HOME-SHOPPING: Crisp family have the taste for success
A NEW family firm operating in the city looks poised to conquer the world of home-shopping, winning over customers with innovation and a friendly, caring image.
MARK SCODIE investigates how the family team behind Everyday Essentials has seen their business bloom within just a month of trading.
JUDGING by the success of Richard Crisp, all you need to create a thriving start-up business is a new idea and determination – and your mum and sister working in the same office.
The Stilton-based Crisp family's home shopping business Everyday Essentials has taken the industry by storm since its official launch on March 1.
The company – founded by Richard, his sister Helen and his mother Jean – has brought fresh ideas and an approachable, family image to the marketplace which seems to have struck a chord with home catalogue shoppers. Everyday Essentials, based in Oxney Road, Peterborough, now expects to rake in between £2.5m and £3m in turnover during its first trading year.
The family is steeped in the home shopping business, following mum Jean's 30 years beating the streets selling to people in their homes.
Richard said: "Between us, there's about 50 years of experience in the home shopping brochure business. I can remember mum going around with a trolley full of goods – this is even before they used catalogues – when Helen and I were kids.
"Then, when I quit my job as a BMW technician 12 years ago, I came back to the industry just for something to do in the short-term. But now here I am running a company.
"Mum and I worked for another company in the industry to start with, but eventually we decided we wanted to create our own catalogue."
The company is now carving out a healthy slice of the home shopping market by promoting an approachable, family-based image among both its clientele and its employees.
Family members even double up as stars in the catalogue. Richard's wife Sharon, and even their toddlers Louis (2) and Oliver (4) can be seen demonstrating anything from watering cans to bubble bath.
Richard said: "The original thought was to produce a catalogue to please ourselves and our existing customers, but we seem to have touched a nerve.
"You wouldn't think it would matter to people in Stafford that the photos are of a real family, but apparently they like it. Our distributors can say: 'That's the man who started the business, and that's the managing director's mum'."
The caring Everyday Essentials ethic is also made clear by the company's tie-in with the Marie Curie Cancer Care. While most retailers give prices for goods ending with 99p or 49p, the Crisp family just round the prices up and give 1p on each sale to the charity.
Richard said: "If you're delivering an order that comes to something like £8.97 customers will often just say 'keep the change', anyway. And everybody knows somebody whose life has been affected by cancer at some time, so it seemed a natural thing to do."
As well as promoting attractive values the company has brought in new ideas to win over customers.
Rather than stick with established industry formulas Richard came up with the idea of creating a new kind of easily adaptable, A4 ringbinder catalogue, which avoided problems he felt normally held home shopping companies back.
Richard said: "We recognised that one of the main problems about this kind of business was putting one brochure together, putting a staple with it and then being stuck with it until you printed another one six months later.
"But ours is almost infinitely changeable. If we want to introduce a new product we just create a new page and send it out to our distributors."
The company's treatment of its distributors is also something it takes pride in.
Richard said: "We're not just some big corporate company with a product to sell, we're real people who have gone out on the streets doing the job. We still do.
"If our distributors ever ring us after a day where they've been out in the rain, their brochures are soaked and they haven't sold anything, then they know we understand how they feel."
The upbeat team feels its formula has what it takes to win over the legions of "potential shoppers" who currently either ignore or bin the home shopping catalogues left outside their homes.
Richard said: "If you find our catalogue on your doorstep you'll probably never have seen anything like it before. We're already finding that customers are really receptive to our format.
"The combination of being new and different and our tie-up with Marie Curie is winning people over.
"I'll tell you a story. I was in a meeting with Paul Wright from Ideal World, and he asked if anyone in the room actually used home shopping services. Out of 100 people in the room only I put my hand up.
"But Paul's reaction was, 'Great, what a huge potential market!'. We feel the same way."
New-look catalogue proves a hitEVERYDAY Essential's unique approach to making home shopping catalogues is a classic example of how reinventing a simple concept can make a company stand out in its field.
Managing director Richard Crisp spotted that existing small and stapled brochures were putting off the public and restricting the stock choices of companies.
His A4 ringbinder model, he argues, provides a clearer layout and allows the company to adapt its range more quickly.
He said: "We can try out a new product, photograph it, design a new catalogue page featuring it and send that page out to our distributors within 10 days. That's previously unheard of in the industry.
"We're also in a superb position to react to seasonal events like Christmas or Valentines Day. We can run a page insert for just three weeks and then pull it again.
"Further down the road we may even be able to tailor catalogues for individual customers."
Article provided by "The Peterborough Evening Telegraph".