Facewatch – My start-up adventure Simon Gordon StB’74

Facewatch – My start-up adventure

Simon Gordon

It was 2009 and I was running Gordon’s wine bar for my mother as my ‘retirement’ job. Everything was running smoothly but one thing really niggled me – we seemed to attract lots of pickpockets and it was upsetting for our customers and our staff. The Police simply didn’t have the resources to follow up on the thefts which made things even more frustrating.

What I had learned from hours reviewing CCTV over the years was that nearly all the thefts were carried out by just a handful of people and if I could stop them the theft would reduce dramatically. So, I decided to do something about it and started Facewatch in March 2010.

With a couple of friends we built a system for uploading crime reports with video clips and images that could be shared with police and local businesses. Amazingly, after just 9 months, we were working with the Met police who accepted crime reports through our system.

In my naivety I thought this would just take off after that. However, creating a business in such a legally complex area was not that simple – we had to build in all sorts of processes to satisfy the Police and Crown Prosecution Service, we had to meet the ICO (the UK data protection regulator) regularly and it started to get very expensive. At the same time I was trying to get the system to work using facial recognition, but the technology wasn’t advanced enough. I got sucked in deeper and deeper both in time and money, working 7 days a week and risking everything I’d saved over the previous 40 years, including my house.

Then in 2016 our luck changed. I met Nick Fisher who had been COO looking after 450 mobile phone stores and had extensive retail experience. Nick agreed to become our CEO because he saw the massive potential. His brilliance was to quickly identify the barriers to selling the product and remove every one of them by designing a new version of Facewatch. This all coincided perfectly with GDPR becoming law in 2018 and at the same time facial recognition systems improved 30 fold with the advent of machine learning.

Nick also focused the product on retailers who are “sitting on a burning platform” because of theft. Did you know that the big supermarkets are losing half their profits to store theft (and it is not insurable)?

So, we closed the old system and launched the new Facewatch system in 2018. Things were looking good - and then came the pandemic!

We had to totally change the facial recognition algorithms to identify people even when wearing facemasks. As if that wasn’t enough there was negative press about the police use of facial recognition which, combined with potential fines under GDPR, made businesses initially nervous about using it. We knew we were fully GDPR compliant as data controllers and had to educate the market to give them confidence.

There was also a huge increase in retail crime and violence against staff arising from the pandemic. In the darkest days of the lock-down theft from and violence towards those stores and workers trying to keep local people fed showed an enormous increase and this reflects a trend that has been building for many years.

Retailers across the UK are now using Facewatch and they absolutely love it. Their customers are happy to see the store better protected and staff feel safer because the crime levels typically drop by at least 25% within the first 90 days of installing Facewatch.

For me personally it is fantastic that the fundamental mission I set out on 11 years ago, to prevent crime in businesses, is at last coming to fruition.

If you would like to find out more or can help us through introductions it would be great. Please visit our website at www.facewatch.co.uk or email me personally at simon@facewatch.co.uk

Simon Gordon StB’74

Facewatch is the only UK business providing a fully GDPR compliant facial recognition crime deterrent solution to the retail sector in the UK. The company uses state of the art world leading algorithms to provide an affordable instore solution using cloud technology to manage and share data of subjects of interest with Facewatch acting as data controller. Our facial recognition technology sends you instant alerts when subjects of interest enter your business premises. Facewatch is proven to stop crime before it happens – we can reduce your crime by 25% in just 90 days.