Louise Truman, the London-based founder of Plotpackers, is the final business to pitch on tonight’s episode of Dragons’ Den.
Louise recounted to BusinessCloud this week how a terrifying experience inspired her to build the £2 million business: then aged 21, she was sexually assaulted on a solo backpacking trip and considers herself lucky to have survived it.
In 2023, aged 23, she started Plotpackers with one goal: to build what she wished had existed for her as a young woman travelling the world solo.
“I launched Plotpackers while backpacking out of hostels. Now I run the business from a London office with a team. That transition has been a baptism of fire, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes I’ve had to learn from fast,” she told us.
“Even now, going on Dragons’ Den, scaling the business intentionally, and building proprietary technology to support that growth, I still can’t say I’m particularly excited about the numbers.
“It’s the people. It’s the purpose. It’s the drive to make things a little bit safer for women. Which is really the whole thing in a sentence: what happens when a raging feminist launches a business?
“For me, that purpose extends beyond the trips themselves into the local economic opportunities we’ve been able to create around the world, and the fact that we’re able to build genuinely better opportunities for women in places where they don’t naturally exist.”
Plotpackers organises group trips around the world, with more than 25 destinations on offer.
Her pitch follows Cicely Coops, founder of Selkie; John Gray and Sean Robinson, founders of retro sweet shop Mr Swainstons; and Shashi and Sanjay Aggarwal, founders of Spice Kitchen.
Series 23 of Dragons’ Den returned to our screens tonight after the summer break.
Episode 8 sees the return of guest judges Susie Ma and Jenna Meek – the commerce queens who made their debuts earlier in the series – alongside regular Dragons Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden and Steven Bartlett.
With female Dragons outnumbering the males for the first time, it signals a power shift in the Den… this series will be the last one featuring Touker Suleyman, who announced earlier this year that he would be leaving the show after more than a decade in the Den.