Danny K

#general-chat - January 28, 2026 at 11:03 AM

Does anyone UK based have any advice on the best way to fund stock cost based on your seasonality? I manufacture in-house so buy everything raw material wise and do around 70% of sales November/December. I usually get all the materials in by the middle of the year and start making all the components up from the raw materials, until the middle of October ( which is the latest it all needs to be prepped for ). I'm sick of the stress it causes when there is inevitably an issue with a material - then not having time to complain/sort it out. And also not having a day off between September - December, so now want to start in the next month depending how quick I can get stuff in.

But ideally I also don't want to keep using my cash supply for this and potentially go bigger. I'm also launching another brand in the same space so there is going to be bigger outlays on materials.
• So what is the most efficient kind of financing that I should be searching for (stock based), that allows me to buy all raw the materials in the next month and not pay it off until the end of December/early January when our sales cycle ends.
• What kind of rate would I be looking at paying for that.

#general-chat - January 05, 2026 at 02:36 PM

Has anyone been in 'Daily Mentor' by Davie Fogarty? Been a big fan of his content and feel he's given out so much good information on YT over the years. Thinking about applying for the new year. Any other similar groups people recommend? Used to be in a UK based one a few years back which did the calls and the group was insanely valuable (being UK specific) but they ended up closing it down.

#general-chat - November 06, 2025 at 06:48 PM

It gives you a breakdown but it's so vague, for example the app will just have all the multiple charges but doesn't give any details of what it is and the app user and Shopify sent me to each other. Turns out that app had changed our storage on our plan without informing us ( it was apparently shown within the app itself but not something I saw obviously ) and billed us an extra £500 in those few months. Unfortunately I need this app for Christmas so they will also get hefty commission from Christmas, but I will be changing after Christmas and hopefully dispute those charges.

#general-chat - August 27, 2025 at 08:46 AM

Really feel for the small businesses shipping into the USA now, with 30 countries suspending postal services to there. I've just cancelled 3 orders. Sure the bigger companies have a contingency but the smaller businesses shipping in, must be stressed right now.

#general-chat - June 20, 2025 at 12:25 PM

People who offer print-on-demand services for products they manufacture, what percentages is fair for a trade customer? It's not something I particularly want to do and they keep chasing up on it as their previous manufacturer closed. We are about to make a large investment on some new equipment so I am more open to it keeping it busy. From their initial emails they seem to think it would be trade price (double up on our production cost) plus postage - which would be what a wholesaler would pay but adding in a postage cost. Not sure that would be worth it considering everything is handmade to order and how much additional materials we would have to buy in advance for q4 and prep/make. Essentially holding all the risk.

#general-chat - April 29, 2025 at 11:36 AM

Probably common with brands who have terrible CS. When shopping or using services for my business - I'm of the mindset, things go wrong and that can't be helped. But if they don't go above and beyond in 2025 there are countless replacements and I'll take my business elsewhere.

An unhappy customer will tell 10 people, a happy customer will only tell 3.

In the UK we have strict responsibility on the online seller to get the item to the buyer.

#general-chat - April 14, 2025 at 12:23 PM

@Anthony Guynes Hi, are you apart of that admission program and is it worthwhile currently? I had a look for reviews and the last ones seemed to be left in 2021 on Trustpilot

#general-chat - March 11, 2025 at 10:57 AM

Morning all, any advice on approaching a closed down competitor and purchasing their none physical assets? Someone reached out yesterday who was a previous customer of a competitor which lead me to seeing they'd closed down. If they have just shut it all down and not attempted to sell it, I presume there would be more room for negotiation with a deal they hadn't anticipated.

They don't have a limited company unfortunately so not exactly sure how we could transfer everything if we could come to an agreement. I'd ideally want their domain, trademark, designs and would rebuild the website on Shopify. They mainly dealt with trade customers/wholesale and will have lost them now, if they could reach out to them again with an introductory deal to get them back on board with the brand.

Anyone also know how you would also approach the Amazon angle. I presume we would need to submit some sort of deletion of everything to do with the brand already on there, then register the trademark within our existing Amazon selling account as a brand - and start it again losing all the reviews etc?

#general-chat - March 04, 2025 at 10:44 AM

I'm sure Matt Kelly who owns Spacegoods said on his pod before that he had a terrible experience with James & James, think he ended up swapping between a few after frustrations. I've just had a search though and I can't find it via titles!

#general-chat - February 20, 2025 at 10:27 AM

Thanks for the replies, I'll take a look at the recommendations. I do have Notion downloaded but the setup is what usually puts me off with software. I much prefer analogue and having a big spread to view at a glance, with me not having team members needing to collaborate.

#uk - February 18, 2025 at 02:09 PM

Prodoto

#general-chat - February 18, 2025 at 02:08 PM

What methods or tools are people using for managing new projects? Overwhelmed at the minute as a single member founder trying to launch 2x sister brands, whilst not neglecting the main brand and everything else that needs doing. I usually use a basic bullet journal for day to day tasks. Just purchased and set up two massive white boards. I have an issue with stuff getting lost within notebooks - trying to have everything out where it's easy to glance at. Brainstormed everything out now I'm wondering how to approach it all and stay accountable.

#general-chat - January 29, 2025 at 01:49 PM

I just use a standalone egg cooker, cost £15 in the UK and does hard,soft and poached eggs. I eat 8 eggs every day and they're always perfect. Can only do Fried with a pan and need to be near a stove

#general-chat - January 07, 2025 at 02:43 PM

Has anyone had a Shopify theme customisation in the product page for product personalisation, that allows real time viewing of photo uploading etc? Currently spend around £3k a year on Zakeke which takes the customer to another page where they can do real time customisation and does work well. Except it's out the box with no options to customise the UI or have it optimised to just our product, we could make it much better for the customer. We would also like to stand out and separate ourselves from competitors who have followed what we've done with the app.

Customily do have a product customiser that allows you to real time personalise within the product page (which claims a better conversion rate from that). A few years back they didn't have photo uploads so seems to be new. I think I saw they also now connect into Amazon custom which I am very interested in as we often have to turn Amazon custom off during peak periods as it forces you to recreate the customers design rather than a downloadable file. But still doesn't have a custom UI. Maybe you could do use this app within a customised theme edit to make it all look custom to us

#general-chat - December 18, 2024 at 07:24 PM

Does anyone have any book/audiobook/podcast recommendations related around manufacturing your own products in-house? I feel like I'm aging 5 years every Q4 with the stress and 19 hour work days, constantly being let down by raw material suppliers, so looking for some decent content to consume. Spent the last 7 months prepping 7 days a week and still so much went wrong over our busiest period 😐

At such an awkward stage of growth.

#general-chat - November 09, 2024 at 02:23 PM

Best place to get creatives made with your videos and images? How much should I be looking at paying for 5-10 creatives?

Wanting to start testing some Meta ads for the rest of November, December. Even if it just results in some social media followers for our brand - I understand it won't be a game changer with such short time frames. Down 30% October and so far November just relying on SEO and Google PPC (don't leave all your eggs in one basket like me), really depressing when we've had such a good year of growth then randomly lost loads of our 1st place rankings just going into our peak selling season where we make our most profit. 🫠 Last year two years I had to limit sales and turn off Amazon as I couldn't physically make anymore working 19 hour days/only so much stock, where as now I've cut out some manufacturing bottlenecks and invested in way more stock for this year.

We sell mainly a personalised home/kitchen product which is purchased for gifts over the Christmas period and is handmade to order by me. So I think there's good potential with visual ads opposed to just plain Google ones. I also have a few videos which I think could be made into good creatives, by someone who knows what they're doing.

#podcast-limited-supply - July 16, 2024 at 08:42 AM

Really sad to hear that Moiz isn't coming back for the next season. Thanks for helping make the podcast so good ⭐ @Moiz Ali

#general-chat - July 02, 2024 at 01:18 PM

Unofficial Shopify Pod used to have lots of episodes with ecom founders and breaking down how they did it and more detail than you hear on most. It was probably the most useful and actionable content I heard at the time, maybe even up to now. I've been listening for around 8 years, in the last year or two it's been less founders and "how we did it" in my opinion, but still a good podcast.

Midnight pod here in the UK has had some big ecom sellers on who are UK based, but it doesn't really break down what they did to get there. It's more just chatting so not incredibly helpful. Episodes of notes would be with founder of Hairburst who sold to JD, founder of Essence Vault and also the founder of Crown and Paw. The podcast is also about the host building his company in public.

Davie Fogarty's YouTube content is some of the best around and he feels very genuine. Often puts out video guides people would be selling, hes very anti course.

So bored of episodes with SaaS guests talking about their software tools etc, it's got me a bit burnt out with Ecom podcasts. I want to hear from actual Ecom founders who have been through it.

#general-chat - June 08, 2024 at 09:43 AM

@Aaron Alpeter I've subscribed too, supply chains and manufacturing isn't talked about much on podcasts.

#general-chat - June 07, 2024 at 12:10 PM

Unofficial Shopify podcast

#marketing-creatives-lp - June 05, 2024 at 12:52 PM

That's a nice looking cart

#marketing-creatives-lp - May 29, 2024 at 11:37 AM

Does anyone have recommendations for high quality UK backlink providers? Thanks

#general-chat - May 09, 2024 at 08:58 AM

80%+ of sales are for the fully custom one, there isn't a logistical way we could offer another one at a discount on the upsell app unless it was for the same design they'd created (and the majority of orders are gifted so would only want one of that design). They have to go through the design process for it to be created as another product in the store.

One possible upsell I have thought of before would be a personalised greetings card for the people ordering gifts. I'm just not sure if the small amount of profit from that would be worth the extra work especially in Q4. We're about to invest in a new printing press though, which would be able to do that and give it more use.

But if I could have some complimentary products made to cross sell and offer bundles that might be worthwhile. I will take a look and see if they can get the creative juices flowing.

#general-chat - May 08, 2024 at 02:19 PM

Hi all, has anyone had experience with creating new skus that compliment your main product just for cross selling? Wondering if I'm missing out on extra revenue, there isn't really an upsell we can offer. As we sell one main product in different designs and then our main sku which is personalised by the customer. That is already at a higher price point than the standard.

#general-chat - May 01, 2024 at 01:36 PM

Anyone know of any social media content guides, strategies or worthwhile courses for Insta? 3 years in and I haven't posted anything to socials other than reposting some stories. I'm pretty lost with it tbh, it's not something I really use personally either. I'd like to build some brand authority with it as none of our competitors really do much with socials either and maybe run some low budget awareness campaigns. To then test some Meta campaigns further on in the year.

My old brand was the easiest to create content for and gained traction well but with a lot of effort, whereas here the majority of our products are custom/ given as gifts and use the customers personal images etc so harder for us to get content to post. I'm probably lacking some creative eyes at the moment and it might not even be worth investing the time I'm not sure.

#marketing-creatives-lp - April 29, 2024 at 09:29 AM

I have this page bookmarked from a few years ago, it's absolutely gold - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-get-authentic-ugc-autopilot-chase-dimond

#general-chat - April 26, 2024 at 10:14 AM

Stuck in review limbo! Another one of Shopify's changes changes to negatively affect us, by removing 'move reviews.'

I use Judgeme and they have always been great, the customer support had been the best we'd experienced a year or two ago. But we currently have 270 5* verified glowing reviews from customers basically stuck in the backend and after a week of backwards and forwards no solution.

