“We’ve gained an understanding of our customers from technology”

We’ve spent the last two years and a lot of energy and capital on setting up and building our monthly cheese subscription programme, The Cheese Club. In 2020, most of our efforts and budgets will go into growing what is now a hugely successful part of the business. We’re determined to grow our subscription base and bring the highest quality cheeses to as many customers as possible. Developing our relationships with producers, discovering new products and ensuring supply commitments are critical to managing a successful subscription programme so our focus throughout the year will be on those key areas.

At the same time, the wait for some sort of movement either way on Brexit, for all of us in food industries, is still a painful and frustrating wait. We receive large weekly shipments from Rungis in Paris, and any amount of delays or worse, tariffs, on this stock would really hurt our margins. Someone along the line will need to pay for the increased cost of European cheese following a departure from the EU, whether that’s the initial producer, the wholesaler, us or the customer. We still feel loyal to all the magnificent cheese producers across the Continent, however, so whatever the situation with the EU we will find a way to stock their wonderful cheeses and include them in our stock listings and subscription boxes.

We have recently become the exclusive online retailer of the new Alex James Co. range of British cheeses. We’re now offering boxes of four or six of his fantastic new cheeses, which are also available individually, along with other merchandise such as clothing and books. We will certainly look to develop this relationship with the Alex James Co. team through the coming year and hopefully will play a part in the Big Feastival at the end of August. Celebrity endorsements of artisan cheese benefit everyone, and the more that the superb cheeses made in this country are praised in the mainstream media, the better it is for everyone in the industry.

We’ve just celebrated our 10-year anniversary at Pong, and as an online business in the age of the internet, we’ve been around for what feels like a huge proportion of the digital retail era. Personally, I’ve always felt the same about the internet which is, as the adage goes, ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’. So much of what we did in our very first year we still do, and we do it at the same time of year in the same way. While we’ve honed, refined and streamlined our production processes and have invested and improved our logistical set up, we still have peaks of sales at the same points in the year, we still acquire customers with the same methods, and we still offer the same products – boxes of high quality artisan cheeses, quite a few of which are still the same classics, made with the same methods as 10 years ago. We’ve been able to finesse marketing techniques over the years and gained an amazing understanding of our customers from the technology available now, but ultimately what we’ve really learnt is to not keep making the same mistakes we made early on.

As another new year begins I know that while we will hopefully grow in the areas we focus our efforts on and develop some new ones, I’m also aware that a lot of the structure of the year and our customers’ buying patterns will be mainly the same as always.