PARENTHOOD shed a whole new light on Carol Cotton’s business career. As the owner of a specialist electricals shop in London’s West End, she recognised the benefits of being in a niche market. And so, after becoming frustrated by the lack of stylish clothing for her baby Catherine, she switched trades to set up her own shop, importing colourful items from Brazil.
By chance, a year later, she discovered a revolutionary nappy while visiting a friend in America. Convinced the washable, shaped, cloth nappies would sell well in Britain, she decided to ship 5,000 home. Her aspirations fell on stony ground, however. Her own customers showed little interest in them and the retailers she approached dismissed them as a useless fad.
Determined to shift the stock she had bought, Cotton set about approaching a wider audience of parents, leafleting midwives’ offices, private houses and doctors’ surgeries.
“Having used the nappies on my daughter I was confident that once people tried them, news of the benefits would quickly spread,” said Cotton, 53.
That first shipment arrived in Britain 16 years ago and it took Cotton more than 15 months to sell it. Now her business, Perfectly Happy People, specialises in the cloth nappies and is the sole British importer of the Kushies brand. Last year she sold 115,000 of them.
Her first basic leaflet offered just four products. Today the mail-order business has a glossy catalogue of more than 600 baby items.
Sales through the catalogue are growing. And retailers such as Mothercare, Tesco and Boots are ordering the firm’s products, giving it an extra boost. Sales for the year ended March 2005 are expected to be £2.2m, with pre-tax profits of £5,000.
It sounds a meagre return but Cotton is delighted because it is an improvement on the previous year, when losses of £98,000 were made on sales of £2.6m.
“In 2002-3 we returned pre-tax profits of £58,000 on a turnover of £2.5m,” she said. “Over the past couple of years, though, we have invested heavily in technology to outsource our warehousing. This is reflected in these recent figures, but we are confident that now we have the infrastructure right, the business will be much more cost-effective.”
Nappies still account for 22% of turnover, but over the years the firm has added other baby products such as books, toys and equipment — some developed and made by the company itself.
Growth has been steady and largely organic. The marketing budget — which last year was £90,000 — is used to place advertisements in the classified sections of mother-and-baby magazines and to pay for attendance at Britain’s three largest baby exhibitions and get access to other firms’ lists of contact details for the target audience. This, together with word-of-mouth recommendations, has helped the company develop a 70,000-strong mailing list. Cotton and her business partner Jane Mitchell are now keen to extend this significantly.
“We’ve recently moved to new premises and the warehousing systems are in place,” said Cotton, whose spaniel Tommy travels to work with her every day to Chiswick, the London suburb where the firm’s head office is located.
