How Cora + Spink sells 20k sustainable bags a year with WooCommerce

I'm Tim and I run a business called Cora + Spink. We make plant-based bags, backpacks, and everything made out of canvas. I knew from a very early age that I wanted to have my own business. I was always inspired by my father who took me on his travels through work here, there, and everywhere, and I saw what small businesses could do, and I wanted to wear that hat. Then in 2014 and 2015, I had the idea to do a canvas range of products. And I worked with a couple of different factories, and we came up with some prototypes, and it was a success. People really liked the product. Fast forward a few years, I did a trade show, and that replicated the story again, wholesale customers. I started working in the industry where if you were making a product, wholesale was probably the way that you would launch the business. So it naturally came first, and we operated traditionally with sales agents, predominantly knocking doors using their networks of connections to get orders. We did trade shows as well to top that up. But then in the last three or four years, we've had an online presence as well for Cora + Spink wholesale, operated with WooCommerce that then directly interacts with our backend system for the warehouse. Wholesale customers can come along, place an order, they can have their orders delivered just as a retail customer would. And that's proving incredibly popular. There's a lot of factors that go into developing products, and we work very closely with the factory, and predominantly it's the canvas that starts first. We decide what the canvas should feel like, look like, how it should interact, how it should work, its performance. And then we start designing pattern cutters, take those designs and little illustrations and they turn them into samples. We then receive those samples here in the UK, and we say, yes, we love that, we don't love that. And we might develop three or four different products, and we will show that to our customers, and we will get feedback orders, and based on that, depends on if that product goes forward to production or not. We don't end up making unwanted stock, and that's an element of our sustainability, if you like, that we don't have a warehouse full of unwanted or unneeded stock. And that's something from the very beginning is really important for Cora + Spink. We wanted everybody who touched uh our products to literally be happy. So that would be the worker, the grower, the marketing person, me. Everybody, it's really important that we're happy, and that means well, the house that you live in is nice, the factory that you work in is good. The warehouse operates safely and effectively. That's my vision for Cora + Spink, and that's how we bring sustainability to Cora + Spink. Something that we have been approached and asked to do quite a lot recently was brand collaborations. One of the earliest collaborations was actually one of our largest, and that was with Tate Museums. And we worked with the team at Tate and produced a Fonthill bag in a select range of colours, and it's incredibly popular and it was very fun to do. That's something that enables us as a small business to reach a larger audience. We're selling around 20,000 bags a year, and now that is split approximately 80% towards wholesale, 20% towards retail. We're now turning over around 250,000 pounds annually. And we've got vision to turn that into about a million pounds revenue within the next three years. So Cora + Spink and WooCommerce goes back quite away. It was in 2014 that I built out the first WordPress and WooCommerce website. The website has taken a lot of turns and changes over the years. It's developed and become better and better. I chose WooCommerce back in the day because there was very little choice. You custom coded a whole website, which was beyond my remit and budget, or you chose something that I didn't really like the look of. So WooCommerce really won out. It was flexible for me. Over the years I've tried different tools and I'm open to suggestions, and one of the ideas has been to try Shopify as a platform. It just wasn't able to perform and do the things that WooCommerce could, and the flexibility of WooCommerce really shone through. We wouldn't use a platform that wasn't performing for us, and WooCommerce performs for us. So we've customized quite a lot of the websites. So we run technically two websites. One is the retail website, but it's customized in a variety of different ways from aesthetics to functionality of capturing data and sharing data with our backend systems. And then likewise, our wholesale system is reasonably well customized.

We use a variety of plugins on both the wholesale and the retail websites. Rank Math is a key plugin. It helps us with SEO and analytics. We use the Stripe plugin for payment processing, and that's on retail and wholesale. We use B2B King, which is a major plugin for the wholesale side of the website, which makes the website secure and simple and quick and easy to use in a slightly different way to how a retail customer needs to use a website. I use a hosting platform called Pressable, which is brilliant, absolutely fantastic. It's one of the best hosts that I've ever used. The way that they handle security and updates is phenomenal. The future for Cora + Spink is definitely our wholesale. We're going to grow and build our digital presence. We want to be a leading wholesaler online and our website to become stronger, bigger, better, and attract more customers digitally so that we can become a digital-first business. And then retail, we've only just started to scratch the surface with retail customers. So we're really going to focus on making us the number one bag brand for people to go to.