by Dan Cluderay
Those first six months were incredibly stressful. It is one thing to dream that the business could grow to something, but then when it actually fulfils those wildest dreams it’s great, but you don’t plan for the wildest dreams you plan for what you think might be reality.
Fortunately things settled down but still maintained at a certain level and we were able to build back up to the peaks as time went on. The company we are now outperforms the peaks back then.
It was a huge challenge as everyone measures online performance against the likes of Amazon, you order it one day and expect it the next. Lots of people try to be that big corporate entity whereas we’ve always tried to be friendlier, keep it small and not pretend to be bigger than we are.
We were in a position where people expected things to work in a certain way. That is a real challenge and it was really the software background that helped us out. Handling five or ten orders a day you can do from a bedroom, but when you are talking of hundreds of orders a day it’s quite easy for something to go wrong and upset a lot of people.
You can say you are au fait with ecommerce, but sitting on the other side of the fence is a completely different experience. I can’t think of another business that ships thousands of orders in boxes sent with third party couriers that can be damaged or damage other things. There is a lot of technology that goes into making sure that we can fulfil that.
99% of the products we buy can’t be bought again, they are one-off deals. So you have to make sure you don’t upset anyone and there are lots of challenges that over the years we’ve had to overcome.
This is a completely alien environment than I was working in 12 years ago. I’m still into technology now. I might not be working on telephones anymore but I still enjoy IT and the overall experience has been a good one.
There are many sides to this business. I’m someone that thinks about waste and green issues and that strikes a chord with me. Just making people think about what difference does it make if a can of baked beans goes a week out-of-date if it’s already been sat on that shelf for two years?
Does it really make a difference?
For some people it does. They won’t tolerate food passing its dates, but in all honesty that’s great because we need people like that so the more savvy people can go and buy it cheaper with us because it’s no tolerated in supermarkets.
We fill a niche and a void in the market for people that want value for money.
The people that shop with us aren’t people necessarily struggling to live. They are actually quite affluent people. We’ve got people in Kensington shopping with us. What they really want is real value for money.
They want to be able to get things the might not usually buy. They might not buy a £8 bottle of olive oil, but because we sell it for £1 people are able to try different things.
My cupboards contain lots of products from here that I wouldn’t normally buy.
That’s our edge. We can give value for money on the mid and high end products that people cannot get elsewhere.
