In 1987, Carole Middleton, former airline stewardess and mother of three young children, founded a home-based party supply business called Party Pieces. She and her husband Michael, a former airline pilot, built the business up over time and hired online retail agency Screen Pages to launch its first website in 2002. (The original was replaced with a redesigned site in 2007.) The collaboration with Screen Pages provided a wide range of supporting services which helped carve a path for Party Pieces to grow from a small mail-order business with a printed catalog to a successful "clicks and mortar" online store.
Today Party Pieces is the UK's leading party supply and operates from fashionably-converted farm buildings in the English countryside. Most recently, their oldest daughter Kate -- who must have grown up with a plethora of princess party gear -- is now engaged to Prince William and on track to become Queen of England.
What can we learn from their success? In A Practical Guide to Marketing Your Website, Roger Willcocks, owner of Screen Pages shares this insight:
In fact, it's pretty hard work nowadays; you need time, money, planning, management, and measurement -- all the sorts of things you need to run a successful business. What's more, there are no silver bullets.
He also offered this simple formula to estimate the amount of traffic that is necessary for a small business to achieve its sales goal: How To Estimate Traffic Needed For Sales Goal.
It's clear that Party Pieces was no overnight sensation, but rather, is the result of hard work over a number of years, combined with competent guidance and support from their strategic partners. And going forward, it looks like some of those party supplies will come in handy. They can certainly get a good deal on wedding decorations, or perhaps something for a pirate-themed bachelor party. So, party on!