Andrew Steel is the eCommerce Director at Charles Bentley. Founded 160 years ago as manufacturer of chimney sweeping brushes, they now balance selling brushes and cleaning products via wholesale and dropshipping to some of the UK’s largest retailers and running their own home and garden eCommerce store. Annual Sales are now at around £30million across the group.
In this episode, Andrew shares the hard-won lessons behind managing 20+ sales channels, mastering stock control, and scaling a heritage brand in today’s competitive eCommerce landscape.
How Charles Bentley sells on 20+ channels (without going crazy) The clever stock-splitting system that prevents overselling nightmares Why cutting SKUs from 1,300 to 600 actually boosted growth How Andrew uses data, weather trends & search terms to forecast sales The truth about price scraping & keeping prices consistent across marketplaces Why fractional experts can be your secret weapon for eCommerce scaling Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[03:57] Optimizing Retail Channels for Growth
[07:44] Stock Management and Channel Optimization
[12:08] Challenges in Retail Price Control
[16:00] Evolving Expertise Through Technology Partnership
[16:57] Longstanding Trusted Business Partnership
[23:16] eCommerce Challenges and Recovery
[24:54] Expanding Charles Bentley’s European Market
[25:35] Listen to Andrew’s Top Tips!
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[SPEAKER_00]: I always had a bit of a vision that customers and shoppers would go to their preferred channel to buy a product and some retail buy ones told me that the brand is something you can buy everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess for us at Charles Bennett it was around how do we leverage the types of products that we’ve got and try and offer customers a choice to wear to buy them predominantly online in some of the products that potentially don’t work for us in store.
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cutting through the highly to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome.
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s great to have you here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now regular listeners will know that me and the team get a lot of joy and fun when you guys talk about us on social or leave us reviews.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I’ve got one of those to give a shout out to in this episode before we get started.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I read a russ of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hope I pronounced that right.
[SPEAKER_02]: who is works at Luxon 10 and she puts up on LinkedIn.
[SPEAKER_02]: This comment about our episode, episode 553 with John Mark Cronic of Lamatera, loved this episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: The insights into thoughtfully scaling a company building supply chains and being cognizant of your brand roots resonated particularly with me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we glad we resonated with you, Irina, and have a lovely day.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, in this episode, we are catching up with one of our past guests.
[SPEAKER_02]: We last caught up with Andrew in 2020 when he was dealing with the huge growth in sales caused by the pandemic, while he’s back and this time talking about all manner of different things.
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ll be talking about how you handle selling across over 20 different channels, balancing both buying in stock and managing manufacturing your own stock.
[SPEAKER_02]: We’ll be talking a bit about price scraping, we’ll be talking about what to outsource and he’ll be sharing his tips on expanding into Europe.
[SPEAKER_02]: Loads coming up in this one, plus of course his top tips are excellent, so do listen to the end.
[SPEAKER_02]: and now to introduce our special guest.
[SPEAKER_02]: Andrew Steele is the e-commerce director at Charles Bentley.
[SPEAKER_02]: Founded 160 years ago as a manufacturer of chimney sweeping brushes, they now balance selling brushes and cleaning products by a wholesale and drop shipping to some of the UK’s largest retailers together with running their own home and garden e-commerce store.
[SPEAKER_02]: And your sales are now around 30 million pounds across the group, hello Andrew.
[SPEAKER_02]: great to have you back on overdue, which I think is my fault and not your, definitely my fault and not yours.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how have you been?
[SPEAKER_00]: How have we been good, spin, busy?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we obviously last talked, we talked on a podcast in 2020, and I think I told you about our expanding brushes and breams business online with some crazy staffs about being thousands of percent up selling brushes and breams online, because stores were shut, the infancy of the pandemic.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, but anyway, and then we saw each other didn’t we last, or was April at Channel X, I think,
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it was a, yeah, it was a channel X, which was a fantastic event.
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, so things have obviously moved on quite a bit since then.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I believe you are now selling on, is it 20 different channels you’re managing?
