UPS: How to expand your business internationally and acquire loyal customers

Shipping across borders can be quite complex and is one of the main reasons many small businesses face export and expansion challenges.

In this episode of Small Business Snippets, Anna Jordan discusses some of these challenges, the expectations of online shoppers and how the right partner can assist, with UPS’s Marketing Director Arthur Lam and supplement provider YourZooki’s co-founder, Marcus Mollinga.

Find out more about consumers’ expectations of small businesses in UPS’s Smart E-Commerce report here.

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Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan.

Today we have something a little bit different for you. We have a sponsored episode with our partner, UPS.

I’m joined by Arthur Lam, director of marketing at UPS and Marcus Mollinga, co-founder of vitamin brand, YourZooki.       

Anna: Hi, guys, how you doing?

Arthur and Marcus: Good.

Rather than me introducing you, and getting a bit winded, I'll let you guys introduce yourselves. Arthur, tell us a bit more about yourself and your role at UPS.

Arthur: Sure thing. A little bit about myself, I've been very fortunate to have helped customers both big and small in the last 20 years at UPS in different capacities starting, originally, in North America, the nature pack. I'm currently now the marketing director for our UK, Ireland and Nordics businesses. Very happy to be here and to share my thoughts and best practices that I came across.

Anna: And now you, Marcus.

Marcus: Yep, so I'm one of the co-founders of YourZooki. YourZooki’s one of the fastest growing companies in the UK. We specialise in liquid supplements, which are more bioavailable compared to capsules, pills and powders.

Most of what we're going to talk about today is around international shipping and how small businesses can deal with the logistics and the issues that they face scaling up – and shipping and logistics. I'm going to start off talking to you a bit more Marcus, because YourZooki has scaled up majorly over the course of the pandemic. How did you deal with the logistics of doing that? How did your shipping provider help?

Marcus: During 2020, we're in our fifth year of business now. Each year, we sort of doubled in size. Last year, we saw huge amounts of growth, especially on the online side of the business, so there's a fire alarm going off. Last year, we scaled really fast. Covid, for our type of business, that was good. In a sense where we employed lots of new people – more people interested in taking vitamins and supplements over other products. In terms of scaling and to triple a business in terms of revenue in the space of 12 months is a really difficult thing to be.

So one of the major things we had to do was ensure we had the right partner to get things from A to B, because it's easy to acquire a customer to get the product made, then get an appointment from A to B is also one of the key elements in our supply chain. With UPS, for us to scale fast involves selling in different countries, and selling into Germany, France, Holland, Ireland is a huge market for us, ensuring that we can get product there, then (within?) a couple of day. Timeframe is key. And UPS, I think at some points, w