Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
Joan Woulfe, managing director of Cooking Marvellous, has sold her high street shop in Shrewsbury in Shropshire to focus on its burgeoning online operation.
The shop has been sold to staff member Gill Gradwell, and has been renamed Cooking Kneads. Joan is now concentrating on online operations at the Cooking Marvellous warehouse just outside Shrewsbury, which dispatches more than 1,000 orders a day.
Joan said: “I bought the shop in Shrewsbury in 2005 and spent the next couple of years building the business up. We then started selling products online, moving out to a warehouse in 2007. The online side of business has gradually overtaken shop sales and last year, accounted for 95% of our sales.”
She added: “I just didn’t have enough time to spend in the shop. Luckily, one of the girls who worked in the shop was interested in buying it and running it, so it has been a nice seamless transfer of stock and staff, and hopefully she will do very well.”
Cooking Marvellous was named as a winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade 2014. The business, which Joan runs alongside her daughter Katie Smith, packs and dispatches orders containing housewares and grocery products, of which 65% are sent outside the UK to more than 90 different countries. It garnered another award last year when www.cookingmarvellous.com was crowned Britain’s Best Retail Website at the Housewares Innovation Awards 2014, organised by Housewares Magazine and www.HousewaresLive.net.
