eCommerce MasterPlan

023: Serious Readers’ Alex Pratt on selling the world’s best reading lights and growing sales to £5 million

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Alex Pratt is the founder of Serious Readers who build and supply the world’s best reading lights. (I am a customer and love these lights – perfect for an evening of needlework! And they do ship worldwide). The business started in 1986, and is now a mail order business with strong online sales, as well as Amazon and wholesale sales. Turnover is £5m achieved with 50 employees selling 20,000 lights per year. Alex is also the Chairman of the UK’s Direct Commerce Association.

CLICK TO TWEET: Founder of Serious Readers Alex Pratt talks raving fans on @eComMasterPlan podcast

serious readers quote
About the business

  • eCommerce Business Structure – Mail Order (with a strong Wholesale side)
  • Product Range Scale – VERY niche
  • On a bespoke Ruby on the Rails platform by MoneySpyder
  • 1 million customers worldwide
  • 50 people in the business
  • Based in the UK, sell globally

Listen to hear how Serious Readers got started in eCommerce

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

Raving fans, Serious Readers bases their business on the idea that light enriches lives and look for people that believe this also.

Listen to hear how Serious Readers creates raving fans and uses the number of raving fans as their number on KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

On the Radar for the Coming Months

Maximise the value from the season, which for them is now through till March.

  • Make sure everything works
  • Multiple testing and conversion to replicated their offline journey and taking it online
  • Migrating the customer recruitment activity online

You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…

eCommerce Book Top Tip

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

  1. Know your customer
  2. Test test test

Tool Top Tip

Ipads to make sure your non-desk based team members are in the loop

Listen to hear how Alex keeps his diverse and spreadout employees performing as one team (including the evening games in the background!

Start Up Top Tip

Work out if an idea is an opportunity by getting it out early and if it gets traction it is likely to be an opportunity.

If your business didn’t exist, which eCommerce Business Would you like to be Running?

Airbnb.com –  Airbnb is a website for people to list, find, and rent lodging. It has over 1,500,000 listings in 34,000 cities and 190 countries

Interview Links

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