We use a product customiser, so when they create their design it creates them a hidden product with their design on for purchasing etc. But when they leave a review it attaches to the created hidden one rather than the hero product they started the design on. We could previously just move them to the hero product. We now have to create 'product groups' and add everything to that. Their terrible UI filters means we have had to manually go through many thousands of products, 22 a page to then find only 10 of them are actually there to add to the group!

Wondering if switching to Okendo and exporting our reviews will help us fix this mess. TGIF

#general-chat - April 16, 2024 at 03:06 PM

Essence Vault is one of, if not the biggest "copycat" perfume business in the world who started from a market stall. He's definitely the biggest in the UK anyway, £70-100m rev I think and rapidly grown in the last few years.

Represent has the coolest founder George Heaton and I love his whole transformation and ethos with health and his dedication ( I see him rubbing off on even other founders, like Davie Fogarty) Their clothes are also top notch and I don't particularly like clothing brands. Search on Spotify for a few pods with him on, he's motivation to be the best you can be and I love what him and the brands achieved.

#general-chat - April 16, 2024 at 02:00 PM

Some British brands: The Essence Vault, Manière De Voir, Represent Clo.

Rep is fairly well known in the UK but all 3 are very successful. Crown and Paw one of my favourites for being creating their own niche, not sure how well they're doing recently though.

#podcast-limited-supply - April 16, 2024 at 01:52 PM

S5 E7 talking about the Amazon seller Utopia Bedding. I've just gone back and listened to it for the third time. I'm really surprised I've not heard more about theses guys or people discussing it. They have one of the most impressive businesses I've heard within D2C and they seem very unknown.

It's just so impressive the way they've took full control of every aspect of their manufacturing, logistics, everything in-house. So the only thing they're relying on is themselves (and Amazon marketplace.)

These are the kind of companies I love to hear about, would be so good to get them on the POD.

And as someone who manufactures their own products I dream about owning all aspects of the production line. Countless times we've been let down by unreliable suppliers over the years, really is no wonder manufacturing went abroad - other than the cost saving.

#general-chat - April 16, 2024 at 08:34 AM

Customily lets the customer personalise within the product page.

Zepto is another option.

#marketing-creatives-lp - April 15, 2024 at 10:02 AM

Google Ads and Shopping in my opinion. Much easier to get started with and it's people searching with intent. Once they're working it feels much more autopilot too. Meta feels very daunting starting out in 2024 and it also looks like a full time job managing that and all the creatives, landing pages etc you need. I've avoided Meta with my current brand, I just don't feel it's worth the time money and effort currently unless you've got a decent sized team.

#general-chat - April 15, 2024 at 09:53 AM

Yes that's basic customer service

#uk - March 27, 2024 at 10:12 AM

Connor Martin who owns Essencevault has a 3PL I've heard him talk about it on the midnight pod, think they have very straight forward pricing. No personal experience with it - https://jaqfulfilment.com/

#general-chat - March 22, 2024 at 10:06 AM

Strange as none of our content is AI generated. I think most of the click decrease is from dropping 1 down to 2 for one of our main terms. It's an annoying one as this search term is extremely transactional and we're the only one who ranks for it with our product page. All the rest just link to their homepage, I think it really skews Googles perception of the search term.

Will have to see over the next few weeks when it's fully finished how it levels out.

#general-chat - March 21, 2024 at 10:55 AM

Morning all. The Google Core Update 2024, have people here experienced gains to their SEO or drops since the new update? I've not really heard anyone Ecom folk talk about this, just bloggers and affiliate marketers.

We experienced our best growth and had an amazing start to this year. Then the last two weeks we're approximately 30% down on website clicks via organic compared to this time last year and felt a big drop off. People's thoughts? We had insane Google last visibility 2023 November December which dropped down after Christmas, maybe because that's our peak season.

Tempted to get an audit to see what we need to work and focus on. I mean since the last two updates I have no clue what we should be doing. Whether backlinks have been killed off etc. Any recommendations for freelancers?

