Micro-Businesses are beautiful

They don't have a website and they are not on Twitter. Moveable Feasts are more like word-of-mouth guerrilla dinner parties, and presenter and cook Andrea Oliver and art director Sandra Kane rapidly sold out tickets for their first feast at the weekend and are planning the next.

"Sandra and I have worked in big teams but we wanted something that was just the two of us," says Andrea. "We don't go out to bars, we have dinner parties, so we thought we'd get a few interesting people to come along too. We want to keep it small and personal. We're giving people what we want ourselves. That's the secret."

Big is bland and impersonal — that's the message behind this small movement. The 21st-century business landscape is changing, and micro-businesses are seen as the way out of the recession. "They are a growth industry," says Hilary Farnworth, director of the Centre for Micro-Enterprise at London Metropolitan University. "They are easy to set up and have low overheads. It's a new philosophy of work that means you can do what you want to do. People who have been made redundant can find passionate employment in this way."

Elaine Foster-Gandey works from a farm outbuilding in East Sussex running Designer Sales UK, a sample sale that brings designer bargains to Brick Lane four times a year. "One of the main reasons I can keep making changes to my company is because I'm a micro-business. Recently, I've made sales more personal by inviting my customers to be models in our Real People catwalk shows."

Human in scale, non-corporate in outlook, run from home, a shed or a small business location — these are all integral parts of being a micro-business. Sarah Bagner runs a web shop called Supermarket Sarah from her living room and has a pop-up wall at Selfridges of her one-off objects, plus new and vintage clothes. She often serves tea and cakes to customers. "My pieces are one-offs, so I like to treat my customers in the same way. I often attach personal stories to the items so that buyers get more involved. It's a very intimate business."

An individualistic men's clothes shop in Shoreditch, A Child of the Jago, the creation of Joe Corre and his old friend Simon "Barnzley" Armitage, epitomises "the making of clothes we would want to buy" approach. "Men's clothes are still so boring out there," says Armitage, "we're doing something much more exciting. We use end-of-the line fabrics and get them made up locally into limited edition pieces." The son of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Corre sold his international Agent Provocateur lingerie label to go small. "He's loving it," says Armitage, "here we do exactly what we want."

Micro-business entrepreneurs realise that it's not all about bottom lines and profit margins but there is a practical element to them. Isobel Beauchamp and Elinor Olisa who run DegreeArt.com — they sell art graduates' work — acknowledge that their business has survived precisely because they have been pragmatic and small.

"Other people had the same idea as us but they bought expensive offices in central London full of Italian leather chairs. We had Ikea chairs, a laptop and a live/work building. We have survived and they haven't."

If you would like to stay in a funkily opulent, urban setting where there are only two bedrooms, just visit micro-boutique hotel 40 Winks in east London. "We're not trying to be a conventional hotel," says interior designer David Carter, "it's my house. I live here and I love people to share it with me. My motivation is to create something inspiring and warm."

Which really sums up what it is to be a micro-business.