AD| Growing our business with the Twill ‘Go Global’ Guide

As well as writing a number of blogs, you might know that my husband and I also run a furniture making business.  We have created lots of different products over the years, but more recently have been so busy selling radiator covers that we have streamlined the business to sell just these and nothing else. 

It’s been very important to us to keep costs low and to get the best deal on logistics prices.  We send out hundreds of radiator covers each year.  Most of these are in the UK but we do sell many to mainland Europe and a considerable amount to the USA.  If you are planning to go down this route, it’s important to read around the regulations involved in this, with particular reference to areas such as customs clearance.  We found the Twill ‘Go Global Guide’ to be very helpful in this regard.

Our decision to sell just radiator covers is mainly due to a lack of space.  We live on a country estate that was divided up in the 50’s to make a manor house and three different cottages.  Our cottage came with several barns.  We both used to work in IT and had a 1.5 to 2 hour commute each way every day, so in an effort to change our lives we began a business making things!  Mr W is very technical and built our CNCs (Computer Numerical Control machines) from scratch.  We can then program these machines to cut large sheets of MDF with mm precision.

If we were to expand, then taking new premises, say on the local industrial estate would be the obvious solution to our lack of space.  This would greatly help with logistics too.  We are rural and at the top of a hill, on a farm track.  In winter we struggle to get couriers here if it snows (and being high up, it snows here more than usual!).  If we relocated to the nearby town’s industrial estate with it’s proximity to an important A road then this would cause far less delays with sending orders and receiving supplies.

 

 

On the subject of supplies, it has to be said that in current times, everything is more expensive to source.  To counteract this, we have shopped around for what we need as well as approaching existing suppliers to see if there is a more economical way to purchase supplies.  For example, we use a lot of cardboard to package our covers.  We approached our cardboard supplier who suggested that if we bought more cardboard in bulk at once then this would help to reduce our cardboard costs.  Of course, cardboard is bulky and needs to be stored somewhere, which brings us back to our lack of space issue and lends more weight to moving to larger premises.

Larger premises of course, cost more money, so it’s very much a difficult decision that needs to be weighed up!

 

 

This post is in collaboration with Twill, but all opinions and experiences are my own.