Exporting for growth – and why it’s worth beating the Brexit challenge

Exporting is by no means an easy option, but to achieve fast and sustainable growth, it’s a must.

Pricecheck’s export sales have grown from £8m to £40m in the past 10 years – a 400% increase. The global brands we trade with are recognised worldwide, so we have the potential to trade with most countries. That’s enabled us to mitigate some of the natural peaks and troughs of our domestic market.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing.We’ve had to tackle lack of resources, cultural differences, regulation changes, and of course, Brexit.

Starting the journey

We’ve exported for most of the business’s history, but in 2012 we decided to focus on it as part of our strategy for growth. Sales have grown significantly since we introduced our more  proactive and tailored approach.

To start our journey, we used all that the Department for International Trade had to offer and enrolled in its Passport to Export scheme.

This gave us access to an Overseas Market Introduction Service (OMIS) research report. We chose Spain as the target market, simply because we had a Spanish speaker in the team, and we’re still opening accounts that OMIS report helped us identify. It’s now now a £2m territory.

Understanding the impact exports could have on our company, we created our Business Development department. This team are now the first port of call for opening new territories and they conduct the the research needed in-house. They also ensure we’re represented  at domestic and international trade fairs, and inform our UK and international marketing..

Brexit challenges

We’ve faced many ups and downs during our journey, but the past two years have certainly been the most challenging.

Overnight, ease of access to 75% of our export market had vanished.

Suddenly  every business in the UK  was facing the same challenges with customs and compliance – but we were also competing against European businesses who had seamless trading practices in place. For us, this was a big challenge.

To pre-empt as much of this as possible,  we launched a Belgium subsidiary in 2020, supported by our local Chamber of Commerce. We realised quite early on that every country was interpreting rules and regulations differently and to understand them all was an impossible challenge. However, we could become experts in how one country would import and export goods and for us that was Belgium.

The subsidiary has become vital with 90% of our EU exports taking this route.

Exporting has always pushed us to grow, it’s made us work with more brands, more categories and of course more countries.

Brexit meant we needed to work even harder than before. It made us expand our UK partnerships and look into new and niche markets as well as looking further afield. Post-Brexit our sales to ROW grew 17% YoY.

Surprise benefits

Exporting obviously impacted our turnover – but it’s helped us in so many other ways.

• Winning the Queen’s Award for International Trade in 2015 firmly put our name on the map. We continue to see an increase in inbound enquiries because of this, and the other awards we’ve won due to export growth. Building our brand has enabled us to access the big household names we work closely with.
• It’s opened a new avenue to recruitment. We speak 14 languages across the Pricecheck team and we’re always looking for more. We’ve found that language students typically have a passion for travelling and with our international presence, this is something we can now offer. People thrive on the challenges that international trade brings.
• We proudly trade with countries from Australia to Algeria and Canada to Cameroon. Operating this broadly has improved our relationships with manufacturers – we can access the non-traditional markets which typically have less focus from the brands or even competitors.

Despite the challenges faced over the years, we accept that as a business, we simply could not have achieved our fast growth without exporting. We have more ambitious targets of increasing our turnover from £100m to £200m within the next five years and know that exporting will play a huge part in that growth story too.