Inventor gains £75k investment from Dragons' Den

Diane Challender appeared on Dragons' Den and gained the backing of Sara Davies

An inventor from Grimsby is celebrating after gaining backing for her business on Dragons' Den.

Diane Challender secured £75,000 investment from Sara Davies in her interiors company.

Zebedee Any Angle was set up in 2017 and makes clothes-hanging rails for sloped ceilings.

Ms Challender says she is "over the moon" to receive the money and hopes it will support her plan for global growth.

She appeared on the show on Thursday, 7 March and entered with the intention of attracting the attention of Ms Davies.

The "dragon" was happy to back the invention and gave her the money for a 40% share in the business.

Ms Challender told BBC Humberside’s Carla Green where the idea for the business came from. “I moved into a semi-dormer bungalow in Laceby and my bedroom is quite narrow and has four sloping ceilings," she said.

“I tried various things but I thought I just need some sloping clothes rails but I couldn’t find any, so I decided to design my own never knowing it would lead to all this.”

'Creative thinking'

Ms Challender says she has been working with Ms Davies and her team and has taken on a lot of the advice. She is hopeful that it won’t be too long before all the paperwork is signed and the new partnership can officially start.

One bit of advice was to move the manufacturing away from Grimsby but she is confident they will still have a presence in the town.

Ms Challender added: “I would like to stay as local as I can for the UK [operation]. I had already been thinking that when we do the American market, we couldn’t do it from here because the numbers wouldn’t be practical.

“Even if we get some of the components made abroad, we should still be able to keep this here for the other bits.”

Ms Davies says she decided to invest because she liked how Ms Challender “combined creative thinking with engineering to create a simple answer to a seemingly complicated issue”.

You can watch Ms Challender face the Dragons on BBC iPlayer.

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