Case Studies

How NOT investing in their website turned a Welsh retailer into an international trading success.

A business that grew out of a tiny traditional Welsh knitting and sewing shop has caught a world-wide fashion wave, capturing new markets across the world. This is the story of how a business grew from a modest Neath-based shop founded in 1974 to become an online international trading success.

Even in 1974, knitting and sewing shops not at the cutting edge of fashion and our Neath shop founders were indefatigable in their local trading efforts, expanding sales through local clubs and running sales in church and village hall.

Just two years after starting, they sought further markets by amalgamating with a Swansea firm. This subsequently was floated off with two of the original Neath shop directors to become the forerunner of the current internet success: Knitters and Sewers World, a trading name they had the presence of mind to register in 1976.

By 1980, Knitters and Sewers World had also established a thriving wholesale business supplying all wool, haberdashery and fabric shops in a 50 mile radius of Swansea, using their increased buying power to drive manufacturers' prices down. In 1985 they invested the proceeds in a second retail outlet.

The 1990s however, were another matter as knitting and sewing were dwindling minority craft interests, with an increasingly elderly customer base. With characteristic energy and enthusiasm, the company was still turning over a substantial six-figure sum, but margins were increasingly squeezed. By the first three years of the new millennium it was becoming obvious that Knitters and Sewers World was facing stark choices: to find new and more profitable markets or die.

Knitting and sewing supplies, by their very nature, is an obvious choice for selling over the Internet. The items are easy to post being mostly light and unbreakable. The trouble is, the items are generally low cost, so any website had to be capable of handling a high volume of sales to generate even modest profits. And the Knitters and Sewers World range is vast, so that meant a database-driven catalogue, which generally entails a sharp intake of breath when you hear the costs involved for such an ecommerce project. Early enquiries into developing a suitable website confirmed that it would be an expensive operation. The directors were keen to maintain their high quality range and standards and kept looking for a solution.

With hindsight, it was probably fortunate that the costs put them off developing their own e-commerce website, so when they found Shopfitter, they found a risk-free solution: pay as you go with no up-front costs. It also means that the ecommerce solution is future-proof, with no additional expansion costs no matter how fast the business grows.

And Knitters and Sewers World has grown rapidly online in the last year. By December 2005, their turnover was 30 times more than the preceding December and a colossal 112 times the monthly turnover from eighteen months ago. Now that is sales growth in anyone's terms!

Philip Bowden, "By choosing Shopfitter, we were also aware that we were protecting the business from exposure to technical vulnerabilities. The internet is a wonderful facility, but there are threats out there and it is a constantly changing marketplace. We are not technical experts, and by using Shopfitter, we are tapping into both their online technical expertise, and also their marketing know-how. They have worked directly with us to ensure that we occupy a prominent position in the search engine results, no matter how the rules change. They will also help us convert to our own website if we decide in the future that we want to run things ourselves.

"Another real advantage with Shopfitter it's integrated with a choice of payment solutions which meant we could choose the one that was best for us. That allows us accept payment from 120 countries, with no requirement for our customers to register first with the payment provider. That payment registration requirement from other providers apparently loses some businesses 25% of sales at the advanced checkout stage. With our need to drive sales volume, we wanted as few barriers as possible to the sale. The low costs of the payment services also boost our bottom line, allowing us to offer one of the widest and most competitively-priced online knitting and sewing ranges available."

The flexible Shopfitter system, combined with the online marketing and payment services all came into their own recently when A-listed celebrities were reported in the media avidly enthusing about knitting in-between film takes, indeed, Catherine Zeta-Jones can be counted among previous customers of the store.

"A trend we had been watching for some months became a flood as hand knitting suddenly became fashionable, and Shopfitter easily accommodated the huge uplift in demand. The directors agree that Shopfitter's help was invaluable in achieving this very satisfactory increase in turnover from the website and are looking forward to continued collaboration with Shopfitter"



Visit Knitters and Sewers World at www.knitandsew.co.uk