Helemill

www.helemill.com

Helemill is a home, a business, an ethos and a passion. Mother-of-two, Maggie Shaw has, since 2004, been supplying pedal-free wooden bikes, design-led contemporary children’s furniture and toys of the highest quality via www.helemill.com using Actinic ecommerce software.

Helemill peddle bikes without pedals

The idea behind Helemill, which is named after the family home near Bude in Cornwall, started when Maggie Shaw and her husband Mike bought a pedal-free bike to teach their sons, Daniel and Harry, how to ride. At the time the bikes were hugely popular in Germany, but the Shaws found it difficult to source the bike they wanted in the UK. Maggie decided that setting up a website to sell these wooden bikes whilst bringing up her two sons could provide the family with an additional source of income. Little did she know at the time how well the business would take off. Maggie explains;

“The Early Rider range of pedal-free bikes, designed specially without stabilisers has revolutionised the way in which children, as young as two, can learn to ride.”

Traditionally, young children initially struggle to ride conventional bikes as they fall off and get their ankles knocked by the pedals. Stabilisers will keep them upright but removing them is a scary business that can take ages to overcome. Toddlers often get disillusioned and the bike gets cast aside until they are older. Go pedal-free, however, and within days the same child will have learned to balance, gaining confidence from having their feet on the ground. Within no time they are whizzing along - free, mobile, active, and above all happy. What’s more, this will make for a painless transition to a larger pedal-bike when the time comes.

In October 2004 Maggie setup www.helemill.co.uk with assistance from her husband Mike, who has a technical sales background having previously worked for companies like Wordperfect and Intel. Following a recommendation from a friend about which shopping cart software to use, Mike looked at Actinic Catalog for developing the ecommerce site.

Mike’s first attempt was entirely created by himself using standard Actinic templates and stock photography -- all for an initial investment of £1000. Looking back Mike comments;

“In comparison to the design of the site now, my first attempt was very crude, but within a week of launching we had sold six bikes. We now sell over 1,000 per annum, in addition to spring-free ultra-safe trampolines, German-made wooden toys, sledges, scooters, go-cart kits and helmets. All of the products we sell are as robust as they are stylish and designed with children in mind.”

Since then, the site has been through a few revamps and the latest incarnation was developed by Chris Dicken of Random River www.randomriver.net and is designed to offer a fusion of website convenience and local shop friendliness. With advice from our PR agency Excess Energy www.excessenergycomms.com it also includes professional imagery from Kirstin Prisk www.kirstinprisk.co.uk. This gives Helemill’s online presence a cool and calm feel while maintaining the brand values of uncompromising quality and safety, coupled with style to die for.

Initially the site was promoted using Google pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. As the products were comparatively niche this was a cost effective method of generating traffic to the site with keywords like “wooden bike” and “likeabike”. But, as the bikes have become more popular and the numbers of competitors who supply them have increased, paying for adverts to appear based on these keywords has become costly.

“We now do very well on free organic results in search engines like Google and Bing. Actinic makes structuring your ecommerce site so it is search engine-friendly relatively straightforward, even for a comparative novice like I was when I started. The software walks you through setting up appropriate page titles, Meta tags and keywords etc. in the right places so our site is picked up by the likes of Google which really helps build traffic. Each year we are doubling our visitor count and we now get approximately 20,000 a month.”

"An initiative which has proved very successful is producing videos of the LIKEaBIKE bikes in action. We make these freely available for other dealers and distributors to embed into their websites, provided they link back to the Helemill site. Having these third party links has also helped increase the Google site ranking, which in turn has helped push our website further up the organic search term results.”