The Candy Garage accelerates growth following partnership with Diamond Logistics

The Candy Garage, a Lincoln based confectionery brand, has doubled its sales since partnering with Diamond Logistics, highlighting how outsourced logistics is becoming a critical growth driver for fast scaling e-commerce businesses.

Founded in 2022 by Gemma Faye Bell, The Candy Garage began as a £30 concept selling pick ‘n’ mix, freeze dried sweets and American candy online to local customers predominantly in Lincoln.

However, thanks to a strong and entirely organic social media presence, demand quickly expanded nationwide and within her first year she had transformed the business into a six figure success story, achieving a turnover of £130,000, while also expanding its product range to meet growing customer demand across the UK.

Since joining the Diamond network, The Candy Garage has grown from requiring just one courier collection a week to daily collections. In line with this strong progression, the company has also doubled its sales, achieved year on year growth of 30%, and expanded to the point where Gemma has recently hired a part time employee and become VAT registered.

As order volumes continued to increase en masse, Gemma found herself juggling the demands of picking, packing and personally delivering customer orders on her own, often spending up to three hours a day on the road — time that was taking her away from focusing on growing and scaling the business.

Gemma commented, ‘Having initially started The Candy Garage four years ago, the business almost took off overnight and as such I very quickly went from managing a small volume of orders per week to demand increasing tenfold.

‘It got to the point where it was becoming a struggle to manage everything as not only was I dealing with general administration, mixing sweets and packing orders – most of which were bespoke – but I was then jumping in the car to make deliveries across the breadth of Lincolnshire.’

That was when Diamond Logistics’ Lincoln network partner, Fleetline Despatch, stepped in to help, led by managing director Bob Fenwick.

Prior to working with Diamond Logistics, Gemma relied on mainstream carriers directly and often had to drive parcels to regional depots herself because she didn’t meet the minimum thresholds required for collection services.

This led her to be tied into a never ending cycle of being stuck on helplines if there was a delivery issue flagged, with Gemma spending hours upon hours attempting to get answers all while customers were waiting on their orders – threatening both her customer experience and satisfaction.

Initially sceptical about outsourcing deliveries and integrating a third party system into her website due to fears of losing the identify of her brand from a customer facing perspective, Gemma eventually took the plunge and made the strategic decision to adopt Diamond Logistics as her dedicated fulfilment partner moving forward.

‘I was largely hesitant about handing over the keys to our logistics and delivery operations as I was worried we would lose the personal touch because I am very much the face of the brand, with all the sweets being mixed by me and I was also at the heart of the day to day running of everything from packing orders to delivering them myself,’ she explained.

‘Realistically, people can buy sweets anywhere, but customers have bought into the Candy Garage brand and what we have built over these past few years.  Thankfully because of Diamond’s culture in terms of retaining that human element I haven’t lost that connection with our customers at all.

‘Partnering with them has given me the time and capacity to focus on growing the brand, as managing everything alone had become completely unsustainable. At the same time, we have been able to maintain the personal, hands-on service our customers know and expect, while allowing me to build upon our wholesaler relationships, supercharge our marketing efforts, and expand the brand’s presence on a national scale.’

Through using Diamond Logistics’ proprietary platform Despatchlab, Gemma is now also able to manage her entire shipping process far more efficiently from a single system.

Each morning, customer orders are automatically pulled through, allowing invoices and shipping labels to be generated in just a few clicks before parcels are collected later that day by Diamond’s Lincoln depot.

According to Gemma the platform has completely simplified the day to day running of the business from a logistics perspective, removing the painstaking administrative tasks that would often take her away from other tasks.

With everything housed within one easy to use platform, the system has simplified order processing while also giving her direct access to Diamond’s support team whenever needed.

She continued, ‘Working with Diamond has given me the time to really push the business forward. In many ways they have been a lifesaver as they have helped the business scale without losing any of our identity, and the customer experience if anything has actually improved.

‘With everything managed through Despatchlab, I also have full visibility over orders and shipments in one place, so if there is ever an issue, which is rare but does occasionally happen, I can quickly pick it up, contact the Diamond team with the consignment details, and it is usually resolved within around 30 minutes.

‘That for me was a huge breath of fresh air as before working with Diamond, resolving delivery issues could be incredibly time consuming and stressful. Now, I know there is a dedicated team on hand that understands our business and can deal with things quickly, which gives me real peace of mind.’