Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
We caught up with Snaffling Pig, a UK-based retailer of pork-based products and novelty gifts. The brand launched in 2014 with a starting fund of only £500, and is now an established retailer of the gifting sector, selling food items and gifts direct-to-consumer via its Shopify website and through a number of UK supermarkets.
We spoke to Founder and CEO of Snaffling Pig, Nick Coleman, who shared his insights on how the brand has charged through the multiple retail challenges of recent years to achieve 100% growth, leading it to take 16th in Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 list of fastest-growing brands. He also discussed how the brand plans to maintain its momentum going forward.
Here are some of the highlights from the transcript…
- “Quite simply we make awesome-flavoured porky snacks. There’s so much emphasis on exercise and wellness these days, why not just enjoy time with friends and be a bit indulgent? ‘Life is for living’ was our initial vision and we still work on that philosophy.”
- “Our performance brings in about 3M a year. Overall the pork scratching market brings about 28M, so we’re really proud of that. There’s a ceiling for how you can market pork scratchings, though – so we’ve started to sell other flavours like barbecue, and we’ve branched into beers, utensils such as burger flippers and barbecue tongs; complimentary products that align with our brand and core offering.”
- “We’re very proud of the fact that we’re omnichannel. We started six years ago with a vision to de-risk as a brand by selling through as many channels as possible.”
- “We thought the way people responded to Covid would continue – it hasn’t, it’s slowed right down. But we’re in a good position to take advantage of changing consumer habits. As people have gone back to bricks and mortar we’re developing that side of our business more – and with the cost-of-living crisis we want to offer desirable items that are of better value to customers. It’s important to evolve the business and not rest on our laurels based on the Covid effect – the market is changing, so we must too.”
- “The tech available to support small businesses now is phenomenal. One app we use is Gorgias which interacts with our Shopify website and allows you to prioritise how you communicate with customers. […] The time and money we’ve invested into our system has allowed us to really understand profitability, by customer, channel and location, and allowed us to make better decisions we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.”
Want to hear more of what Nick had to say? Catch up with the full episode, and subscribe to upcoming ones, here.