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So on site, dropshipping, a plethora of marketplaces, wholesale.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, how do you keep all of that in check?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because everyone adds another layer of complexity, doesn’t it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it’s probably got harder and it’s a great question and it’s a question that we do ask ourselves, you know, a little bit from time to time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I always had a bit of a vision that customers and shoppers would go to their preferred channel to buy a product and some retail buy ones told me that, well, I asked him, you know, what do you constitute or brand and he said a brand is something you can buy everywhere?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess for us, which I was bending it was around, how do we leverage the types of products that we’ve got and try and offer customers
[SPEAKER_00]: predominately online in some of the products that protect potentially don’t work for us in store So that was a reason I guess that you know, we started selling on Amazon and eBay and you know Those infancy channels all those years ago Kind of 20 years ago, and then we built built the business onwards from then and The things change you know, we’ve we’ve we’ve backed other Retailers or retail brands that are coming to the market and we
[SPEAKER_00]: hopefully you’ve done a really good job with them and built technology to support the complexities of all this aggregation and how you get days from age to be and and all does and shipping and tracking and look after customers and shoppers and so it’s maybe on a bit below I was saying maybe it’s easy then I didn’t do anything but it’s certainly a difficult one if you were going to start again I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s like to add, what’s your up to 20 to add one more is not too much complexity, because like you say you’ve already got the systems and the processes in place to do 20, so adding more and more is not that much more difficult, but I would imagine the jump from two to three and from three to four and four to five is a lot harder.
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s been the thing that, I wanna kinda say what’s the most difficult thing about managing 20?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it the data that goes on to the platforms?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it the orders that come off the customer service,
[SPEAKER_02]: the money, what’s the hardest thing to get right?
[SPEAKER_00]: When we first started on eBay, you wrote a listing, didn’t you create some content, and then we decided to sell on Amazon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that point, we said we would need some sort of aggregation, because we didn’t want to have to copy and paste stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we went to an aggregation partner, and they weren’t really that many back at that time, it was only a couple.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we, you know, we slept one that we thought would be right to scale.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that did make life easier.
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the years, you know, we used that that part and we saw use that part on us today.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they helped us with European selling, and then they took more aggregation, more channels on, etc, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: The theme probably becomes slightly more difficult.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as it loads of those now, you know, they will do things in a slightly different way and some better and some worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that probably is the hardest but is when you’ve got other, you know, if you’ve got a a web store or shop for our magenta, whatever, and your drop shipping, you still got to have data somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you can use the data within the aggregator, but then you have to deal with the orders, but maybe with the orders aren’t within the aggregator.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we ended up having to build a bridge, and that was probably the harder thing for us to do, because there wasn’t any technology at the time that would do that, so we had to build our own.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, if you build your own technology, then you can help it ball game of other complexities and which is a brush manufacturing, we sell some card and stuff right, so we’re not a tech company.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, we had to become more tech-focused and tech-minded to understand how we were going to serve as a scalable solution to look after customers regardless of the channel that they came to us through.
[SPEAKER_02]: because it’s easy to get hung up on getting the information onto the plenoid, the product information, the graphics, et cetera, onto the other platforms.
[SPEAKER_02]: But actually, the more critical stuff is the stock, the pricing, and then the orders coming out on the other side.
[SPEAKER_02]: And once you’ve got 20, it must be really hard, making sure you don’t go out, not that you don’t go out of stock anyway, but I suppose that you don’t sell stock, you don’t have anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s easier than you think, because within the study for us, within the bridge that we’ve built, it takes a proportion of stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we’ll say, I’ve got 100 gas barbecues in this skew.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it gave us, you know, the third of it here and the third of it here and the third of it here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s, you know, that’s algorithmically updated, depending on the stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes you can come out stuck if, you know, some of our partners, they don’t, they don’t, they don’t have to stop re-quick enough, or it might be a bit manual, and you can, you can sometimes see an oversell, but it’s very rare because, you know, we’ve built enough of the buffers that you don’t really get back to that position.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we, we, we, we cope with it better than you think.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, I think the more challenging thing we’re probably starting to see now is each channel is becoming really good with this data.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, Amazon with the pioneers of data and what you could do with data and how you manipulate it and what you can see within
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of a sudden, the change is now for businesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got a few channels to sell on is what would you do with the data?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you’ve got to do something with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You’ve got one of the days you just, you just list something, can it sell or you maybe stick an ad on it or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got to get a bit more intuitive as brands and businesses to, what data is hell yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: you sell everything everywhere or are you also not just making decisions about how you split what stock you’ve got across the channels but also what actually gets sold on every channel because how actually before you’ve announced that how many skews are you handling?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I’m guessing it’s you know it’s more than 100%
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s about 600, free pandemic.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was probably a lot more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we came to the conclusion that we had maybe taken our range slightly too wide.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it was 12 or 1300.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, in reality, when you’re trying to, you’ve got to be laser-focused on the thing that you want to really succeed in, which is why we’re bristing someone brush away manufacture because we’ve spent under the 65 to five years being
[SPEAKER_00]: learning about making rooms and and distributing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there’s some things that you know, we’ve become a really quiet expert in now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have to forge for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So 600 skews, you know, it’s not huge amounts, but we’re, you know, we’re confident in the skews that we’ve taken forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they are, say, the hard to manage, but it’s, it’s the, you know, the day to day upkeep of them in an ever-changing world, I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: And do you sell everything everywhere?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, I guess the reason we don’t is because some people don’t want necessary to list certain products.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s more a case of the marketplaces, not being the right place to do it rather than a weed weed will sell our top 10% everywhere in the rest will shuffle around.
