Superfast North Yorkshire helps artist’s home business double online sales

A Helmsley-based artist has successfully transformed her wholesale art and homeware business due to a programme run by Superfast North Yorkshire.

Julia Burns, an award-winning artist, has doubled her sales and expanded her home-based business, including taking on two part-time staff, after completing a digital support programme and signing up to superfast broadband.

Julia’s company is one of around 2,000 small businesses in Yorkshire that have signed up to the innovative business programme, which offers free business support and advice on a variety of topics designed to help businesses utilize the benefits of high speed fibre broadband.

The Superfast North Yorkshire project – a venture led by North Yorkshire County Council and BT, has completed its first phase of the rollout with 90% of the county’s 380,000 premises now able to receive high speed broadband – offering speeds of up to 80Mbps and faster - when BT’s commercial roll-out of fibre broadband is also taken into account.

The second phase of the project has already begun, with £8m in funding to make high speed broadband available to another 11,100 homes and businesses in 2017.

Julia, a well-known artist whose abstract canvases are bought by private collectors around the globe, established her business in 2008 as a means to create and sell affordable art, based on a sophisticated version of the age-old method of potato printing.

As demand continues to grow, Julia aims to turn Red Hen Originals into a brand – expanding into stationery including greeting cards, wrapping paper and even fabrics and ceramics.

Julia said: “We’re a small business in a very competitive market. The little high street retailers who would normally buy from us are still struggling from the recession so we are very reliant on online sales. Before getting superfast, the speed was very slow and intermittent – very frustrating when you’re trying to process online orders or keeping the website up to date. Everything took so long, which would eat into my time spent in my studio.

“The advice we got from the support programme showed us how to get the most out of social media and to make the most of our website and it has certainly had a positive impact on the number of sales. We’ve taken on a part time marketing assistant and an admin manager to look after this side of things so that I can focus on my art. I’m also looking to expand the website with fabric products like tea towels and cushions. But without superfast to make everything run smoothly none of this would have been possible.”

Simon, Julia’s husband Simon, also attended the business support programme to learn more about how to use social media and digital marketing more effectively.

Simon said: “The course helped us to understand how websites and search engines like Google actually work. A big lesson was that you have to constantly work at it in order for it to work for you. Everything has to be regularly refreshed and updated. Content has to be dynamic and interactive to have a real impact. That’s when we realised we needed to take people on so that Julia could focus on her art.

“Having superfast has also given us a competitive edge. Before, wholesale customers would ring up having seen something on the website and want to check its availability for a client. We would try to check what it was on the website while they were on the phone but with our old slow connection it could take ten minutes or more to upload the pages. In desperation we printed pages from the website and stuck them on the wall for quick reference. These days buying decisions are made instantly – people don’t want to wait and having a good broadband connection really can make the difference between losing and winning a sale.”

Colin Hobson, Superfast North Yorkshire business advisor, added: “What Red Hen’s experience shows is that being digitally savvy is not the preserve of hi-tech industry or big corporates, new online ways of working benefit everyone – especially when they are powered by faster fibre broadband.

“As the Superfast North Yorkshire rollout gathers pace the issue is becoming less about whether or not a small business has access to the right technology and tools and more about how best they can use them as they become more widely available.”

The programme aims to attract 2,100 businesses to the scheme by the end of June 2015.

Carl Les, chair of Superfast North Yorkshire, added: “As the superfast rollout progresses, more and more businesses like Red Hen are starting to harness the power of fibre. Superfast can open doors for new opportunities, fresh ways of connecting with customers – and potential customers – and it can cope as business needs develop and grow.”

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