Our History

We've endured Type One Diabetes for over 25 years, but Type One Style is pretty new. Check out our brief history below:

Events of 2021:

March - Emma's Dexcom G6 is ripped out by her Duvet in the middle of the night, and we discover patches as a solution.

April - Type One Style is officially incorporated in the UK. We set forth to encourage people to wear their devices loud and proud and to provide the quality products they deserve (we weren't too impressed with what we found at this time). We upend our spare room and turn it into Type One Style HQ. 

May - Thanks to a British Army scheme, we get a small business loan. We launch our little Instagram and Facebook pages and make our first sale!

June - We meet the wonderful Marnie Lee-Davies, and she joins the team to help us spread our message of positivity.

July - It looks like we're onto something! Things are picking up, and we can't keep up! 

August - As you do, we get a 150kg printer and stick it in the conservatory. We're now operating two production facilities - the spare room and the conservatory. Quite cold out there, though.

September - We launched our first free sticker promotion and broke the internet. We didn't get much sleep this month.

October - Our Halloween collection comes out and is wildly successful! Not much sleep here either! 

November - We've outgrown our two-room operation and moved into a larger office at a huge business park in Kent. It comes with free heating, which sealed the deal.

December - Christmas is great, but we had a massive slump in revenue here. Things went south, and we had to make redundancies. This was a dark time, no matter how well the "Festive Fun" patch went on to do.

 

What of 2022?

January - We're stripped back now. Charlie fortifies his resolve and starts working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, in a bid to "win at all costs." We aren't prepared to let down the thousands of people that rely on our patches.

February - Amongst the grueling work patterns, Charlie finds out that Russia's invaded Ukraine. He puts out an Instagram post to help get aid to those T1Ds in Ukraine that will inevitably be forgotten, and it goes viral globally.

March was, and probably will remain, the most brutal month of Charlie's life. In three weeks, we set up an international aid operation with as many as 40 on-site volunteers, packing what would amount to nearly £3,000,000 of diabetes equipment sent in from across the United States and the UK. 

We received heavy equipment donations from NHS bodies and sent over 20 lorries out to Ukraine. Globally, we were one of, if not the first, organization to get medical aid into Kharkiv and Eastern Cities when the press claimed this to be impossible. Our network of volunteers, the power of social media, and the resilience of the Ukrainian rail network made this possible. 

A group of incredible members of the type one diabetes community supported us digitally, handling as many as 1000 inbound inquiries to donate aid every day. This was truly a community effort.

April - Our aid operation is ongoing, and Type One Style is "on pause." We've had multiple interviews with the BBC and ITV, been featured in the Daily Mail, and collaborated with the New York Times on numerous stories, even getting a mention in one of the publications. The live interviews Charlie sat in on will stay with him forever. 

We nearly lost Type One Style at this point because it was so thoroughly neglected to support those in Ukraine. The hardest part of April was a four-day stint in our hangar in Manston Airport, where Charlie worked 4x 20-21 hour days in a row. He's eternally grateful for the volunteers that brought him breakfast and lunch of their own will and kept him going.

May - Things have blown up so much it's hard to remember what Type One Style was before. We start looking for new premises. Our aid operation continues, and its activity levels track alongside public sentiment.

June - Finally! We move out of our small office into a large self-contained industrial unit with plenty of room. This comes just in time, as we receive a massive donation of over 20 pallets from a large company and have to use the car park to store it for a day.

We had a lot of support from our forklift-owning neighbors, which is much appreciated. That, and a number of our volunteers followed us over to Manston and continued to help us.

August - Type One Style is back in full swing, and we're having a record month. We're quite famous now, and it's helped us stabilize and continue pushing for our various goals.

September - From September, things change. They change fast, and they change a lot! At the time of writing, it's the 19th of January, and we'll be back to update you in a couple of months. Riveting stuff!

We appreciate all of our wonderful customers and are always here for you. Thank you for your continued support, and if you would like to donate supplies to Ukraine or funds for logistics, please let us know; we're still sending diabetes supplies out there, and we won't stop.