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be some of the chances we work with now.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot more curated or they just don’t want everything and I think there are some products as well that we don’t necessarily see fitting in some areas.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we have to be slightly selective in some areas about what we do with them all.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then sometimes you don’t always know, and it’s a hard sort of conundrum that sometimes we all face, you know, everything everywhere, you get more visibility, potentially traffic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes you don’t quite know where something might sell, you know, we had a particular success over the pandemic, we were one particularly retail and there were a result that you wouldn’t necessarily see high ticket items on, and yet they had less, I suppose, competition at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s only a Google feed and people are comfortable with the bike because they
[SPEAKER_00]: and all of a sudden, you’re seeing pretty good, pretty good sales, say sometimes why should we limit people here in a way?
[SPEAKER_00]: Say, but I think there’s more of that coming, more is more alignment for certain products, to certain channels.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess so it’s kind of you make your best guess with the other channel of what should be on there, but then you’re also watching the data for the surprises of what works where
[SPEAKER_00]: exactly, exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the things you can’t get away with when you start sending a multiple channels is price.
[SPEAKER_02]: And should the price be the same everywhere?
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you price match?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it seems like one of the elements of AI that’s really taken off an e-commerce is good old price scraping, which
[SPEAKER_02]: used to be, you know, it was a little bit complicated to set it up so not everyone bothered.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now it takes about 30 seconds to set it up and everyone’s become obsessed.
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s your your take on that nutty nightman little area of the business?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if I took 30 seconds, it was really easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were definitely using more, but I think for what I’ve seen, it’s not quite as simple as that, but you’re right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s become really quite difficult over the last certainly two years to control it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we’ve probably got in the better position this year with the consistency because, you know, it does alienation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It shoppers to some extent if it’s so far out.
[SPEAKER_00]: and every retailer obviously has a slightly different margin expectation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the price we’ve been told does some of us every one today, you know, and I hadn’t seen this one before, and maybe this one is the one that’s more competitively priced than the others, but it’s, you know, it’ll keep everyone on their toes, and I gather as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can have some automation of price matching in Google now, which
[SPEAKER_00]: for friends with me to death because you know you’ve got to make sure you’ve set it up right in the first place before it just goes and matches matches matches matches something so we have to be a bit bit careful but I think yeah we’re fairly aligned across the market you know across child spending products so it’s but it is hard when you’ve got many channels for sure
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it price-graping for knee-jerk reactions to things, like Monday morning?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, no, they’ve changed their price.
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to do something.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or do you see it more as competitive research and double-checking the strategy?
[SPEAKER_02]: So it’s a more thought-through element than that’s changed.
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to do something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it for us it’s probably more just having a bit of an understanding that we want customers both to buy a product from their preferred channel, whether they want to get points or subscriptions or cashbacks or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it’s probably…
[SPEAKER_00]: We don’t look at it all the time, I don’t get obsessed by it, I don’t look at it every five minutes, thinking someone’s listing a judgment, you put that to one price and someone else’s another price.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s more of a guy to understand maybe what’s going on within the dynamics of what’s happening within the retail channel.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now you’ve got, I think it’s about 130, 150 people working across the business.
[SPEAKER_02]: Does that mean you’re doing everything in-house or have you got some stuff you’re outsourcing as well?
[SPEAKER_02]: What’s your approach to that?
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s a good question.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got two size of the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got our manufacturing side, which is popping around.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the two-thirds of the business at the moment, and that’s manufacturing in Lafborough, we sell about 2,000 breams, so 2,000 breams.
[SPEAKER_00]: 2,000 breams is out, it’s about 2 million breams a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: and we’re looking to expand that operation as well so we have people within that side of our business and within the e-commerce business we’ve got we’ve got quite a few experts that we rely on I think it’s quite hard to you don’t need to move the time they’re going to fractional you know direct to level people that can come and support us in various different functions whether it’s forecasts and trading
[SPEAKER_00]: or it’s market place, aggregation management.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I could get all the skills in the business, it’s obviously quite expensive to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually to scale, maybe in the time, we may need more, but actually it works really quite well for us at the moment, having touch points within the business with the right office-based people to work and support the aggregation partners that we’ve worked with.
[SPEAKER_00]: How many of those are a number of years to support the business?
[SPEAKER_02]: freelance help or consultant help for this sort of business being at the lower level, you know, like we have so many comes in every couple of weeks and they sort out all our product copy or they do all the photography.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I like your approach of, you know, the direct level insight, we’ve got our Amazon specialists, we’ve got our aggregation specialists, we’ve got our cash-ray forecasting, you know, stock forecasting specialists, how long did it
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of time I think it is and it’s not and it’s still not it’s something that always improves I think because technology changes isn’t that you have to go and find the next expert in something and can you know so taking a long time but I think the aggregation part we know we went to the aggregation part in a back in.
[SPEAKER_00]: 2009 I think it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: So quite a long time ago now and they were in X employee, you know, a launch manager within the channel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they had a really deep understanding of not only the channel but the complexities around migrating data around the internet and that particular person had left the business and we were on a quite expensive managed service at the time because we didn’t have the expertise in house and, you know, it got really expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: and I didn’t really feel like I was getting enough value for money from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I knew this guy had left and linked him as a becomeer of things, so I sent him a link to message.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just so I’ll do a little bit of mood license for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ll give you some money every month, you know, sort of half joking.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they came back and they said, oh yeah, we just we’ve got the same idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so we were there first client.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that relationship is being quite long ever since because we’ve kind of grown up in our businesses together and we use them as sort of, you know, sounding boards for everything that’s going on and you know, it’s a fairly trusted partnership in certain things that those guys do.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, some of them are a bit more recent, the trading thing for us has become really, really important.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you don’t have a, you can’t sell it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And obviously, whether when it’s sunny, you know, you need to, you know, you need to work out the risk of, versus reward of soaking too much stuff in some areas like Charles will always, you’ll blame me if we’re not so old enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we got too much stock, you know, you never praise if we don’t, well, they said we should have done more.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, you’ve always got that paradigm shift.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, working on forecasting, it’s a tough ol’ gig.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, and we’re putting more effort into how best we do we link our forecasting models to weather forecasting, historic data we’re looking at.
[SPEAKER_00]: what we do with search terms and search history and impression shares across channels.
[SPEAKER_00]: You’re taking this massive subset of data and trying to model it in a way that you’re buying stock and bring it into a digital marketing calendar, but a calendar of understanding about what the data is telling you.
[SPEAKER_02]: and then impacting both your production schedules and your purchasing schedules, I suppose, which is two additional levels of complexity, because most businesses would either be doing production or they’d be doing purchasing, but you’re having to do both.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they’re so I’ve got to see there’s different rules sets to each, because you can’t have everyone in the factory sitting around because it’s because the weather’s not right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is quite complicated because obviously we’re manufacturing, you know, brushes and breams and in left for as well as importing products that send me a guard of furniture or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there’s these two sort of elements to the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: The box shifting forecasting is probably a downside easier to forecast than the componentry and how many bristles and fibers you need and brackets and nuts and bolts and handle types and customer labeling and all the other bits boat where we do to help customers and support customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or if it needs to go in a production box or a counter display or wherever, so, you know, my wife looks after that side of the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes I look at the way that we forecast and think, yeah, there’s got to be different ways to do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you mentioned about using the weather to help with the forecasting and then data from the search engines and Amazon data and all those different sorts of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it’s, I find myself going, oh, that’d be so exciting.
