A Rural Niche That Turned Out to Be Global

Holly launched her business while on maternity leave, originally looking for countryside-themed baby clothes she couldn’t find anywhere else—Land Rover prints, ponies, gun dogs, sheep. It started as a personal project, but when others showed interest, she collaborated with a watercolor illustrator to create custom prints and learned how to turn those into real garments. Today, her e-commerce brand sells internationally to customers in the UK, the U.S., Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, and even the UAE—where demand spiked after an influencer posted about her Land Rover baby grows.

Despite this reach, Holly has stayed intentionally lean. Nearly all her revenue comes from e-commerce, with a small portion from wholesale stockists and pop-up retail at large summer events. Most stock is manufactured in Turkey or India and shipped to her home, where she and occasional helpers manage storage, packaging, and shipping directly. Each order is hand-wrapped and gift-ready, often including handwritten notes. That kind of personal touch, she says, is part of what keeps her customer base loyal and engaged.

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Growing a Brand Without Giving Up the Core

Holly has no plans to outsource fulfillment—not because it wouldn’t save time, but because it would erode one of the things that makes her brand work: care. “Third-party packing would eat up the margins and strip away what makes our orders special,” she says. Her challenges aren’t unusual—cash flow, minimum order quantities, manufacturing delays—but her solutions have always leaned practical. When she couldn’t source one of her bestselling items wholesale anymore, she took profits and manufactured it herself.

The business is profitable, but still hands-on. She reinvests most of the profit into growing product lines, though she’s careful not to follow a fashion-style calendar. Her babywear isn’t seasonal. “I don’t want to be launching newness all the time. I want products that last.”

On the marketing side, Holly does everything herself. SEO, Instagram, Google Ads. Email is still underused, she says, though the subscriber list is growing steadily. What she hasn’t cracked yet is retention measurement. “With babywear, people move on. If their child ages out of our range, the emails might not mean much anymore. Unless they’ve had another baby.” Still, her returning customer rate is high, and Instagram is where most customers discover her.

Her long-term plan is clear: stay focused on e-commerce, make fewer but better products, and build a business that’s sustainable in both time and financial terms. She isn’t looking to raise money, hire a warehouse team, or outsource creative direction. Instead, she’s exploring where to bring in help most strategically—starting with social media and fulfilment support.

“I see people get overwhelmed because they didn’t invest properly upfront,” she says. “You need a niche. You need to pay for marketing. And you need to understand that this takes real money and real time. But if you do it right, it’s worth it.”

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