Digby Vollrath, 33, co-founded Feast It in 2017 with Hugo Campbell to make the best street-food caterers in London available to event organisers. The platform was set to make its first month of £1 million in gross sales in April 2020, but lost it all as the Covid lockdown hit. After recommitting with their investors to focus on physical events, last year they renamed the company Togather to reflect the wider range of event-related services that they now provide. In July, Togather hit a new milestone of £4.2 million in monthly gross sales. They expect to make between £25 million and £30 million gross sales this financial year.

We started out as this niche product for street food in London and had a brand that recognised that. Frankly, the reason we were called Feast It rather than Feast was because we couldn’t get the domain name. But it worked perfectly well and there were definitely people it really resonated with.

The biggest problem with it was that no one could understand it if you said it down the phone, which is something you don’t think to test. You get every misspelling and wrong version of it. People kept calling it Feast “I-T”. No one wants to book a caterer through an IT company.

We also started to move from being a food and drinks platform to something that you could book venues through. And we transitioned from doing small weddings to larger events. For example this summer we did London Pride, which one and a half million people go to.

How long did it take and cost?

We got an agency in and did it from scratch. I hope to God we never have to do that again because it is maybe the most time-consuming and stressful thing I have done in my life. You don’t realise how many places where your name appears until you have to change it.

Timewise we gave ourselves six months. It is one of those things that is quite elastic. As we’re a digital platform, our brand is in a lot of places. And we were changing name, logo, colour palette and style: so everything went.

The cost is also elastic. You can find agencies that will do it for £25,000, up to the gold standard of £250,000 to £500,000. That’s just on the cost of creating the identity; it’s not the cost of your team implementing that identity, which is where the big cost is.

The pain point for us was how many people it occupied and for how long. Your commercial team is redoing every single [sales] deck; your supply team is concerned about educating your suppliers on the name change; your engineering team isn’t building new features as much as they are rebuilding old features to the new brand guidelines.

The entire company for two months was pretty much full-time on that. It’s the longest hours that I have personally had to work because you are the copy editor, the design editor … I was signing off things at 4am for quite a few days in a row. If you don’t do that, you will get compromised on the whole exercise.

There is also the digital complexity of changing your name online. All those articles that give your SEO [search engine optimisation] juice, suddenly you throw them out the window.

It is a hard needle to thread to get Google to understand that you, Togather, are that business Feast It. They freak out when 100,000 people suddenly turn up on a website that didn’t exist yesterday. Every bot thing goes off. We took a big hit on traffic for a few months and had to rebuild that.

We also had to navigate trademark because lots of businesses in the catering space use some form of the word “gather”. You are trying to get trademarks without alerting the entire industry. It is very easy to complain about someone getting a trademark.

Was it a success?

The morning we did it, Hugo’s mum sent him a message asking “What have you done?”. It was not universally popular, but we knew what we wanted to build. That was the brand that we went and fundraised with [they raised £6.6 million in May 2023 in a round led by a venture capital firm called Untitled, alongside Material Ventures, Best Nights VC and Fuel Ventures].

In events, it is important not to take yourself too seriously

I co-founded this business with my childhood best mate and we built a business in a sector that many people want to work in and have a passion for: events and food. It’s a serious thing you are doing and it’s also a fun thing and trying to strike the balance can be hard at times.

But I just don’t think we take ourselves overly seriously as people. We don’t want to be seen as kooky or quirky, as that is not who we are, but it has got to be fun. It is really long days, lots of the days of the week. If it is not enjoyable, what are you doing it for? Both my co-founder and I find it a lot easier to get up in the morning if it is going to be an enjoyable thing to do.

I don’t think we’ve ever been particularly serious people. We don’t take ourselves overly seriously. There’s a lot on LinkedIn where everyone is a guru and are very po-faced about the whole thing.

It has to be a laugh. And it is who we are. It’s hard to put on a front for eight years in a row; much better to be yourself and crack on with it.

Digby Vollrath was talking to Richard Tyler, editor of the Times Enterprise Network