Who is doing this
The Crazy Cherry team.
A small team, buying across four markets. We decide what the shop carries, one piece at a time.
We grew up on Taiwanese design: illustrators, character makers and stationery studios that no British shop has ever carried, most of whom have never had a reason to look this far west.
We know that market the way a good buyer knows one - which illustrator's work is worth having, which name is noise, which small maker in Taipei or Tokyo or Seoul is about to be everywhere. That is the entire business, and it is not a supplier list.
The other side
And this is the one we are filling.
Britain has never carried these makers. It also has plush and stationery of its own that almost never leaves the island. Both halves of that sentence are why the shop runs in two directions rather than one.
Why the shop is shaped like this
The audience grew faster than the shops did.
Britain has a character-goods audience that grew faster than its shops did. There is a sweet gift shop, an own-brand hype machine, and a handful of stockists with no voice. None of them will take you somewhere you have not been. That is what we want to be for: the shop that carries the thing you had not met yet, with the origin on the label so you can go and learn about it.
Most of the job is refusal.
Choosing what to carry is the easy half. The half that makes a shop worth reading is what gets left out.
The other half of it
And the machinery behind it.
Crazy Cherry is part of the PoshLayer group: the sites, the shop software and the films come from there, which is why a brand this young has a working basket and a shop in several languages rather than a landing page.
The division of labour is not subtle. One half of the work decides what is worth selling. The other half makes sure the thing that gets sold arrives.
The other direction
It goes both ways.
We pick in the other direction too: British character goods and our own label, shipped to Taiwan, priced in NT$ and written in Traditional Chinese, for buyers there.