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.
The UK 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.
The UK has a character-goods audience that grew faster than its shops did, and that is the gap this shop was built into. America is not short of shops - it is short of the ones that will tell you where a thing came from and who made it. 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.
Where you can buy it today
Two doors are open. This one is not, yet.
The British shop sells today, and the Taiwanese one sells in NT$ and reads in Traditional Chinese. The American door is a list and an honest wait: no dollar prices, no converter under a pound price, and nothing shipped until the tax, the customs position and the testing that American law asks of children's products are settled rather than guessed.