Anything Left-handed

www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk

Established in 1968, Anything Left-Handed is a family business offering products, services and advice for left-handed people. Owner and MD, Keith Milsom sells over 250 products which have been tested & approved by his left-handed team, from a shop in central London, mail order and the web site. The case tells how the business recovered from a disastrous overhaul of the ecommerce website & learnt the importance of keeping control of core IT functions in-house.

Migrating from a bespoke developer to Actinic

First established in 1968, Anything Left-Handed, is a family business offering products, services and advice that make life easier, safer and more enjoyable for left-handed people living in a right-handed world. Directors Keith Milsom and his wife Lauren are ‘very left handed’, as is their son. And so, amazingly, is every member of their growing team based in Surrey. In fact, being part of the 13%* of our population that is left-handed is a pre-requisite of working at the most successful and dynamic venture of its type in the world. They’ll sell you anything from a boomerang to a bass guitar as long as it’s left-handed, but only if they’ve tried it first and think it’s any good. It wasn’t until a recent overhaul of their ecommerce website, however, that they discovered just how vital this personal insight and involvement really was to this unique business.

The company was originally run out of a shop in Soho, London by a right-handed hobbyist spurred by the inconveniences of left-handed friends. Keith and his father took over 20 years ago and interestingly when the business went into ecommerce in 2000 this real-world shop served as an important showcase for the core business at www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk. However, for years it did not really make money and was a huge management headache. Keith adds,

“When the lease came to an end and the landlord asked for another huge rise in rent, that was it. Add ever-increasing business rates for less and less service, congestion charging, astronomic parking charges, the huge difficulty of managing staff at a distance and these outweighed the credibility factor of the shop."

“For 2004 the website was responsible for 60% of total business turnover, and in 2005 this grew to 80%. Far better to focus our limited time on the website and our online Left-handers Club (now with over 50,000 members) which DO make money, continue to grow well and take far less management time.”

No surprise then that the quality, stability and security of Anything Left-Handed’s website is of paramount concern, and anything jeopardising its success causes Keith more than a few sleepless nights. Imagine then his despair when an apparently sound decision to outsource website development backfired. Keith lost all control of the company’s key marketing channel before fighting back with a superb relaunch site built in-house with the latest version of ecommerce package Actinic Developer. Business is now growing again, but other ecommerce businesses facing a similar crossroads could learn valuable lessons from the experiences of Anything Left-Handed.

Keith explains how he came to make the decisions he did over the past two years.

“The site we had developed as a marketing test from 2000 onwards worked okay, but demands on my time for marketing and managing the business made it difficult for me to add all the functionality I really wanted. So we made the strategic decision to outsource site development to a third-party which would create a bespoke online store and information site for us. As it turned out, this change in direction was disastrous, setting us back a year in business development and leaving us horrified at the results.”

After lengthy delays, the developer did produce a site, but not one that worked anywhere close to the standards Keith had expected, and crucially also failed to alleviate time-consuming technical overheads. Fortunately Anything Left-Handed was far from inexperienced online and could see obvious technical flaws, including access to the site, incomplete navigation, slow load speeds, difficult site maintenance processes, very poor activity reporting and more. Keith says,

“We couldn’t afford to wait and see if things got better. That site should have been operating at higher levels than the old homespun site, but we could see our sales going through the floor.”

Internet turnover had doubled each year to reach £200,000 in 2003 until the setback caused by the bespoke development. The disparity between the cost of outsourcing and the price of in-house site development with boxed software rang alarm bells. Keith says,

“We’d planned a site operating as you see it now, only with less functionality, and had budgeted around £30,000 to get those results."

He now owns the site he envisioned and what’s more he created it himself tailoring it to his precise requirements and marketing plans, and all for around £4,000 including software and consultancy outlay. Keith explains,

“By early July 2004, we had had enough. I gave myself a week’s preparation, made sure we had access to as much of the site content we had prepared as possible, then put our own original site back up as an interim measure, dealt with the fallout with the developer and set about developing the site you see today using Actinic’s software.”

“I redeveloped the whole site myself in just two months, using some of the design work we had paid for, but restructuring the whole thing around the boxed software. On 13 September 2004 we were back up and running with a fully-functioning site, and saw an immediate increase in site visitors, page views and orders.”

Understandably Keith now believes the benefits of a flexible boxed ecommerce package over bespoke third-party developers are incalculable.

“I just felt my business was completely out of my control. The service we received was poor, and there was little I could do about it. A third-party had our whole site sitting on its own servers, with us entirely at its mercy. If that company went bust one night, then we would have been left with no web site and no way of recreating it. I could have woken up one day with no online presence at all, faced with starting again from scratch with months of hard work on my hands and virtually no business in the meantime. I simply couldn’t sleep at night with that risk.”

Anything Left-Handed’s latest online incarnation perfectly illustrates the fact that for forward-thinking online businesses, ecommerce is far more than just selling stock. To build a loyal customer base and gain repeat orders in an ever-crowded marketplace, you need a store that offers visitors more. For a high street book shop this might mean a few sofas and a cappuccino machine. For the directors of Anything Left-Handed this meant an active membership club, pages tailored for children, a database of famous lefties, personal left-handedness tests, quizzes, jokes, FAQs and a vault of information on all things left-handed so comprehensive many of the pages warrant top search engine rankings independent of the core business. The site now stocks over 250 product lines, receives around 2,000 unique visitors per day, and gains around 50 orders each day with an average value of £28.00.

The new site started taking almost twice the level of orders of the failed bespoke development from day one and before they unleashed their marketing plans. The web sales forecast of £220,000 for 2004 was only 10% up on the previous year, reflecting the very poor performance from the bespoke site. With full functionality plus marketing and development potential returning, online sales are getting back on the previous growth pattern, increasing 50% year-on-year for both 2005 and 2006, with Keith’s more conservative forecast for the third-year expected to see a 40% growth in 2007 yielding web revenues of £700,000. Overheads are expected to stay fairly fixed, and of course that means that as turnover increases, profits are expected to rise rapidly over time.

One particularly helpful and unforeseen aspect to redeveloping the site ‘out-of-the-box’ was discovering how open and flexible the software really was. Keith explains,

“I have recently integrated an in-site search engine (Search Engine Studio), affiliate program and outgoing links directory using different low-cost, third-party software. With the bespoke site, this would have taken months and cost many thousands of pounds, if we could have done it at all! We have a long list of improvements we might choose to deploy in the future, which we now know we can do inexpensively when I have a little spare time. It’s satisfying, creative work and means the design and development process is completely integrated with our creative and marketing plans.”

Keith, Lauren and the rest of the team at Anything Left-Handed experienced enormous frustration by following a website development path that took control of the business out of their capable hands, but now it’s a very different story, and the whole company is extremely proud of the latest results. Keith explains,

“The successful store you see today didn’t come about as a result of paying for somebody else’s expertise, but from our own vision, hard work and determination, using some pretty clever software on the way.”

Thousands of visitors buying products at the company’s shop over the last 40 years have had their lives made easier, safer and more enjoyable, but perhaps it’s only since the launch of their latest online store that the proud owners themselves have finally achieved the goal they aim to reach for their customers, to create “a haven in an otherwise back-to-front world.”