While she was a textile-design student, says Jeda Lewis, she had "a vision" of selling her work in an online shop. Now, tapping into the growing market for buying fashion items on the internet, she sells not only her own designs for children's accessories and jewellery but hand-crafted clothes amd accessories by other designers, all online.
The 28-year-old behind Velvet Boutique is also the mother of a six-month-old son and a five-year-old daughter. She admits: "The past six months have been challenging. I can be processing orders at two o'clock in the morning, if that's the only time I have." Yet running the business from her Edinburgh home is a practical way of allowing Jeda to fit work around caring for two small children, as well as realising that dream of going into business for herself. "Trading online was a way of keeping the capital costs down, but it was also important to reach a wider audience and promote Scottish designers," explains Jeda, a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee.
Her website has been trading for only 18 months, but has attracted customers from England, the US and Europe, all of whom are keen to buy Scottish design. Not having to pay for shop premises means Velvet Boutique can showcase the work of other designers and take only a minimum commission in return for despatching goods.
Like many such enterprises, this one is something of a family concern, with Jeda's sister, a textiles student, helping with the website, and "a very supportive extended family" helping with domestic life. If there is a downside, Jeda says, it is that her own creative work is now squeezed into increasingly rare downtime as the business takes priority. That is countered by the fact she is at the centre of a network of designers: "We keep each other informed of things that are happening, so that it is more of a collective than just an online shop,"she explains.
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While Velvet Boutique is meeting a specialist demand, such niche websites will increasingly start to slot in among the fashion sites competing in the booming internet marketplace. Research published today by Mintel shows that sales of fashion (ie clothing and footwear) online have increased by an extraordinary 461% in the past five years. For the first time, they topped £1bn to reach £1.2bn in 2006. Although online spending on clothing and footwear is estimated to account for just 3% of the total for the category in 2006, sales are predicted to increase by a further 138% between 2006 and 2011, to reach £2.9bn.
For Charlie Gladstone, being able to run a business online makes the good life even better. The internet side of his business is growing rapidly: last year it accounted for one-third of his sales, and now it is more than half. He agrees with Mintel's analysis that the increasing number of broadband internet connections and consumers' greater confidence in online shopping have been fundamental to the market's growth.
He and his wife, Caroline, gave up jobs in London to move to Aberdeenshire 15 years ago and set up a mail-order business, Pedlars. "The original concept with Pedlars was to create a lifestyle," he says. "We chose to live in Scotland because it gives us a lifestyle we could not afford with six children in London.
"The original emphasis was on clothes, but we have shifted the balance so that we are 90% general merchandise, such as toys and outdoor stuff. We started off sending big, thick catalogues out to people, but I would imagine that in three years we will use no paper mailings.
"The problem with the internet was that people were frightened of the big void they enter when they go online because, in many cases, there is no personality to it. Unless it's a major company, people don't have confidence. We overcome that by constantly reminding them that they can phone us if they have a problem. We work quite hard on telling people who we are, and we have photographs of ourselves and our warehouse. Combined with a guarantee that things can be returned for any reason, that gives people confidence in us.
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