IELTS Listening Test Questions

I’m very pleased to welcome our guest speaker this evening, Maggie Johnson. She is the CEO of Bathroom Bunnies, a company that only entered the market several years ago but is already achieving revenues of over 50 million pounds and (Q1)made 4 million pounds in net profit last year. For those of you who haven’t heard of Bathroom Bunnies, they make bathroom products with a special focus on young female consumers. (Q2)If you have an adolescent daughter, you’ve probably heard of them. She’s going to tell us about how she set up the business and some of the challenges she faced in the early years. Over to you Maggie.

Thank-you. Well, our first products hit the shop shelves in 2016, after 2 very busy, and sometimes challenging years of work on getting the product line ready. I first got the idea for bathroom bunnies in 2012, (Q3)but it wasn’t until 2014 that I gave up my job, set up the company and could focus all my efforts on the project.

The idea for the brand first came to me while I was arguing with my daughter over how long she was spending in the bathroom. It seems like my daughter’s favourite pastime is locking herself in the bathroom for hours on end. (Q4)I realised that I was spending a small fortune on bathroom products for her and it got me wondering if there was a niche in the bath and shower products market for shower gels and bubble baths marketed exclusively towards teenage girls.

The next two years were a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I didn’t have a huge amount of savings, and while my husband was still working, (Q5)I’d given up my job as a senior sales manager in order to focus on the start-up. We had already paid off our mortgage, but even so, we could only survive so long on one income, so we were under considerable financial pressure. (Q6)Fortunately, early on, I was able to get a loan from the government’s New Enterprise Investment Scheme, and with that money, I could begin working seriously on perfecting the ingredients for the product line-up, getting the necessary health and safety assessments done, and looking for a factory that could cheaply and efficiently manufacture the products.

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Selecting the factory turned into a bit of a saga. The first factory we teamed up with couldn’t overcome some issues with the products. Although they claimed to be using the ingredients exactly as indicated and accurately following the specifications I’d given them, (Q7)the end results did not perfectly match the samples I’d had made. Each time the fragrances weren’t quite right. One of the things that sets Bathroom Bunnies products apart from our competitors, is our unusual line-up of fragrances, so this was really important to us.(Q8)I then tried a second factory, but they proved themselves unreliable after failing to meet various production deadlines we’d established, and so I had to continue looking.(Q9)The third factory I tried cancelled our order unexpectedly. I can’t be sure but I think our order was on the small side for them and they’d received more attractive business from elsewhere.

Eventually, I was recommended to try a fourth factory and thankfully this one proved itself to be more reliable. At first, I was a little worried about them too, as (Q10)they were slow to respond to emails and messages, but they completed the order on time and everything was exactly as I had requested. That’s why we went with them, and they continue to be our partner today, and have even expanded their operations significantly to meet our growing sales.