[SPEAKER_02]: That’d be so cool to build.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then you have to remember, actually, we can have all the ideas we like, but if this doesn’t help us, and it doesn’t actually impact us, so it’s constantly questioning and questioning the rules sets and the data you’re pulling together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it’s only just in the infancy how we build that out in a certain way.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s a few tools that, you know, there isn’t enough of the shelf does that, but there’s tools that can help you with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we have to work through how to, you know, how does how does how does that work and do we, you know, do we build it in-house or do we,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, is it an Excel model or do we go out and take it somewhere to go and support us with something?
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably the same for the, I guess what I call the net cash profit forecasting because sometimes it’s quite difficult to see where the stock and where the channel management is being traded.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know and there’s different different channels have different rules, the different commissions and rebates and other things and you know we need to we need to and businesses need to understand where is the dynamic of the sale because you can maneuver the things around across the season depending on the channel that’s the most profitable for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimate goal is that you support everyone but in reality it’s not always evidently possible to do that in some channels.
[SPEAKER_02]: course because if one market place is paying you on 15 day terms and the next one’s doing you 90 days end of month terms and the next one’s doing 30 days minus councils refunds and 30% just in case something happens and we’ll give you that in two years time.
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s hard enough to build it with non dynamic data but your is the sales change every day of course then the numbers change every day so that must be a huge project too to try and accurately predict that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, and I think we have got some software in-house that can aid us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got a, as we call, a system’s accountant.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, he builds a lot of data and data sets within our ERP.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, you can start to look at things in a slightly different way, but I think the key for us and certainly businesses is, you know, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think people can get quite hung up on sales and not net cash.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, sales and gross margin, you know, people can get re-hung up on that and think that, you know, the matrix is right and they might think a raft of one to two is amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And other people might think that’s terrible, it depends on where you’re going with your business, but I think we quite like the data integrity here that Charles Bennie to see actually where what’s actually going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where is the actual money?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it’s a simple rule, but a very common one in retail, if you’re doing it right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I’m not changing tack a little, Andrew, but you mentioned when we were talking about how many different channels you’re doing that you’ve also started selling across into other countries.
[SPEAKER_02]: which obviously a great way of scaling, which has become somewhat more challenging this year with the trade wars going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let’s not get into the politics of it all, but how has that changed your plans?
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, because I imagine back in 2012 it’s been great.
[SPEAKER_02]: We’re going to roll out to there, there, there, there, and there in Europe, and there, there, in America.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that the ground’s shifting so much with all of that, how are you, how is that altered your strategic decision-making about where geographically to sell and how fast to scale that up?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think if we wind back to probably pre-Brexit when we first were selling predominantly on Amazon in Europe, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain with the first markets, and here we had a, I think originally we got a U.K.T.R.
[SPEAKER_00]: government grant to go and fund it, which was great.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like 50% match funding, so we got lots of humans going right, lots of coffee, and you know, happy days, and then we were away.
[SPEAKER_00]: We then really got to round about the pandemic time and the pandemic, you know, and Brexit, we were all kind of merged into one, didn’t it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, we were we were flying in Europe.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’re doing about two and a half million euro, so something across those channels, plus the eBay, confirm, see discount.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we’re going to we were going to launch a
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the wheels fell off because it became a abundantly clear it was going to be a lot more complex and difficult.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think the pandemic sort of subsided and then retail was in decline and 2022 for businesses with very, very difficult certainly in e-commerce and certainly with the God of Veneratory e-commerce with a crazy container price season.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the stock that we were all lumber with, so I asked like many business, we just focused on getting through that kind of crazy time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn’t really until last year that we felt we’d come to a position that we were supporting, our shoppers and our customers in the UK, which is really important to all of us, as a board we had to focus on.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, get the UK right, get lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, get up pricing right, you know, clear the decks and really make sure that we were going to be the preferred brand for, you know, within garden with many of these different retailers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it hasn’t become until that point that actually we can go and look at, look at Europe again and what’s become a button, the clear is it’s not as hard as it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of things are changed, technology is aiding, certainly in some areas, and how to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we’ve already started our selling back on Amazon into France as our first channel, and really we should be able to roll out more products.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we have to be a bit more careful about packaging and it’s assembly instructions and all the legal requirements, which is a lot more convocated than it was when we first started all those years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in reality, it’s not a difficult job.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just takes time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we should have shoppers buying shelves, many products across Europe really.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, on mass over the next 12, 18 months and we should be able to go back into all those channels that we did and there’s a lot of work to do to make to make that work But certainly in a garden cash we went, you know, we’ve had an amazing year where the handway is like a five-year cycle So it seems every five years is amazing and then it’s sort of right and then it’s not very good
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, it scares to death in the garden category that, you know, what’s going to happen next year, or the year after.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we do need to diversify and actually give shop a great product in, you know, southern Europe and where it’s potentially warmer or the season is extended.
