Emilie Williams (24) – Ditsy Bits
If you’re a young person who keeps up with the latest trends, it’s likely you’ve seen Ditsy Bits on your social feed. Known for its signature Irish designs on funky T-shirts, the fashion business was started by Dublin City University (DCU) graduate Emilie Williams in 2022.
Ditsy Bits began as an “outlet for the fact I didn’t like my college course”, says Williams, who studied primary teaching for a year before switching to geography and human development in DCU. She began hand-painting T-shirts with Irish designs and selling them on clothing resale app Depop.
Williams says she “used the motivation of loving what I was doing with Ditsy Bits” to push her to get through her university work quicker, often handing assignments in early so she could have time to work on her business, which she was funding from the wages of a part-time job.
One design in particular “completely blew up” her brand overnight. She calls it “the Sláinte tee”, a plain T-shirt with a pint of stout and the word Sláinte written across it.
RM Block
Williams soon found that demand for her products was outstripping her stock. “So overnight, I set up a website, I made more stock, and literally from there it’s just been an ongoing kind of sell-out, which is crazy,” she says. The growth of Ditsy Bits “snowballed”; she registered it as a business, quit her part-time job and began outsourcing production.
“I have someone in Dublin who prints my T-shirts for me. And then at the start of this year, I got a distribution centre, so it’s very much more professional now than it was at the start,” she says.
Williams now also employs two interns and has an accountant. However, she has found that, as a business owner, it can be difficult to delegate work to people because “you’ve grown this thing by yourself, and then you have to trust someone else to work to the standard that you would hold yourself to. But it’s something I’m learning to do.”
She has also expanded sales beyond her website, hosting pop-up shops around Dublin.
“I did a few [pop-up shops] in Urban Outfitters when the brand hadn’t really taken off yet. But I’ve done three independent ones myself, where I’ve rented out a space in town and advertised on social media and sold the stuff there, and they’ve all been the most successful days of business.
“It’s insane the amount of people that turn up, and just seeing everyone in person, it’s so surreal because you’re like, woah, the people that follow you online or order online are actually real.”
Ditsy Bits has expanded into knitwear products, and Williams hopes to continue growing the brand, “while also staying true to what Ditsy Bits was at the start”.
“I want to keep it kind of niche and special, and something that people can see themselves in, and also keep the community aspect as well, because I think that’s really nice. I love when people come to the pop-ups and stuff and they’re chatting to me about the brand.”
Her advice to young people thinking about setting up a business is to use the supports available to them.
“I didn’t think I could reach out to these business supports because I had a bit of impostor syndrome,” she says. “Because of that, I missed different deadlines for grants or funding.”
She advises young entrepreneurs to “go to the local-enterprise office, because they are there to help”.
“They have different courses; there’s some free ones; there’s some ones you pay for. You can do one-to-one mentoring, all of these things, and they’re just brilliant.”
Chris (23) and Vicky Reilly (33) – The Cookie Bro
When Chris Reilly started making cookies during the Covid lockdown, his sister Vicky called them an “absolute disaster”.
However, he tried again and again, eventually perfecting his recipe, until Vicky told him they were “so good we could totally sell these”.
The pair began selling cookies in their mother’s newsagent’s, at €1 for a box of four. After noticing the cookies were “flying” off the shelf, the siblings decided to start an Instagram page to sell cookies for delivery around their area.
“It wasn’t even that we had some business, tech-savvy background,” says Vicky. Chris was still in secondary school at the time and Vicky was a HR graduate. “We just had an idea.”
Vicky invested around €150 at the start to buy ingredients. Friends and family shared The Cookie Bro Instagram page with others, and within the first week, the siblings had five orders for cookies. They were “delighted” with that, says Vicky.
Orders quickly built from there, until Vicky found herself “staying up to three o’clock in the morning taking orders, because one weekend we had, like, 100 orders of people just wanting to buy cookies. It spun so quickly we didn’t realise this was actually happening.”
Vicky believes that it was a combination of social media and the pandemic that helped to grow their business. “People couldn’t go out, they couldn’t do things, so they were ordering all these boxes [of cookies] because that was their treat”.
The siblings’ “whole mindset” about the business changed when cafes began reaching out asking if they could stock The Cookie Bro products. They transitioned from making cookies in their kitchen to renting a commercial kitchen, and have employed their mother to work with them full time, as well as employing a part-time driver when the siblings’ take holidays.
Their cookies are now stocked in more than 50 cafes around Dublin, Meath and Kildare. Chris and Vicky hope to eventually open their own shop to sell their products.
Vicky’s advice to young people with business ideas is to “just give it a go”.
“It might be the most successful thing that you ever do in your whole life, or it might not work out and you move on to the next thing. And that’s okay too.”
Sadhbh (23) and Aisling Wood (21) – Bean Around
When Sadhbh Wood’s exfoliating mitt was thrown away during a pandemic clear-out, she had to come up with a way to remove her fake tan. She remembered that her dad, who suffers from psoriasis, had been using coffee grounds in the shower to soothe his skin. So Sadhbh decided to give the coffee grounds a go for removing her tan, and, while it worked, it was messy and didn’t smell great.
In 2021, Sadhbh and her sister Aisling decided to begin experimenting by making different formulas and scents to create a solid-form coffee exfoliating bar. They asked local coffee shops for their grounds to repurpose for production.
When they began the business, Aisling had just started studying business and law at UCD and Sadhbh had just started sixth year of secondary school. Now in her final year of business at DCU, Sadhbh feels their college experiences have allowed them to “apply what we were learning in real time”.
Balancing operating a business with their studies “definitely took a lot of time management”. “We had to schedule studies and exam timetables weeks in advance” to stay on top of things, says Sadhbh.
The product was picked up by the Supervalu Food Academy in 2022, which the siblings say taught them how to “package, label, market – everything to the distribution of the products in a retail space”.
In 2024, Bean Around was selected to be part of the Lidl Kickstart programme, which aims to give small Irish businesses the chance to promote their products through Lidl stores across the country. Bean Around products are also stocked in Meadows and Byrne stores, in Café Sol and at Arboretum garden centres, among other locations. They also sell online and at trade shows.
Convincing others of the benefits of their product was a challenge for the siblings, however. Sadhbh says they have faced “a lot of rejection” throughout their business journey.
“It takes a lot of convincing [that] what people would throw in the bin can be used in a new way,” she said.
However, Aisling notes that as “a young and female entrepreneur, people are really willing to help. There’s great supports in Dublin and all around Ireland.”
In 2024, Bean Around made it to the last six finalists for the Hult Prize, the biggest student-led social entrepreneurship competition in the world.
As the business grows, the sisters hope it will remain as environmentally sustainable as possible. “We’ve grown up in a household that’s very sustainability conscious,” says Aisling. They want to see “how far we can take this business in terms of repurposing this waste”.
Their advice for any young people considering starting a business is to “definitely just give it a go” and “listen to yourself”.
Reflecting on their own experiences as young entrepreneurs, they said: “We know the business – we set it up. We’ve been there since day one. We know what’s right.”
