The Village is a new free-to-join initiative that aims is to help local independent businesses – especially those located in the outlying regions of the town, including the surrounding areas and villages in the locality – to reach and find new customers, by bringing together their experience in online retail and marketing.
Why join The Village?
Our region is blessed with a myriad of local artisan producers and suppliers. Innovative businesses including bread makers, beer brewers, vegetable growers, candle makers, sauce creators and many more – they continue to create beautiful produce locally for our community.
Currently many of these businesses are having to find new ways to sell their amazing produce, simply to be able to stay in business. The purpose of The Village is to help you reach new customers working collectively with other like-minded businesses.
Our intention is to position The Village as THE go-to local community online destination – where customers can browse, choose, order and arrange delivery via their web browser or mobile device, as though they were popping into their local village shops, only virtually. Alternatively, customers can call the supplier directly, placing an order across their preferred local providers separately.
Benefits of joining The Village
Local businesses that have joined The Village are already working collectively to promote this virtual community – bringing a wider customer base for everyone to benefit from, as well as finding and discovering new customers and routes to market.
Working collectively, our business members can generate even more benefits, including:
Sharing knowledge and experiences – we are all facing many of the same issues and may benefit from each other’s experiences.
Businesses can create packages of complementary products, be it ‘beer and curry’ to ‘cards, candles and cakes’, creating a luxury package for a personal treat, gift for a loved one or a corporate package to thank staff or clients.
Rather than each individually organising their own logistics, members of The Village can combine their efforts and help deliver each other’s goods. As many have already found, this has the benefit of minimising costs, reducing the number of transport deliveries and lowering our collective carbon footprint.
How do I join The Village?
The Village is an easy-to-join and free-to-use resource.
All that’s required is for you to upload your own organisation’s marketing material including logo, a sample product image and a 30-60 sec company introduction (this can be filmed from a mobile phone). Simply go to our website complete the online form.
Once we receive and approve your completed form, we will welcome you to The Village’s website and social media feeds, by dedicating a post to your business (feel free to like, share and comment to maximise your post’s engagement).
We will also send you a batch of labels featuring The Village’s logo. This will help you to spread the word among your customers.
Collectively with all members of The Village – and by working together to help promote the resource – we can bring more potential new customers to everyone’s doorstep.
We also organise a programme of virtual members’ meetings to share tips, tricks, life-hacks and ideas of how we can all work together to develop the benefits of our local collective.
What our Members Have Said
What our founder business members are saying about us:
“The Village is a great platform to launch any new products, or to raise awareness of your business in general.” – Snug Aromatics, artisan candle producer
“It’s great to meet new members and learn how they do business.” – Keith Morrell, Lucky Seal, supplier of imported stationery
“I’m really looking forward to getting to know everyone and am excited about the business journey.” – Krishna Patel, Dilishque curry paste.