Accountant turns sketches of her dachshund into £5m in sales

An accountant who began drawing her dachshund on an iPad during the Covid pandemic has turned the sketches into a personalised clothing business with more than £5 million in cumulative sales.

Lucy Bowes, 29, from Cambridge, started Lucy&Lola with a £1,000 embroidery machine bought with a loan. The company now employs 30 people, turns over £2 million a year and has seen sales rise by 300% following her appearance on Dragons’ Den in September.

Bowes received offers from all five dragons, having built a business that began with her desire to wear a sweatshirt featuring her dog.

“It’s crazy that something that just started off as a hobby has spiralled into this,” she said.

“It still feels so surreal when I see all of my staff working on the machines.”

Bowes adopted Lola, now seven, in November 2019. During the pandemic, she began drawing her on an iPad bought through Facebook Marketplace. As her sketches improved, she used an online printing company to put one onto a sweatshirt.

“There was no business plan at this point”, she said.

“I was just obsessed with Lola and wanted to wear something with her on it”.

Thinking the designs would look better embroidered, Bowes borrowed money to buy her first machine in September 2021, despite not knowing how to use it. She and her husband Andy, 34, learnt through YouTube, Google and trial and error.

“I thought it would be really easy to use, but it’s not that easy at all”, she said.

The couple listed their first sweatshirt on Etsy with little expectation of a sale. It sold within hours, by the following day, for £45.

They began taking bespoke orders, embroidering customers’ pets onto sweatshirts in their front room. Then, in December 2021, they woke to hundreds of orders after their work appeared in a CNN article recommending Christmas gifts for wives. They had not known they would be featured.

The business made £50,000 in sales that Christmas, prompting the couple to buy another machine.

“We’d come home from work and be up all night sewing”, Bowes said.

Andy left his marketing job in January 2022 to work on the business full time. The couple lived on Lucy’s salary, reinvesting the proceeds from sweatshirt sales. A month later, they moved production into a small studio costing £400 a month.

When Lucy was offered voluntary redundancy from her accountancy job in May 2022, she took the opportunity to join the business full time.

“The redundancy felt like a sign that this was something that could work”, she said.

“I felt relieved that I would no longer have to do both at the same time”.

Lucy&Lola has since moved into a large studio in Cambridge. Its designs have found celebrity admirers including Claire Balding and Jade Thirlwall.

Bowes said she initially turned down an approach from Dragons’ Den in 2025 because the timing was wrong. When another opportunity came, she felt the company was ready for the exposure.

“This time, they got me at a good time, as I felt the business was ready for that level of exposure.”

Following her September appearance, the company received four times its usual daily number of orders. Sales are now up by 300%, leaving the team working to meet demand for products made to order.

“We’ve been crazy busy; we’ve just been trying to keep up, as everything is made to order”, she said.

Bowes hopes to keep expanding and would like her products stocked by retailers such as John Lewis and Selfridges. Her advice to others considering a business built around a hobby is to try it rather than assume there will be no demand.

“I would say to anyone who is thinking of turning their hobby into a business, put yourself out there, as you never know what is going to happen.

“You’ve got to grab it with both hands”.