Sacks duo bag an early Christmas at John Lewis
TWO friend selling personalised Christmas sacks have landed a deal with John Lewis.
Louis Porter and Tom Coleman started the business, The Handmade Christmas Co, which is officially called 36&5Ltd, in 2014. Coleman said: I was running a business doing inventory inspections for Foxtons and other estate agents, and Louis worked in IT for University College London. We were looking at a small side project to do at Christmas just to see us over and try and make a bit of money to put into a website we were working on.
‘The idea of the Christmas sack came around. The idea was to buy sacks from farm shops, personalise them and make a small eBay business, hopefully selling a few hundred. We reached out to companies – Wowcher and Groupon and those sorts of platforms – and pretty much all the websites we spoke to said they’d love to give it a go.’ The friends then negotiated with a wholesaler to buy sacks in bulk.
‘So with a credit card we bought the sacks and a cheap heat press on eBay. We ended up doing 42,000 in the first Christmas.’
The friends said they have worked to improve the quality and size of their range, which includes personalised and nonpersonalised products. They now have a pop-up for personalised sacks in John Lewis’s flagship Oxford Street store, with another set to launch in Peter Jones. John Lewis will stock non-personalised sacks in every store. Coleman said: ‘We’ve already had a meeting with John Lewis last week to discuss next Christmas.’
The company, which is based in Beckenham, South East London, is now expanding to include other products.