[SPEAKER_01]: E-commerce master plan is supporting by some of the greatest companies in the e-commerce sector.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s time for the top tips round.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Andrew, are you ready for the top tips?
[SPEAKER_00]: Go on then.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, then the FUC Top Tip.
[SPEAKER_02]: If everyone listening to this podcast, agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I’ve, I’ve eaten nearly finish it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve not started, I picked up on holiday and I got slightly sidetracked with all sorts of family stuff, which is why I was on holiday.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was reading, I was reading in the middle of reading, a book called How to Make a Million In Business.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is by Gary Beckwith and he’s the CEO of city cruisers in London.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s really interesting because, you know, it’s like a bit of a wreck to Richard’s story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I quite like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I quite like the, you’re reading about adversity and challenge and yeah, how people have evolved from sort of nothing and just learned along the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love that type of book and, you know, they’re doing amazing for what it sounds like.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it’s a good read.
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s always nice to read kind of what I call a business biography, or autobiography, especially when it’s in a different sector.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because we’ll read too much e-commerce stuff, don’t we?
[SPEAKER_00]: Listen to too much e-commerce stuff and it’s quite refreshing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Go and see, oh yeah, I get where they’re doing that, you know, look beyond, as always, always good in my book, so I will be looking at one of myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And everyone, I think the thing we find, and the same with meeting other people in other industries, on a course, or maybe like a leadership course, like mentoring course, and there’s a lot of other sort of director execs, you know, people, and no matter the size of the business or the type of, well, everyone’s got the same changes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone’s got the same problems with their teams or technology or sector or owners or transport or whatever, and it’s just just
[SPEAKER_02]: are completely, okay, the traffic top tip, which marketing method, do you either price above all others or think doesn’t get the press it serves?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think for me, it’s probably somebody who I talk to talk about there, you know, the very first videos about their own.com and they don’t really understand the leverage of going where the traffic is going and there’s that shifts to market place and other areas.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it’s really important to look at where the data is saying the shopper is going.
[SPEAKER_00]: the impressions and the sessions because if you’re not doing those things then you’re really missing missing an opportunity to find shoppers that may not find your brand or so I’d probably say that there’s a traffic tip but not necessary to get you to your site directly but just have a white cast and that wide of your brand.
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s a bit like being in the formerly hot area of the
[SPEAKER_02]: But we’re staying here, it was good one, so we couldn’t possibly leave over there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s very true, and without going on in too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the channels that are going to be around, there’s a lot going on with the Chinese channels coming to the UK, and sometimes I look at it, I think I don’t really want to be there, but in reality,
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s probably going to happen and there’ll be a time when we all have to consider if they’re taking 50% of the market traffic for search terms in the UK then and you’re not there then you’ll be in left behind so we’ve always been quite good at, you know, is a business to maneuver and be nimble and have a fairly open mind as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: good work, good rules for life there.
[SPEAKER_02]: The tool to uptip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plugin, a phone app or just a way of working, is there a call little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?
[SPEAKER_00]: One that I’ve had, which maybe slightly touched on, is cellarbord, cellarbord.com for Amazon data, because you can plug it in and you can use, you can use it software to look at your sales and your commissions and your rebates, and it gives a bit of a mini-pnl.
[SPEAKER_00]: which, you know, really, I think, you know, it is nice to see if you’re multi-channeling and you can, you know, you can build out more things within it to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve started using Clavio for CharlesBeing.com and that’s been really quite good for us, you know, to see how we set the flows up and there’s more customer interaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: which you know is really what we want to see on our own.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, CharlesBee.com is, you know, in a way it’s the hub of where people might come to to understand the brand and actually in reality we want them to buy on their preferred channel.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they buy from us, great, we want to service them and look after them and retargonise other good bits, but in reality we want to support all the places that we sell then you need to feel comfortable where you buy it from.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the carbon top tip, what’s your favourite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, not just a store, but I think there’s a business.
