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Company: Wiggly Wigglers
Contact: Heather Gorringe, Managing Director at Wiggly Wigglers
Location: Blakemere, Herefordshire, UK
Industry: Home and Garden, B2C
Annual revenue: Confidential
Number of employees: 17

Quick Read:

Wiggly Wigglers is a natural-gardening retail company descended from a farm in the countryside between England and Wales. Its products are not high-tech, but its marketing certainly is.

In fact, largely due to Wiggly Wigglers' use of new media to build a stable and successful business, it was recognized by Dell as the No. 1 small business in the United Kingdom in this year's Small Business Excellence Awards—and has made it to the finals of the global award.

Staring in 2005, Wiggly Wigglers Managing Director Heather Gorringe all but abandoned traditional marketing and instead took up a podcast, a blog, a wiki catalog, an e-newsletter, and social media outlets such as Facebook and YouTube.

The company has since reduced its annual marketing costs from over £100,000 to less than £3,000, all the while expanding its customer base and building international brand recognition.

Challenge:

Wiggly Wigglers specializes in natural gardening products such as composting kits, meal worms, English flowers, and native hedges.

"We sell products that gardeners may not know that they want," said Gorringe. "No one is going to wake up in the morning and think, 'Ah-ha, I really do need to be composting my kitchen waste using worms.'"

The company's early challenge lay not only in generating demand for such products but also in building a customer base beyond its immediate area, since it resides in a village of just over 60 people in England's rural West Midlands.

To that end, in 1995 it became one of the first mail order companies in the United Kingdom to incorporate e-commerce. "It's essential that we embrace new technology," Gorringe said. "If we didn't do that, we simply wouldn't have any customers."

Still, e-commerce wasn't enough. The company was spending more than £100,000 a year in marketing with direct mail, print advertising, and its catalog, but sales weren't adding up. The company accountant even suggested that it might be time to give up.

But Gorringe was confident in the company's product offerings and felt she simply needed to connect with people and share her enthusiasm. In 2005, she set out on a new campaign to engage people in a bold attempt to both increase leads and decrease marketing spend.

Campaign:

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Case Study: How New Media Helped a Rural UK Mail Order Company Go Nationwide, Global

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kimberly Smith is a freelance writer. Reach her via dtkgsmith@gmail.com.

LinkedIn: Kim Smith