous achievements of the team and companies they’ve all worked at before.

Then comes screenshots of testimonials from Tala’s own customers, which came from an Instagram Q&A box the company made, asking its followers what they love about the brand.

The pitch deck then highlights its new brand ambassador program, where it works with a fitness influencer, sustainability influencer and fashion influencer “who have strong brand alignment and high engagement rates”. It says Tala is hoping to use the funding it’s recently raised to increase and expand its paid promotional content.

Finally the pitch deck touches on Tala’s competitors, but says no one else in the UK offers its niche of sustainable activewear at more affordable prices. It then shows Tala in the middle of a venn diagram, showing three categories – activewear, leading digital marketing, and customer-values alignment.

Within the diagram it shows other companies that do one or two of these things, with Tala alone, smack bang in the middle. It says: “It’s hard to do these three things well. Tala does.”

Grace told Insider: “We think all of these brands are incredibly exciting. And we put them in here to show just that, and then show exactly where we would fit in. And I think that it is the golden middle point.”

You can see the full pitch deck from Tala here on Business Insider, or see below for some of the images used (and some extra ones!), posted by Grace Beverley herself on Instagram: