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Hello, I'm Andy from The Courtyard Dairy in Settle. We are a very specialised, small little
cheese shop based up in North Yorkshire. We only champion and work with small, independent
farmhouse producers. Kathy and I started out in hospitality - we
worked in fine dining up in Edinburgh - and from there, we really fell into cheese. I
then went and worked in London for Paxton and Whitfield's, selling cheese direct to
The Queen herself as well, before getting an apprenticeship in cheese-ageing in France.
After that, I returned to the UK, because I wanted to get back into British cheese and
learn a bit about the small producers we had in Britain. From there, we really wanted to
move back north, so we decided late last year - December 2012 - to set up our own cheese
shop, The Courtyard Dairy, and just work on championing about 20 to 25 small producers
who we know and have visited and we love. Our typical customer base is people who are
interested in food. What we're really looking for is anybody - any generation, really - who
just loves traditionally-produced food that has the best quality flavour, and this is
all over the UK. We have a strong customer base in the north of England and supply a
lot of the high-quality top restaurants throughout the north of England but, day-to-day, we supply
the public from our shop here in Settle and through mail order throughout the whole of
the UK. We partnered with Label Media because they
offered a brilliant, responsive design and, not only that, they're a personable people
who we felt added a real individuality to our website.
Selling fresh food online is always a difficult thing because you have to be able to deliver
it, and make sure it arrives in the same condition that it left. The key one for us is to get
across the uniqueness and speciality to what we do - and that was our real challenge of
getting across how we champion small cheesemakers, how we know the cheesemakers and how we talk
about them day-to-day. Having worked with other eCommerce stores
like Magento, I think Yetti's just so nice in terms of the back office, in terms of you
can tweak and change anything you'd like and it just seems to be designed exactly how you
want, but the back office and running the day-to-day... what I can tailor, what I can
do, is brilliant. I've used Shopify and Magento - and they were both good - but I really liked
Yetti because it felt like with Label Media, who obviously built the platform, they could
tailor it exactly to what I wanted whereas, with the other two, I was always trying to
have to buy add-ons or trying to... trying to have to make them work for me, whereas
with Yetti, it felt like it was built specifically for me.
Well, we get up in the morning - not too late - and we look at the orders that have come
in. Now for cheese, we actually don't dispatch the orders as soon as they want, because many
of them are given as gifts, so these cheese gifts are sent all over the place, so most
people want them to arrive for their birthday. We look at when they need to be delivered
by, we then set them into a folder by delivery date, then just get out the orders for that
day, cut them as fresh as we can, pack them - using Yetti, we click shipment sent, shipment
dispatched - they get charged, we get a nice label to stick on the box, and then it's gone.
When we originally used to send out mail shots, we looked at the analytics of the data and
then we found that the majority... about 40% of our people looked on either iPhones or
iPads, so when we made our website, it was quite key that they would then be viewing
the website on iPhones, iPads and all types of mobile devices, because it was quite a
high proportion of people who were watching and using our website and our emails through
their mobile devices. Twitter, for us, has worked massively from
the start. I joined Twitter about five years ago, wasn't really interested in it at the
time, but it's really great at bringing together people who are interested in similar concepts.
For us, it's not necessarily about selling cheese, it's about telling people about what
we do, and telling people about cheese. We find that, by its very nature, helps sell
it on top of it. Since the new site went live, it's been an
amazing success. Not only has it got across what we do to our suppliers, but also to our
customers. It's increased sales massively and we now can sell cheese all over the UK
with ease. Being close to Lancashire, we sell a heck
of a lot of Lancashire but we are in Yorkshire, so for our best-selling cheese day-to-day,
is the Dale End Cheddar. They're the only unpasturised farmhouse making cheese in the
whole of Yorkshire, and their cheese is absolutely outstanding; tangy and rich, they've only
got 46 cows, so it's very, very small supply. Settle is an amazing place to live, we've
loved living here and setting up our business. It's right next to the Yorkshire Dales, and
on the doorstep of the Lake District, and we can get into Leeds very, very easily. I
couldn't dream of a better place to live and set up a cheese shop.
Any small businesses considering eCommerce should be keen to get across their values
on their website, and make sure that their eCommerce store is just a natural extension
of their store.