Member Article

Behind the business with onesie entrepreneurs, Kigs

Borthers Eddy and David Barrett, set up kigs.co.uk to exploit the growing craze for onesies. Here, Eddy takes Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

We’ve just recently started importing our products into America and the biggest challenge has been finding out information regarding US customs. This wasn’t easy information to access.

We spent a lot of time researching online, spoke to US Customs and then decided to ship a small amount of goods over to the US to test the waters.

We distribute in exactly the same way we do in the UK, which has proven to work well for us here. We import directly to a fulfilment warehouse where we then pay per unit shipped plus a storage fee.

We chose to expand to the US because there is no language barrier to overcome and we see a lot of potential. We think it’s a huge untapped market for us.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Making the transition from being a simple reseller of goods to having our own products manufactured for us is probably the most important achievement for us over the past 12 months.

We decided to make the switch about six months ago from retailing to having our own brand manufactured. It means we have complete control over all the packaging and we can make changes to the designs of the onesies. It also means we move up the supply chain and can start supplying to other stores.

It has brought a whole number of benefits and has allowed us to start pitching our products to bricks and mortar retail outlets ranging from independent fancy dress retailers to high street department stores.

We’re working towards being in ten separate retail outlets by Christmas.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

Our biggest focus is going to be marketing our new full range of children’s onesies that we have arriving in the next couple of months! As we mentioned earlier, we’re also expanding into overseas markets, in particular the US. There is a huge market over there for fancy dress, particularly for Halloween and other times of the year too.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

Aim to get as much control over your product in terms of packaging and branding as possible. We live in an age where branding dominates over everything else and you should be focusing on this as much as possible from the very beginning.

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in your region or generally, and where your organisation sits within it?

I think we live in an interesting time where having products manufactured is incredibly accessible thanks to the internet. At the same
time big high street retailers who expanded way beyond their means seem to be failing and more trade is being pushed online.

As such we’re seeing more and more small independent brands pop up online and perhaps some of these will make the transition from the internet into the empty shops. I think this is particularly true in industries like clothing where seeing the goods makes a big difference.

In terms of where we sit, we’re one of the brands that are now looking into making the transition from online sales to potentially getting into high street shops.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .