Cosyfeet in Street

7 March 2006

Size: SME
Application: Multimedia
www.cosyfeet.com

David Price, of Cosyfeet in Street, explains the impact that e-business is having on his traditional shoe-making business.  From being a conventional mail order company five years ago, the business is embracing web technology throughout its marketing, sales and distribution operations with dramatic results. 

Video Transcript

I bought the Cosyfeet business about ten/twelve years ago when it was very small; it was the owner and one part timer.  It was essentially just a mail-order business.  I’ve since grown that – we’ve had a spectacular growth really, we’re now, including part timers, there are 82 of us here on site in Marketing and Distribution.  We are a multi-channel marketing company.  We started really with just Velcro slippers, selling to the elderly in Retirement homes.  We’ve now stuck within that niche, and we see ourselves as world leaders really in footwear, socks and hosiery.  The four channels we’ve got are the existing catalogue company, we have about 150,000 customers, wholesale business, so we’re selling through 100 or so mobility shops, we have a shop here, and the hub of our business now increasingly is our web business. 

Three years ago when I was asked about the web I thought it had no future at all.  It was sort of the dotcom bubble burst and things weren’t looking too good, but we’ve hung on in there.  A year ago we made quite a big investment, and redeveloped on what had been a relatively successful site and now I see it, although it’s only about 8/9% of turnover, I see it really as the core of our business, because it helps drive the other parts of our multi-channel organisation.  In other words, we’re no different from a lot of retailers, where customers may be mailed a catalogue, they may visit a store, but they’ll check for more information on the internet, and they may use the internet to buy direct, or buy through the catalogue, or visit the store.  So that’s really what I mean by a multi-channel marketing.  I simply don’t think now someone can run a direct consumer, or indeed a direct business organisation if you haven’t got a website there at its heart. 

Our big investment last year was the development of a new web-shop and we’re now seeing takings of around ten or eleven thousand pounds a week on the web, and that seems to be fairly consistent, we seem to be plateauing out a little bit, which means we need to do a lot more work on the site. 

What we are trying to quantify now and benchmark as precisely how much business we’re getting through the search engines, so we’re now going through a process of optimising our website for the search engines, benchmarking ourselves against other web-shops, to see if we’re doing a reasonably good job, but I think there’s a long way we can go, a long way. 

One of the things we’re doing now is to make certain that we’ve got our web address on everything, and these new boxes are just coming into the warehouse, because we want people to remember, www.cosyfeet.com because this is the entrée point for all our business. 

We deal with a very old age group, and our customers are for the most part 70 upwards, in fact we’ve got a lot of 85 upwards.  We know that we’re dealing partly with them, but also we’re dealing with their sons and daughters who are the silver surfers, they’re in their 50s and 60s, Mum and Dad in their 80s and 90s.  We’re very conscious of that particular group becoming greater users of the internet, and that’s where we fit in, and that’s why we think that with broadband spreading across the country that’s only going to accelerate that move. 

This is our business communications system, it’s the heart of our telecommunications, it manages our call centre, it’s integrated with our website, it’s integrated with our main suppliers, like credit card companies, Parcelforce, Royal Mail, it enables us with a relatively small number of staff to handle up to 2000 calls on busy day.  It’s going to be the heart of what we do when we integrate the web with our call centre, so that people in our call centre can see where our customers are online, what pages they’re on, and we’re constantly working on this, and we’re quite certain we’re at the cutting edge of this type of technology, appropriate for a business of our size. 

My view on the internet now is very simply the internet changes everything.  You have to start by thinking internet first, even though you might be running a chain of shops, you’ve got to think how people in the future are going to find your shops, do comparison shopping and for the most part people are going to do that comparison shopping from the comfort of wherever they access the internet, which may of course be a handheld thing.  You’ve got to think of it first.  It changes everything.

www.cosyfeet.com