Growing a £5 Million E-commerce Business With Ash Young
Ash Young is the founder of web design and digital agency Evoluted and carmats.co.uk, which launched in 2020 and won the Sheffield Startup Business of the Year award. In this interview, he shares his journey of growing carmats.co.uk from 0 to £5 million in revenue.
Why Car Mats?
Was there anything else you considered before settling on this niche?
"It's an area that I've been involved with before with previous clients of Evolution. I've seen there were people selling car mats but they weren't doing very well, they weren't promoting the products well, they weren't necessarily doing the customer service side of things well. It's an area that I thought actually we could go in there and do things a lot better than the existing people in the market."
The First Sales Journey
What was that first sale like? Because going from zero can be very daunting.
"Those early sales, they were just so exciting. I used to come downstairs in the morning and run downstairs - it was during lockdown, so all the kids were at home all the time - I'd run downstairs and be really excited like, 'Kids, kids! We sold like three car mats last night!' And they'd just roll their eyes at me after the first couple of times that happened. But the joy of those early sales of car mats... we're selling a thousand order days at the moment and that doesn't actually come close to what it felt like to sell three."
Early Tactics
Did you do any crazy tactics that surprisingly worked well for your business?
"The one that really stands out for me is that we wanted to prove that the concept would work without sort of spending months and months populating a website. So we launched carmats.co.uk with only one product populated - you could only buy Ford Focus car mats. If you went to the navigation to try and buy any other products, you couldn't click on them, they were just hash links. We launched on Google ads and the ads just pointed straight to the Ford Focus page."
The Growth Journey
Did you ever think you'd be doing £5 million in revenue?
"No, I never thought we'd get to 5 million. When I got to 5 million, I thought, actually, that's probably as much as we're going to get to, and this year we'll probably do seven and a half million, and I can see that it's doing 10 million next year. When we launched we wanted to do 1 million... I thought a million would be tough. I was aiming that in a year we'd be on a run rate for a million pounds."
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Marketing Strategy
Did you change anything heading to 1 million revenue?
"The thing that we actually changed was we stopped targeting model specific. We still do, but as we got to a million we had enough products on the website that we could go after broad terms like 'car mats'. We got to a stage where we had enough products that we were confident that we had the product for them."
Risk Taking
What was the biggest risk you took that paid off more than you expected?
"I don't think we took any really big risks. I mean I put five grand into the business at the start, I spent five grand separately on the domain name. Essentially, we bootstrapped, so we tried to avoid taking risks by making sure we were profitable all the time. Once we got profitable after month one, we stayed that way."
Customer Feedback Impact
In what ways have customer feedbacks guided your product offerings?
"In the early days we were incessant with customers. We published a phone line, tried to get people to talk to us at every possible opportunity so we could see what they were thinking, wanted to know what issues questions what they weren't sure about. I mean I still today get involved in the customer service tickets and go in there and see what people are doing."
Hot Take on SEO
What is the one thing that frustrates you the most about SEO or the industry?
"The big one for me and SEO is that the powers that be, whoever the decision makers are, don't include SEO from the beginning. I think if you've got that really tight connection with your SEO team, your agency in-house, however, you're doing it, then actually you can make decisions that shape the product for the benefit of the product and the benefit of the SEO."
Daily Pocket of Joy
What is one thing you do every day that brings you a tiny pocket of joy?
"That's the thing for me - is the family and the kids. I walk my little girl to school every day. I do my absolute hardest not to miss that walk to school in the morning. I've only got a few months left before she goes to secondary school soon, but I absolutely love it. I love getting up, the routine of having a walk there in the morning. I walk back with my wife, so we do it together... we get like 40 minutes together; it's about 20-minute walk there, and 20-minute walk back. Rain or shine, it's lovely."
And that's it for today's MozPod. Don't forget to use the #MozPod to share anything you found interesting on today's episode with Luke Carthy. This episode was engineered by Soule Fox, produced by Chima Mmeje and Jo Cameron, and our YouTube footage was filmed and edited by Sarah Galpin.