#general-chat - March 19, 2024 at 12:08 PM

Has anyone here who manufactures their products created multiple brands and managed to horizontally scale? Would love to hear more. I've been working on a lightweight and more budget range of our products (with a faster/easier production line and limited skus) which will hopefully allow us to sell international with cheaper shipping or sending to a fulfilment center and hopefully retail, under a different brand to not devalue our main premium one.

There's another company in the UK that manufacture all of their products in-house and have basically created a brand group with different variations of their products under different brands but all via the same production line.

#marketing-creatives-lp - March 19, 2024 at 11:54 AM

For someone who hasn't ran Meta ads in the UK with their current brand, I wonder in Facebooks current state how worth it starting now. We've primarily focused on Google ads and SEO over the last 3 years and have a good ROAS all managed by me, always kept it first order profitable (don't have the luxury of pumping money into potential money dumps as a small business). But we're at the peak of how much we can scale Google ads with search terms etc - our peak is Christmas. The advice has always been focus on one main channel rather than shiny object syndrome, which is easy to fall into at the start. I'm just wondering now if we are leaving lots of money on the table and whether to add in another channel.

#general-chat - March 07, 2024 at 11:22 AM

Am I missing something regarding all the adverts and promotion for Sendlane?! I've heard several times on the Limited Supply and on other podcasts it's good for starting out with Email and more focussed on Ecom now than Klaviyo. It's $600 a month on the lowest priced plan, you'd need 40k contacts to be paying that on Klaviyo

#general-chat - March 07, 2024 at 11:18 AM

My friend who has a Google PPC agency subcontracts me out for a flat fee p/m for Amazon PPC and he gets a flat fee from the company. No percentage of spend or per campaigns, I see a lot charging per campaigns. A lot of the time is spent on building a campaign out so I can see why and you could just cancel after, bit it's been fine in my experience.

If you can find a decent freelancer you might be best offering a flat fee and then bonuses if they can hit reasonable and discussed targets. At least it gives them more of an incentive to get good results.

#general-chat - February 15, 2024 at 12:27 PM

Hi all,

Does anybody have any experience with brand licensing and the costs associated? I'm in the UK and there's a few brands we would love to license for a limited range on our products. I think I read you can expect to pay 10-25% of revenue from the range, but I've not read anything on actual upfront costs etc. Thoughts?

#general-chat - February 11, 2024 at 09:38 AM

Thanks for the replies - I hate even having to waste time thinking about it and it's all I've been thinking about for days now. I'm based in the UK

#general-chat - February 10, 2024 at 01:51 PM

Afternoon everyone, anyone dealt with having a competitor constantly copying? We have a competitor that makes the same product ( pretty niche ) and for the last year they've been copying more and more things. It's really distracting and getting me down even though I'm trying to think of it as - if they're copying they're always one step behind. But it's hard when you spend so much time, effort and thought into coming up with something someone else is just gonna copy. Even now I feel like I'm wasting time and focus looking into what we can do about it.

They started replicating our sales angles to start with, we'd come up with different solutions and aims with taglines etc that they never had before. Rewording all our copy into their own versions. Then they started replicating all our 5 product photo infographics - with the same features and points into their own branding but a much worse design. They started recreating our bespoke personalised designs we print on our product but changing bits slightly like just different fonts! Enough to try and argue that they're different I guess? I re designed our website before peak selling season last year and it's great - Now I looked at theirs yesterday and they have basically changed everything to how we have ours - layout, navigation, sales points on homepage and product page. But worse design and slightly changed wording (also without any dev work for the custom things). But some of our taglines were very unique and they've just copied them in the most obvious way. Does anyone think it's worth pursuing DMCA and if we would even have a leg to stand on if it's not fully identical? I think we could DMCA at least two of the product designs but I'm not sure if them using a different font would count as it being different enough.