A BOOMING, student-based Worcester business has launched a crowd investment campaign to help fund its continued 300 per cent year on year growth.

Fancy Fresher in Shrub Hill Industrial Estate is an online fancy dress company, operating heavily in the student market and offering a bespoke fancy dress pack for new students to customise and buy online in preparation for their freshers week parties.

Last year it won the West Midlands start up of the year award in the Big Start Up Loans Competition.

The company was founded in August 2014 by 25-years-old entrepreneur Dom Portman, who had been working for a local lettings agents, when he decided to quit and go full time on developing his idea. He hired two staff and 40 student reps and soon won contracts with nine UK universities’ students’ unions.

Now the company has five staff and Mr Portman said: "The growth of Fancy Fresher has been rapid but steady and our business model, as well as opening doors in other areas of the student market, has proved to be scaleable. This means we can continue to scale up and this year we will actually begin to own our own marketing channels for our products which will increase the sustainability of the business year round and provide a foundation for further brand awareness campaigns. The beauty of crowd investment on a platform like Seedrs is that the platform deal with all the share distribution and communications between investors and business owners, leaving a relatively simple job for investors to analyse the opportunity and businesses to receive investment.”

Fancy Fresher’s campaign also qualifies investors for the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, meaning that a qualifying investor will receive up to 50 per cent tax relief on the sum invested into new and growing companies.