Who is doing this
Alexia.
Taiwanese, living in Taiwan, and the person who decides what Crazy Cherry carries. She picks every piece on the shelf.
Alexia grew up on the Taiwanese shelf: 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.
She knows that shelf 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.
She is the Brand Director. She chooses what goes on the shelf, what goes in a box, and what stays off it - and the last of those is the job that actually matters.
The other shelf
And this is the one she is filling.
Britain has never had these makers on a shelf. 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.
Our own brand footage.
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.
The evening this got decided
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 off the shelf, and that decision is hers.
The other half of it
And PJ, who builds the machinery.
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 three-language shop rather than a landing page.
The division of labour is not subtle. Alexia decides what is worth selling. PJ makes sure the thing that gets sold arrives.
Nothing real to show here yet.
The other direction
週五之箱.
Alexia also picks the Friday Box: a weekly drop of British character goods - plush, the lines that never leave this country, stationery and sweets - shipped to Taiwan and written in Traditional Chinese, for buyers there.