Student gap years: ‘Make money and move on’

If you don’t want to simply rely on savings while travelling, why not set up a business?

If you are one of the thousands of students left without a university place this year or are just sick of living in austerity Britain, gap years have rarely looked so attractive. Only two obstacles might be preventing a sprint to the airport: money, and the worry that escaping abroad is unlikely to boost your job hopes. But use a gap year to launch a business, and you could come back to the UK with a bulging bank account and a stellar CV – and may even be able to continue the entrepreneurial lifestyle full-time.

Warren Bennett, 29, spent a post-uni year in Nepal. He asked local tailors to make a suit, which inspired a business idea that, five years on, is making him rich. “I’ve always loved travelling, so after graduating from Cambridge in summer 2004, I decided to spend two months in Nepal,” says Bennett.

When he took up a voluntary post teaching web design, he ordered a tailor-made olive-green, three-piece woollen suit. “Back in the UK, people began to compliment me on the quality of my suit, including an old school friend, David Hathiramani.

“We felt there was a gap in the market for tailor-made suits at affordable prices and, with our technical backgrounds – I’d trained as an aeronautical engineer, and David did computer science at Imperial College – we thought we were in a position to change that.”

Bennett renewed his contact with the Nepalese tailors and set up a stand at Hampstead market, taking customers’ measurements then sending them over to Nepal. “We sold our first suit within 20 minutes, and quickly realised it was a viable business idea. We then had some very late nights developing the website and putting together a business model.”

Hathiramani kept his job as a computer manager at a London recruitment firm to start with, but now they both work on the business full-time.

A Suit That Fits has a team of 37, with four permanent branches around the UK, and a £2.2m turnover. Bennett employs 110 Nepalese tailors, and, he says: “We pay more than 50% above the local labour rates, and give 5% of the cost of each suit to a local school.”

After Jamie Waller left school at 16 he spent five years working long hours as a bailiff before quitting to spend a year travelling the world. But in Australia, Waller, now 31, struck up a business making camper vans for other tourists, and ended up staying put for a while. “I bought a round-the-world ticket, planning to do all the usual places – Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and Cambodia in my gap year,” says Waller. “I needed time away to think, and I withdrew A$1,000 (£577) on my credit card, planning to work when the money ran out. Once I’d arrived in Australia, I wanted to buy a VW camper van to tour around – like just about every other tourist out there. But after spending three days looking for a decent van, I could only find ones that were a total dump, having been driven around 20 years by other travellers, yet still cost thousands of dollars.”

Waller decided to instead buy a normal van and kit it out. “I bought one for A$300, ripped out the seats, bought appliances and spent two weeks building it. Once it was finished, it cost me A$900, and everyone kept asking where I’d found such a posh camper van. A Greek couple asked how much I’d sell it for. I just said the first amount that came into my head – A$3,000. To my surprise, they agreed to buy it immediately. So I built another, identical, camper van for me. It only took three days that time – but someone asked to buy it again.

“I realised there were loads of couples travelling around Oz, with the guys desperate for a camper van, but their girlfriends refusing to live in a vehicle that had had a group of guys living in it for years smoking weed and getting drunk.”

So Waller started building his converted camper vans one after another. “As quick as I was building them, I was selling them – making A$2,500 a week. I stopped after about four months, because I did want to have some time to relax and see the country. Every time I pulled into a camp site I saw my camper vans everywhere.”

His advice to gappers thinking of starting a business: “Do it, it’s great fun. Countries like the US and Australia are crying out for enterprising people. Work hard, make lots of money, move on.”