Blog - Building Resilience

The most important element of our business is the end user experience: having quality products on offer, quick delivery and regular delivery updates.

In 2016 we relocated from our Eastbourne based location where we were limited in our delivery options, into Uckfield where we were then positioned closer to the main roads and could increase our drivers to cover a wider area. Relocating to a more rural area created a communication challenge that we needed to overcome, for our first 6 months of trading here we only had one phone line which was also our broadband, as you can imagine trading with only 2 -5meg download and 0.5meg upload caused us to be creative in our solutions, using mobile boosters, working from home and using our mobiles. Eventually once we had our much-awaited line put in we gained up to 40meg down & upload speed but now we were vulnerable to the elements. 

Our next development was to develop our capacity and protect ourselves against the weather, our phones and internet signal could drop out in bad weather, we investigated running Fibre in from the main cabinet, at a 10K investment, however we had had the cabinet fail in bad weather and the Government have committed to prioritising rural locations having Fibre by 2025, so why would we pay to invest in a solution that the Government are investing in and an extra line would only split our capacity not increase it?

Satellites! – With a much lower set up and monthly cost using Starlink on top of our normal business line quadruples our download and uploading capacity. Accessing their 5542 satellites on top of our broadband line means that if either one drops out, we are not prevented from fulfilling our customer agreement as this solution splits the load. 

Being a family run business, we will never lose our personal touch with customers and are available to speak to anyone at any time, however the reality is two thirds of our business is web produced, be it our website, Etsy, Ebay, Amazon.

We are continually looking to improve the business in as many areas as possible, recently we sent representatives to the StoreFeeder (our warehouse management system) conference to learn more about a paperless warehouse management system in order to minimise mistakes, maximise productivity and increase capacity. 

 We are already working on implementing these and investigating our next developmental stage.