Name of your website?Chellgrove Office Chairs Weblog
Your name?
Chellgrove
Your Location (city, etc)
Peterborough
Tell us about your business?
Chellgrove Office Chairs is a UK-based online retailer & distributor of office seating. We provide a very broad selection of office seating small and large businesses across the UK, including home-based businesses. We have been going since 2004 and pride ourselves on our customer service and great attention to detail.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
We created the Office Chair Weblog to make our business more transparent to customers. We use it to share our experiences, tell people more about our products and services than we can through our websites alone, discuss interesting relevant findings on the Internet, and to invite people to give us their feedback on the things we say.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
Our first website was Office Chair UK. It is the eCommerce-enabled online store for our business. We launched it in 2004. It is now supported by the Chellgrove website and the weblog.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Deciding on a name for the weblog was easy. "OfficeChairUK" is derived from the name of our main ecommerce website, and "Chellgrove" is derived from the name of our company.
What makes you different from other office chair businesses?
We differentiate ourselves on our high levels of customer service and our attention to detail. For example, we show one price on our ecommerce website - this price includes delivery and UK VAT so that buyers know immediately how much they are paying. We also, uniquely, offer an Office Chair "Options" service where buyers can design their own office chair online from components such as arms, mechanisms, fabric or leather colours, and extras such as adjustable back supports.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
(Laugh) I don't see us creating a book or a movie deal from the office chair business. I expect to run the business for a long while, grow it into a formidable support structure for our loyal clients, and ultimately pass it onto (i.e. sell it) to another team that will come along and prove that they can serve the customer base much better than we can. Our focus throughout will always be on providing best value for our loyal customers.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
It is early days yet. Thus far we have invested a lot more of everything - time, money, energy - than we have received financially. But the business is serving our customers very well (see the website's customer' comments page). I know the business will serve us well too very soon.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would add video. This is the new focus of internet advertising. Video would enable our customers to see our office chairs from different angles. It would also allow them to see how the chairs are operated, and how comfortable they are.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes we would. We have built scalability into our business model. And we are amply supported by our wonderful manufacturing partners. Our manufacturers have the product capacity to cope with huge levels of demand. And we have the resources to handle the processing of several orders, including the resources to handle pre-sale enquiries and after-sale customer support.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
In the early days, when we imported office chairs and sold from our own warehouses, we had to deal with the issue of customer returns. We could not send damaged items back to our foreign manufacturers, so we incurred huge losses over a period of time. Now we deal with UK manufacturers and a UK importer. Our UK manufacturers pay more attention to quality detail, and this is backed up by their very generous product warranties.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Getting the business model right has been our biggest challenge. It still is! We have improved a lot, but growth is a continuous thing that should never end for as long as we are in business. Our improvement process is directly benefitting our customers, and is directly benefitting the business owners and our staff.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
The Internet. Our business model is based on the concept of an online store. We advertise on Google Adwords, we optimse our websites for organic search, and we are now also using social networks to build rapport with our marketplace.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
When I started the business, I naively thought it would give me more free time and financial freedom from day one. I have learned the hard way that these things take time. Good things come to those who persevere, test, and learn from their mistakes.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
This is a difficult question to answer. Those gains are coming in now. But we went for a very long period of time without traffic to the website and without income. And when the income came it did not cover the overheads. But we kept going. I often wondered that we would keep going until the money ran out. Running a serious business is not child's play. Only the hard-skinned survive: things don't get easier, the survivors get tougher.
Tell us about some of your favourite products?
Our best sellers are our next-day delivery office chairs and computer chairs. I don't know any other UK office chair retailer who offers 24-hour delivery for free. But my absolute favourite collection is our Office Chair Options service which allows customers to design their own office chairs.
What is your website address?
Chellgrove Office Chairs Weblog
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