[SPEAKER_00]: We maybe slightly think of them in a different way because we’re manufacturing as well, or I’m just a pure play.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we’ve got a company called Auditale and Auditale are carbon footprint, so I can decalten see fair.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they’re doing a real deep dive, but it’s quite expensive, but it’s a real big deep dive into the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s touching everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s asking in employees and our team, how to get to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s sadly times we go to the Far East, the source products.
[SPEAKER_00]: how many miles or are, you know, fantastic sales team driving to go and represent the company and look after our customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it takes all that data and it gives you, gives you a number, it gives you what it is and then they start to set parameters around how you would improve.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that’s great, you know, you can probably tell we quite like data and we quite like understanding data and then you can do something with the data and then you can best of yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: and also we invested the planet, so the order to tell data is really quite important for us, but not just that, but obviously the impact of plastic packaging tax in our industry in the UK, that was going to make a big change anyway, so we’re spending a lot of time and understanding that to remove plastic from products packaging, you know, getting a higher recycled contact content.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, our clay chimneys now used to have a polystyrene big case because
[SPEAKER_00]: And now it’s, you know, we’ve had to redesign and have like a honeycomb inner so that it still gets the benefits of the polystyrene, but without the plastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, there’s, and of course, you know, I think 600 online products and, you know, probably 2000 products and total is a lot of work to go through and, you know, to make sure that we’re really, really making sure we’ve got a great product and that is carbon friendly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we plot a lot of trees and our forests, so we’re members of FSC, so obviously our wooden products are all FSC certified and so every time they’re dropped down and actually many of them are a buy products, so and without worrying if once tears too much that the wooden rooms are a buy product at the rubber industry, so when they cut the rubber trees down to make you know tires and
[SPEAKER_00]: No, all the other things you used rubber for, the tree comes in of his life and it’s chopped down and obviously lots of them were replanted, it’s quite nice, a very ethical product.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had no idea you were going to say rubber trees at that point, that was a complete surprise to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know the expert, if you want to get Charles to come and talk to you about plantations and wood, he is more than 50 years experties in wood.
[SPEAKER_02]: as it would be essential if you’re making brooms.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love those carbon top tips as well because the data is obviously critical.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there’s clever solutions.
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s lots of innovation and cleverness in the world of carbon.
[SPEAKER_02]: So thank you for that, Andrew.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now before we say goodbye, could you please let the listeners know when they can find you and your business on the web and social media?
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, so CharlesBenny.com is the home of Charles Benny products, and you can find more manner of home guard and leisure products on the site, and we’re on your Facebook and Instagram at CharlesBenny.com 1860.
[SPEAKER_02]: Andrew, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s always a pleasure to catch up with you, so I’m really pleased we’ve got to record it this time.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I’m thank you so much for being here.
[SPEAKER_02]: What a pleasure to get to catch up with Andrea again, and how fascinating to hear how he’s managing all that data and all those channels to grow the sales and really fascinated to hear his plans for European expansion over the next 12 to 18 months.
[SPEAKER_02]: We should really get him on the show more often, so I will try not to leave it five years before we have him on again.
[SPEAKER_02]: To get your hands on the notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we mentioned, head over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: You could also use our direct-to-episode short-links, just put ECMP.info forward slash the number of this episode into the URL bar, and you’ll be redirected straight to the right page on the website.
[SPEAKER_02]: When you get there, don’t forget to add yourself to our email list.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if you liked this episode, then why not check out Episode 294, yes, a little while ago, five years ago, in fact, which was our first chat with Andrew, which is packed with even more of his great advice.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you want more on home and garden businesses, then head to ECMP.info4-home to see all our home and garden episodes on the website.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for tuning into this and every episode that you listen to of the e-commerce master plan podcast I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help e-commerce business owners to succeed and thrive with their businesses including progressing along the path to net zero So if you know someone this show can help please tell them to listen to the e-commerce master plan podcast I hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep optimizing
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce Master Plan podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Find out more at e-commercemasterplanned.com slash podcast.