£500k In One Month
This blog post covers the time period from October 22nd – November 28th 2022.
The matching YouTube to this blog post was recorded on 11/28/22.
So let’s fire this one up! 🔥
Come November 2022…
I finally made the move up to Liverpool from Bristol to be with the team and run the store hard over Q4.
Just a quick recap of stats for the month of October 2022…
As you can see our previous highest day was 10/22 – with £13.1k, but unfortunately following that…
Stats kind of took a dive towards the end of the month, as once again we ran out of stock.
Victims of our own efficiency.
We had loaded up with stock at the start of October, scaled hard, but almost oversold in a way.
Once we hit that big £13k day, we looked at what we had left in the warehouse and had to reduce ad spend.
This has happened to us a few times which you will have seen if you’ve been following our journey, either here on the blog or over on YouTube.
At this point we were still fine tuning logistics with getting goods in on time from China.
Everything is a learning process.
New stock finally arrives!
In the nick of time really, at some point in week 1 of November, new stock arrived at our Liverpool warehouse.
Once stock arrived we were primed and ready.
We scaled ads back up. Hard.
£500k In One Month
Then things absolutely blew up. 💥
During November 2022 we scaled up to be doing in between £23k and £26k.. per day! 👹 (Almost $30k per day for the Americans)
Hitting half a million pounds, or about $600k, in one month was at this point the apex of my entire e-commerce career!
I’d never worked with, or on, a store that had turned over this much money.
The warehouse was going crazy, we were all working like madmen, and the vibes were gold!
Not only that, we finally hit £1m turnover from start of opening the business on April 12, 2022.
It took us about 7 and a half months :
Outgrowing Current Premises
Since start, we were kind of ‘tagged on’ to an existing Shopify business in a smaller warehouse.
This included office/desk space, and various storage units.
As we blew up over November and were ordering more and more product…
…employing more and more staff…
and needing more and more warehouse space…
…it was obvious by now that we needed bigger premises.
Running Out Of Room.
By this point we were ordering more and more different types of product, and in greater quantities.
Not only that, just our packaging supplies – cardboard boxes and padded envelopes were being ordered by the pallet full.
These were also taking up whole storage containers all on their own.
It was time to move into bigger, separate premises and really nail things down once 2023 started.
This, as we’re told, will be happening early December, on or around the 6th.
We are waiting on the current tenants to leave, then we can get in there ourselves.
Five More Packers!
By this point we were up to 1000+ orders a day…
Which as you can imagine is a crazy amount of packing.
Sorting out the orders, printing labels, assembling cardboard boxes, packing the orders, attaching labels…
The above tasks on a couple of hundred orders aren’t too bad but once you go over 1000, the logistics turn into a nightmare.
Because of this we had to hire FIVE new people, just to help with packing every day.
The warehouse was going crazy, at points it felt hard to keep up with the workload.
We had resorted to doing a lot of ‘pre-packing’ at this point.
This means putting products in padded envelopes and boxes outside of work hours, then piling them up ready for the next day.
This way the packers could come in the next day, slap on the postage labels, then get the packages put in sacks ready for pick up.
Other Miscellaneous.
- We hired a social media manager to take over what we were all trying to do in bits on the side. 😆
So she has got busy with TikTok, Instagram and some others.
It’s a relief having her on board honestly.
- Klaviyo has really come into its own over Q4, going over £21k in sales over the last 30 days.
As I’ve said many times, the more traffic you shove through your store, the bigger your lists will become.
Not to mention the amount of abandon carts…
After that, the more follow ups go out (and campaigns when you send them!) the more money you will make.
Klaviyo is the money maker – and on that note I’m making a new course all about it right now.
So keep an eye out for that. 👀
- Black Friday/Cyber Monday is now over
So got the final bit of the Christmas rush to come, and boy are we ready to go!
Last couple of points, we have all the stock now here in the UK that we will need for the rest of the year.
We have set the last day on the store for Christmas orders to December 19th, to ensure everyone can get their orders in time.
I’m already excited as hell for 2023 and what it’s going to bring with this store.
Ok… that’s it for this blog post about our UK fulfilment Shopify store that pushed up to £500k in one month, during November 2022.
Other parts from this series are available here:
part 1 – part 2 – part 3– part 4 – part 5
part 6 – part 7 – part 8 – part 9
The corresponding YouTube to this blog post can be found here.
I put all the YouTubes about this store in a playlist. Click here to watch it.
Part 11 is coming – so please keep checking this blog!