Small Business Saturday Blog

Emma and Stuart started the Chuckling Cheese Company in 2012, selling Emma’s family’s award-winning cheeses at events all over the UK. Their reputation quickly grew as they shared the passion of a small family farm with a nationwide cheese-loving community.

The first Chuckling Cheese Company shop opened back in 2016, offering a wide selection of cheese, craft beers and ciders, spirits, sweet treats, extravagant hampers and celebration cheese cakes, alongside their range of cheese such as their famous Charcoal Cheddar and Botanist Gin and Tonic.

More Chuckling Cheese shops opened in the years that followed, and they now have locations around the country, including Middlesbrough, Brierley Hill, Doncaster and Gateshead Metrocentre, with more to come. They are also in the process of expanding their warehouse, which will grow the company nationwide.

Where to next? Online of course! They started their Amazon journey three years ago, selling a range of products online through their own Amazon store. They told us that not only has this enabled them to reach new customers and increase their volume of sales, but it has also encouraged them further to improve their capabilities and service across all of their orders, allowing them to expand their product range as well as growing their customer base.

According to Chuckling Cheese, Amazon has helped to refine and streamline the way they sell, market and progress their product range. Marketing Executive Maisie told us: “The more variety in products we upload and sell, the stronger our market research is. We learn what our audience is searching for, what they notice and what they purchase. For example, when we uploaded our rainbow box, it had little traffic and no sales. But once we amended the description and improved the images so they were more suited to Amazon's layout, with white backgrounds and minimal lifestyle product photography, the product became a bestseller overnight.”

Maisie adds: “The sooner a product is live on Amazon, the better chance it has of selling and becoming a top seller. Once a new product has had its first sale, the product is dominoed into a Top Products category and becomes a feature of the store, thus creating more sales, which increases its visibility across store front.”

As well as selling their own products, Chuckling Cheese also celebrate and support other small businesses by regularly sharing their products with their customer base. For example, they have regular sampling sessions with their suppliers which allow new products to be tried by the public through their stores. They have also created truckles and hampers with a portion of the profit going to local charities and campaigns. They told us: “We love bringing communities together for a strong shared platform, and Amazon, alongside our brick and mortar shops and our online sales, is one of the tools that lets us do that.”