Dan Cluderay, the owner and founder of Approved Food goes down memory lane to talk about how it all started…
I used to work for Sony Ericsson and in 2001 me and my wife got made redundant. All the company was shipped over to Malaysia and alongside another 2,000 people we needed something else to do.
All the jobs were going quick and we decided to start working on the markets because my father-in-law was already doing that. He’d found a steady income after having shops and market stalls.
We bought a small van and started working in Doncaster and Hull and the idea was doing exactly the same as he was doing.
He was buying short-dated stuff, even out-of-date best before products and every week he would go to the same markets, but take an entirely different load. He’d built a really good small business.
Having a background in technology and trying different things I followed in his footsteps and after a few years I think I was the only market trader who was bar-coding stock. I was analysing what things sold where and realised that markets only two miles apart were totally different.
We had a good small business working in Leeds, Doncaster and Hull. Around 2005 my first son was born and my wife couldn’t work with me on the markets. We started going into a bit of wholesale, into shops and keeping all the IT things rolling.
About 2008 I registered Approved Food and took the stock that I was selling, put it online and used the skills of sourcing and technology and on 14 August 2009 we made our first sale for about £27. I can even remember the ladies name.
In the first week made about £50 and there were a lot of jokes from the wholesalers I knew saying that it wasn’t going to work and what was I going to spend the £50 on. It was just kept on the quiet and each week we started incrementing up-and-up.
Things turned a corner on 12 November 2008 when we were posted up on Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert.com by a customer and we went from a few orders a day to 22 orders in an hour – an amazing jump.
It was the start of three months of incredible growth to the point where it was really damaging and stressful.
Back then we were working long hours and packing up all the orders and getting them out. We answered our customer services on the MoneySavingExpert.com website.
We were talking to our customers, trying to offer genuine value for money and we were new to Ecommerce. We shopped and we knew what to do but when you are on the other side of the fence it’s a different story.
We’d just one up to a completely new level of busyness.
