Eureka: When is the right time to expand?

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Sally Boddington is the co-founder and CEO of White Coco, a fashion retail brand she launched in 2012 with her friend and co-founder Sarah Buckley. Before stepping into the world of fashion, Sally trained as a microbiologist and virologist, working in Hong Kong before ultimately leaving science to follow her passion for style and design. Today, White Cocoa has three locations in the UK, including one in London, and is known for its collections, collaborations and standout customer service.

0:54With growing demand from customers overseas, especially in the United States, Sally finds herself at a crossroads. So how do you decide it's time to take the leap and go international? Well, here's Sally with more.

1:10We start in 2022, post-children, a great mate of mine, Sarah. We sat on a beach and we'd lost this friend who we were doing a bit of work for. And I said to Sarah, we can do this. And she said, do you think? I went, yes. And so we brainstormed for three days the name and came up with White Cocoa. We went back and set about starting up. This friend had taught us where to source. And we just started off very small, selling people's houses. And then opened the first shop in Hungerford in Berkshire. five years ago opened the store on the King's Road. But Sarah's since retired, so I run it now. Clothes and accessories, that was what we did really in the beginning.

1:54It's much more general now, but it's still the main focus is on clothes and accessories. And we just want to find that point of difference where, which is not too expensive, that is another USP. We don't have too high a price point and we have a variety. And we put it into colour sections, so people can come in and see which colours they love. We started off, hence the white cocoa name, as neutral colours. Now we're very much known for our bright colours as well. So that is really the inspiration, was to do something that's a little bit different. It sort of began with curating things that we like the look of.

2:27So it's sort of a look. And travelled to Paris a lot to do that. Quite a lot came from Italy, which we sourced from as well. And then started sorting in this country as well, in England, more gifts rather than clothes. Although we do do that as well now. just it's really finding something it's like a golden we said as a nugget there would be it's a funny place but there might be just one nugget in here so i very much cherry pick from things that i think are that little bit different and are commercial as well it's sort of not tick box but it's it's a mixture between the two what's exciting is finding something that you know is going to be really popular and you think and you look at it and you think that is just perfect and And that's the exciting bit, really.

3:13And then the transposing, you take it back and it sits in the King's Road Shop or wherever and people love it. And also now we have started manufacturing our own as well. Things like the jacket I've got on today, I designed that with one of our suppliers. So we have these great suppliers in Paris that we've known for quite a long time now who will just sell to us because we buy in bigger quantities. And they will get things made for us. They make things. So we've got about 30 % of our business now is things that we have made just for us. We have three shops. We opened the first one in Berkshire, actually, in Hunkerford, and then moved literally last year up to a much bigger store up the road there and then opened a third shop in Sametown, Oxfordshire.

3:57And we've made them. It's a look that we love. It's all in colours, really, in sections. I have a lovely right-hand girl called Katie. We make the windows into a story, really. So they're inviting to come in. Some of our demographic do not even particularly like going online. They want to come into the shops and they want to try and want that experience. And we'll often make them a coffee or we have champagne evenings or whatever. We do a lot of events. And so the experience is so much better. And it's easy to go against all this self-checking out, which people don't want to do. And also there's a trend these days of not even putting your telephone number online.

4:37So all these people cannot get hold of someone they want to. We are at the end of a phone. I feel very strongly about customer service. We get a lot of queries and I always say, please pick up the phone and explain, which is a novelty these days, but it works brilliantly for us and people really appreciate it. expansion internationally is on the radar but actually expansion within this country is closer on the radar because we're asked all the time to open shops wherever it might be currently edinburgh and bristol various places but the reason i mentioned internationally is because we have an awful lot of american customers and also a lot of middle eastern customers but a lot of American customers come in and they're always saying please open in you know Tampa in Florida or please open in we had a big order from someone in San Francisco yesterday and I think we have a lot of Americans coming in they obviously love the King's Road and we have something that's different from anything there and I think that's when we have a good price point that's huge ESP for us so they love it we would look at opening America or at least putting our toe in the water there.

5:49We have French people in saying there's nothing in Paris, which is hilarious, really. Would we open there? But Europe, probably less at the moment, but never say never. And I've got so many different places in this country that I really want to pin down and open. And then Ireland is another option. But I would certainly think about it.

6:12Collaboration has come out of having the biggest store, which is a two-floor store in the King's Road and so we had this space and room to do that sort of thing so we've done events for a long time whether we do book signings or collaborations for people who want to pop up with us. We've recently collaborated with Amelia Hitchcock-Merrick who is the founder of Bijou Demimi and we now have that jewelry brand in our store of one of many but but it works very well. We are excited about the expansion of book launchers within the company we do a lot of them actually and we've just had a recent one in our hungerford shop jill hornby has launched her book the elopement she wrote the mists austin series and that was brilliant and we have several in the offering because publishers don't do their own launches anymore and we have the perfect forum for it in arts particularly the king's road so we'll do them in all of them and so it works incredibly well we have an evening they come and talk about the book they'd sign book people browse the clothes and we give them glasses of champagne.

7:17So what's not to like? I'm excited that we've got a lot of those in the pipeline. That is an exciting progression.

7:31That was Sally Boddington, the co-founder and CEO of White Cocoa. You can learn more by heading to whitecoco.co.uk And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more at the website monocle.com. That's where you can join the club and subscribe to Monocle magazine. If you'd like to contact the team, email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.

8:07Thank you.