Selling online grows international sales for Cheeky Chompers

From baby steps to big business 

Amy Livingstone and Julie Wilson, two ‘mumpreneurs’ from Midlothian, have taken their baby business to new heights, despite the unforeseen obstacles of the last two years.  

The pair invented and designed the world’s first neckerchew – a chewable dribble bib – in 2013, when their own children were babies. Julie explains, ‘We were constantly picking up and sterilising dropped teethers and thought, ‘why doesn’t someone invent a teether that stays attached to the baby?’. Since then, Cheeky Chompers has grown from a small enterprise into an internationally known and loved brand. 

Initially rejected by Dragon’s Den despite impressing with the business’ strong branding and innovative parent-tested designs, our teams have guided the business from day one, through the teething stages to present day expansion.  

In the first five years, the business grew quickly, expanding into 35 different marketplaces with nine different products. Now, the brand has expanded into 49 countries and are stocked in over 1500 stores worldwide and is forecast to achieve a turnover of around £1.8 million by 2023.  

Selling online in a new landscape  

However, like most businesses, lockdown forced the Cheeky Chompers team to rethink how they operated. It made it necessary to move from a traditional store-based way of selling to taking a more robust online tactic. As Carl Gardiner, our trade digital specialist explains,

“As we adapt to the new changing business landscape, ecommerce has become a ‘must have’ for companies looking not just to survive but thrive.” 

The benefits of selling online are well established. It can help businesses reach a wider range of customers in target markets both internationally and domestically. It also provides people with the tools to convert interest in a product or service into real sales.  

Trading across new borders 

Of course, ecommerce is just the first step. Once you’ve sold your product, you need to deliver. Since Brexit, many new and existing traders have found changes to processes hard to navigate, which is where we come in. 

Exporting can be daunting, but many Scottish companies do it, and do it well. We have a range of experts and resources that can help businesses get started. One of the first things we encourage companies to do is to carry out an assessment of the level of demand and opportunity in the intended market. Information such as consumer trends and tastes will help you assess the level of demand. Companies should then look at similar products available in the market along with what the consumers are willing to pay.  

For Cheeky Chompers, who had been exporting internationally for years, Brexit meant establishing a firmer footing overseas. Julie explains that the logistics of their trading processes changed drastically after Britain left the EU:

“Overnight, we lost all of our Amazon business in Europe, and a lot of our European business, because we could not get stock into the EU. We managed to get round these issues by opening a fulfilment house in Germany, so products go there direct from the factories, ready for distribution across Europe.” 

“In the face of adversity, you have to dig deep, and you learn by doing that,” says Julie. “We have created new opportunities and put things in place that will really help us grow in scale.” 

Having emerged stronger, more efficient and more resilient thanks to the company’s own strategic responses to these challenges, Cheeky Chompers’ Amazon business has grown 500% in the last two years. The pair also managed to maintain online sales with premium retailers like John Lewis, Mamas & Papas and JoJo Maman Bébé, despite many of these stores being closed for months in 2020.