BUSINESS
insideKENT BUSINESS PROFILE:
AUNTIE MIMS
photos by Helen Schryver at Schryver Photography
HUSBAND AND WIFE BUSINESS PARTNERS, MICHELLE AND PETER LANSTONE, TOOK THE PLUNGE AND MADE THEIR HOME BUSINESS THEIR JOINT FULL-TIME CAREERS, CELEBRATING THEIR 100,000TH CUSTOMER IN DECEMBER 2016 BY SELLING THROUGH NOTONTHEHIGHSTREET. COM. THIS MONTH, INSIDEKENT’ S DONNA MARTIN SPOKE TO THEM ABOUT HOW THEY DID IT, HOW FAR THEY’ VE COME AND WHAT CHALLENGES THEY FACE.
Your story is quite inspirational for other small businesses – tell us a bit about what made you start Auntie Mims, and why you chose notonthehighstreet. com( NOTHS) as your outlet, rather than just your own online shop.
Auntie Mims started back in 2008. Michelle( Auntie Mims) originally created textile based items such as personalised toy storage tubs and Christmas stockings whilst working part time as a teacher with young children at home, but it was in 2012 when we bought a laser engraving machine solely to design and make everything for our wedding( from invitations to table plans and decorations), and then, when the wedding was over we had to somehow justify the machine! That’ s when Auntie Mims really began and started to grow into the business it is today.
Michelle has always had a compulsion to create things, and when the children were small it was fun to share her designs with others; working from the kitchen table and accessing customers via the relatively new( at the time!) world of online gift shopping. NOTHS was really the only choice back then – Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish, the founders of NOTHS, were actively seeking creative ' kitchen table ' based businesses and we were lucky to get on board early on.
The marketing power of NOTHS is a key attraction of course – visibility on your own websites is tricky; traffic is king and with 5,000 partners and their commission, NOTHS has a marketing budget small businesses can only dream of! That said, you do have to tick the boxes with your products based on what customers want and what NOTHS think they want at any particular time; not all things can be surfaced with hundreds of thousands of items on site. Search is important and the experience of knowing what NOTHS customers want is really important to partners. We know this better than anyone – we all know what sells.
148