24 Febuary 2026
We sat down with the Founder and CEO of Manors, Jojo Regan.
There’s a moment every growing brand reaches.
Orders are increasing.
Retail conversations are opening up.
Marketing is starting to convert at scale.
And then the quiet reality sets in:
Growth is expensive.
For Manors, the modern golf apparel brand redefining the aesthetic of the sport, that moment came as momentum accelerated. The brand had traction. It had culture. It had product-market fit.
What it didn’t want was unnecessary dilution.
"Equity is the most expensive capital you’ll ever raise. Early on, it doesn’t feel that way because you’re just grateful someone believes in you. But when you watch peers give away meaningful ownership before the business has really found its footing, you realise how permanent those early decisions are."
- Jojo Regan, CoFounder & Managing Director
The startup ecosystem often defaults to equity. It’s seen as fuel. A badge of credibility. A shortcut to scale.
But equity comes with permanence.
Once it’s gone, it doesn’t come back.
For the Founder of Manors, the question wasn’t whether to raise capital - it was whether every pound of growth needed to be funded by selling ownership.
Inventory doesn’t build brand equity. Marketing tied directly to revenue doesn’t require permanent dilution. Wholesale orders don’t need to live on your cap table forever.
“The key learning curve here is that you have to get your business fundamentals right if you are going to be able to lean into alternative forms of fundraising. Start with the basics, optimise your margins and build a product model that is profitable.. Then you know you are building a model that a loan structure deal could reasonably get behind.”
That distinction became the turning point.
Instead of reaching immediately for another equity round, Manors looked at its capital stack more intentionally.
That’s when they began working with Kikin.
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Kikin wasn’t positioned as a replacement for equity. It wasn’t a stop-gap. It was strategic.
Working capital that flexed with the business.
Funding aligned with production cycles.
Drawdowns that matched revenue velocity.
"Knowing you can be strategic about getting access to funds when you need it, is a huge mental unlock as a founder. The big game changer for me is that as your relationship builds, so can the amount of capital available. So you can feel the scale potential there if you stick to your side of the deal and deliver on time repayments."
The effect wasn’t just financial. It was psychological.
When growth is funded by structured credit rather than dilution, decision-making changes.
There’s clarity.
There’s ownership.
There’s control.
The founder of Manors has always been building for longevity, not hype.
“We never set out to build something to flip. The moment you optimise purely for an exit, you start making short-term decisions that quietly erode culture. We’ve always believed that if you build a brand with real substance and longevity, the outcomes take care of themselves.”
By separating operational funding from strategic equity, Manors preserved optionality:
And perhaps most importantly, growth remained aligned with the brand’s rhythm - not investor timelines.
Today’s founder toolkit is broader than it was five years ago.
Equity remains powerful.
But it’s not the only instrument.
The brands scaling most intelligently are blending:
“Protect optionality for as long as you can. Once you give it up, it’s very hard to get back. Capital, structure, and timing all matter, but clarity on what you’re building and how you build it matters more than any round you raise.”
Manors didn’t choose debt over equity.
They chose both - intentionally.
Q: Tell us how MANORS came about and what you wanted it to become?
MANORS started from a frustration with how golf was being presented and who we felt like it was for. My co-founder, Luke Davies, and I loved the game, but culturally it felt closed, conservative, and stuck, even though the people playing it were changing fast.
Our focus was to build a brand that treated golf with curiosity, creativity, and respect for its past, while still pushing it forward. The ambition was always to build a modern golf brand that could sit comfortably in fashion, sport, travel, and storytelling, not one that lived purely on the fairway.
Q: What has been your greatest success and greatest challenge?
Our greatest success has been building genuine brand momentum without shortcutting the process. Seeing MANORS grow into a globally recognised name in golf culture, with customers, partners, and athletes who genuinely believe in what we’re building, has been incredibly rewarding.
Our greatest challenge has been learning how to scale without losing control. In the early days, everything is instinctive and hands-on. As the business grows, decisions compound faster, mistakes get more expensive, and you’re constantly balancing creativity with operational discipline. Learning when to slow down, lock things, and introduce structure has been one of the hardest but most important lessons.
Q: What’s the biggest misconception founders have about growth capital?
That more capital automatically equals less risk.
In reality, capital changes the risk profile, it doesn’t remove it. Equity capital especially comes with long-term consequences that aren’t always obvious in the moment. It can buy speed, but it can also force decisions before the business is ready. The misconception is thinking funding solves problems, when often it just amplifies whatever foundations you already have.
Q: When did you realise dilution compounds faster than most people expect?
Honestly, it’s when you start modelling forward properly.
Early dilution feels manageable because the numbers are small and the focus is survival. But once you stack multiple rounds, option pools, secondaries, and future raises, you realise how quickly ownership erodes. Watching peers give away meaningful chunks of their companies early, then struggle for leverage later, really crystallised it for me. Dilution isn’t linear, it compounds quietly and relentlessly.
Q: What difference did structured credit make to your negotiating power?
It was transformative.
Having access to structured credit meant we weren’t raising equity out of necessity. It gave us time, optionality, and leverage. Instead of taking capital to plug holes, we could choose when and why we raised. That fundamentally changes the conversation with investors. You move from asking for permission to building partnerships on your own terms.
Q: What advice would you give a founder about to raise their next round?
Be brutally clear on why you’re raising and what problem the capital is solving. If the answer is “to buy time” or “because everyone else is raising,” pause.
Protect optionality wherever you can. Understand how today’s decisions affect your cap table three or four moves ahead, not just this round. And remember that momentum, profitability, and control often create more value than speed alone. Capital is a tool, not a milestone, and the best founders learn when not to use it.
At Kikin, we work with founders who see capital as architecture - not just fuel.
Because how you fund growth shapes what you keep.
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