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This alludes to it:
As for who Loughran admires in the business world, the first name that comes up is Mike Ashley, the billionaire founder of Sports Direct, which operates more than 500 stores worldwide. Loughran has consciously followed the Sports Direct model: build a business around multiple brands that you own and cut out as many tiers in the supply chain as you can. Loughran also looks up to Grant Petersen, the iconoclastic bike designer who once headed up Bridgestone USA before starting Rivendell Cycles, a small company in northern California making elegant, consciously retro bikes in lugged steel. “I love them because they do their own thing, a hundred per cent what they believe in,” he says.
Loughran’s biggest hero, however, is the entrepreneur Hugh Facey, founder of Gripple, the Sheffield company with 300 employees that makes tiny widgets for joining and tensioning wire. Once described by the Daily Mail as ‘the best boss in Britain’, Facey has put in place a revolutionary employee share ownership system that will eventually mean the company is co-owned by staff and an independent trust set up to safeguard the interests of the workforce. I check in with him a few weeks later to ask whether such a radical idea wasn’t just another flight of fancy. He confirmed he was still committed to the plan, “yes, definitely.”
https://rouleur.cc/journal/bicycles/planet-x-brand-interview-history
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fizzy.bleach
Oh really? I hadn't seen that. My interaction was with a social media employee (or equivalent), and the message was very different.