Interview- Cherish Home founder on the ins and outs of online retail

As part of Bdaily’s feature week exploring retail, I heard from Martin Stanley, the founder of Cherish Home.

Martin explained that: “Cherish Home is an online retail business. We sell a range of homeware mainly small decorative items in the UK and Europe.

Martins business background traditionally lay in other areas, but after acquiring Tango Group (a personal eco-product wholesale business) Martin saw an opportunity to move into online retail. “Naturally, we immersed ourselves in the process of buying and selling products and realised we should look to explore the B2C model.

Jumping into the online retail industry head first has been a teachable experience for the Cherish team. “We have learned a huge amount by selling online via our own website and third-party marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. It’s a marketing challenge and people can only buy what they see in a listing. There is a huge amount of information that sits behind a listing in order to make it discoverable for the right audience.

“Unsurprisingly, one of the most challenging elements of online retail is competing on price. That’s becoming less of a concern as we move further into branding our own products. We work with some great suppliers and the benefits of ‘owning’ the brand are significant, albeit they occur at a higher level of risk and investment.”

With Amazon being one of the largest online retail platforms, it made sense for Cherish Home to have an online presence there. However this wasn’t without it’s issues. Martin explained: “It’s incredibly demanding to be a seller on the Amazon platform. They are the providers and you have to play by their rules and flex with them when they change; that’s something all Amazon sellers deal with.

“That said, other marketplaces simply don’t come close to being able to provide the kind of demand you experience on Amazon. Now that we’re moving into own-brand products under Cherish Planet, we’re seeing new opportunities arise on Amazon and it’s really interesting to learn to see how things knit together behind the scenes given that almost all of us spend time and money there as consumers.”

With sustainability firmly on the agenda in the wake of COP27, it made perfect sense for Cherish to follow suit. “I think it’s (sustainable product lines) incredibly important but, more significantly, we’re seeing consumers tell us that it’s important. They’re telling us via their buying habits. I’d go as far as to say that products being environmentally sound and/or sustainably or ethically sourced is gradually becoming an expectation of consumers.

“It’s no longer a nice-to-have and, whilst higher prices of ‘good’ products used to be an inhibitor to consumers making a switch, the onus has switched so markedly to suppliers to make more sustainable products that we are seeing prices coming down relatively speaking to products that might not be so ‘good’ in that respect. It is getting easier to make products that are less impactful on the environment, which is huge for our collective ability to move away from harmful disposable and single-use items.”

Martin appears optimistic about the future of Cherish Home, laying out whats next for the company he commented that, “I see sustainability playing a huge role in how we move forwards, and not just in homeware. Cherish Planet is a new arm of The Cherish Group with its own website and customer base. There we sell a wide range of energy-efficient and eco-lifestyle products, from solar garden lanterns to organic shaving soap.

“Our success will likely be determined by how well we develop our in-house brands and by the level of cohesion we can achieve in the combinations of our unique product bundles, gift boxes, etc. It’s a really challenging but exciting time to be in that particular market.”

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily