PARTNER CONTENT
CRIMPiT ________________________________________________________________________________________________________
creating fun and exciting products that haven’ t been seen before,” he opens.“ The idea for our square CRIMPiT came from Ian making peanut butter and banana sandwiches at 4am for his son, who trained for swimming before college. Ian eventually invented a gadget to make his life easier and I came onboard to help promote the business from a commercial perspective.
“ Our ethos stems from an appreciation of different ways of enjoying meals and snacks, and we wanted to enable people to do things differently, whether as an adult experimenting with unique snacking, using leftovers, making a convenient meal, or getting children involved in the kitchen. By focusing on innovative concepts, we recognized there was no direct competition, and we could bring products to market and get patents, registered designs, and copyright on them.”
Passion project to national sensation
On the business side of things, Mike continues:“ We launched around three years ago in the UK with just one product for the first 18 months, which was the CRIMPiT Sandwich Thin Sealer for thin sandwiches or low-calorie toasties. Retail has become a much more significant portion of the business as we’ ve grown. We started online with just one percent retail in our first year, four percent in the second year, and retail then jumped to around 25 percent of the business in our third year.
“ Lakeland was the first retailer to get in touch with us, and I couldn’ t believe they had reached out. Since then, we’ ve got partnerships with Oliver Bonas, Robert Dyas, John Lewis, and we’ ve just launched in Tesco and Waitrose, meaning we have a much larger distribution network and are stocked in over 1000 stores across the UK. We’ re in the process of signing with
Argos too, as we identified many customers searching for our products at Argos. We also successfully launched on QVC, one of the UK’ s leading television shopping channels, with sales exceeding six times the channel’ s predictions for new kitchen gadgets.
“ We’ ve very recently launched in Europe and although it’ s a positive move so far, we’ re still taking time to understand what creatives and marketing work for this geography,” Mike explains.“ We’ re currently running some digital marketing campaigns and engaging
in conversations about retail and television shopping, with the aim of being in retail stores within the next 12 months.
“ America is an exciting, yet challenging market for us; it’ s a huge opportunity for growth and innovation. We’ ve been trading in the US for around six months now and the business is certainly growing, but one of the challenges is navigating differing preferences across states, as some are more focused
... one of the best things we ever decided to do was inviting people to join a Facebook community once they purchased from us
46