Making 6 Figures Selling Cricket Bats
This passionate amateur cricketer used his SEO expertise to build an thriving E-Commerce side business.
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Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hey! I'm Freddie Chatt. Founder of Village Cricket Co, an affordable cricket gear brand based in the UK.
Having worked for over 10 years within the ecommerce and SEO industry, I spotted a gap in the market in the sport I love and launched a new brand to fill that void.
How was the business started?
My bat broke.
As a passionate amateur cricketer, it was heartbreaking (I loved that bat) but also exciting as the prospect of getting a brand new one was fantastic.
I started looking around to see what was in the market. And frankly, I baulked at the prices - averaging £400+ it was just ridiculous. This set the process in motion that eventually became Village Cricket Co.
I researched the bat making process, different types of willow that you can make bats out of, everything from how trees were grown to the finishing touches of bat making.
And therein I saw an opportunity. Kashmir willow. It's a strongly-held belief in cricket that English willow is far superior and Kashmir willow is awful and not worthy of hard ball cricket.
So what if that belief was wrong? Peddled by those set to benefit from English willow use. I sourced a few samples directly from India (literally just Googled 'cricket bat manufacturer india'), and we tested them out. And even we were shocked at how they performed. Some of our clubmates couldn't even tell the difference.
We spent around £400 in total on the first batch of samples. And once we decided on the supplier to work with - we invested around £3000 in the first batch of stock.
How did you get your first initial customers?
I pre-launched the brand with a giveaway.
Offering a free bat to one lucky subscriber who signed up for early access. We got active on social (Instagram and Twitter) and followed as many cricket clubs as we could and tagged them in posts about the giveaway (only did each club once as to not spam them).
We drove a few hundred subscribers thanks to this. This got us our first 10-20 sales. We then tracked down contact details of over 1000 cricket clubs in the UK and personally reached out to introduce us - not even trying to sell, purely asking for feedback.
We were running a new giveaway now we were launched and mentioned that which peaked a lot of interest resulting in our next 200-300 orders.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
We've grown mainly on the back of two channels. SEO and email marketing.
With over 10 years of experience in SEO, I leaned heavily into this channel.
We purchased some expired domains to give our domain a boost of authority and created highly targeted content to attract our audience. This has led to reaching over 30,000 visitors a month from SEO during peak season.
My keyword research process had 3 steps:
Sourced my keyword list – I went broad around ‘cricket bat’
Clustered my keywords + Identify the search intent – grouping them on a page-level & to help know what type of pages to create
Prioritise my keywords – based on how much money they could make
I wrote a whole case study on how I got my biggest ever organic day in terms of traffic in this article here.
Email marketing has also been huge, we run giveaways of our products and with partners to reach a wider audience and then nurture and educate.
How does your business make money?
We operate as an ecommerce store, so product sales are our sole income stream.
Our bat costs £117 - a lot below the average in the market. We've expanded the product range into protective equipment to be able to get more sales from existing customers and boosting AOV.
We're currently making a low 6-figure revenue each year at roughly 50% margins right now - mainly due to using SEO and email marketing and very little paid ads.
Our main growth inhibitor in recent years has been stock management; we've been out of stock for over a month during peak season for each of the last 2 years.
To date, Village Cricket Co. has been a side hustle. A fun project to work on alongside my main gig of SEO consulting.
In total, it's taken around 10 hours per week since launch (some higher, some lower) and it is a very seasonal business with more hours in summer and lower in winter. The brunt of the time spent has been on packing up orders and getting them shipped out, which I do daily in peak season and then ad hoc during the quieter times.
Outside of that, designing and sending emails to the 10000 subscribers each week whether in or out of season to keep them engaged and the first two years I spent a lot of time writing content for the website to get traction from SEO.
Where can we go to learn more?
Want a bat? Head over to https://villagecricket.co
Want to learn SEO? Sign up to https://freddiechatt.com/free-tips
Follow along the journey at https://twitter.com/freddiechatt
Want SEO help? Head over to https://freddiechatt.com
Thanks for reading!
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