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Most founders talk about values. Simon Biltcliffe built them into systems.
In Part One of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Simon Biltcliffe, founder of Webmart, one of the most unconventional and quietly radical businesses in Britain.
Simon grew up in Staincross outside Barnsley, shaped by community, the miners’ strike, and the hard lessons of deindustrialisation. He was thrown out of university twice, rode his motorbike south with no plan and no money, and stumbled into a job running a million-pound hologram machine in Corby. From there he discovered sales, built a team, and then had the kind of week that breaks people. A company collapsed, a mortgage tripled, and interest rates jumped to 15 per cent.
Then came the moment that changed everything.
A trip to Japan in 1993 where Simon saw what the world would later call a Kindle. He came home convinced print would be disrupted. His bosses told him to stick with the knitting. So he built it himself.
This episode follows the birth of Webmart and the culture decisions that made it famous. Open salaries. Radical transparency. One version of the truth. A profit-sharing model that hands the upside to employees. Simon calls it Marxist capitalism. Not politics, but a deliberate rejection of extractive business.
Part One ends as the story turns. Barnsley to Bicester and back again. The two Bs. And the question of why a man who built a successful company in the South came home to Yorkshire with a bigger mission.
Part Two is coming.
If you want a founder story with grit, humour, and a serious challenge to how British business is run, start here.
