The Ultimate Family - Hippychick at 25

This blog is written by Tom Minchin – Julia and Jeremy’s eldest child, who has grown up with Hippychick.

When asked how to sum up 25 years of Hippychick I soon realised that my parents and I were coming at the topic from different standpoints. Hippychick has been ingrained into their lives for a quarter of a century now, but it’s not all that they have known.

They existed outside of the business with mum founding the company in 1999. Yet for me and my siblings, we cannot separate our lives from Hippychick. There is no before and after. We have grown up alongside it – from the hectic operation ran out of a house in Spaxton, to the marginally smoother running Bridgwater based service today.

That’s not to say we’ve been fully aligned (my own particular growth spurt happened rather later in life) but it does mean that we’ve come to understand the trials and tribulations of running/raising a small business from an, at times, unnervingly close viewpoint.

My siblings and I have been early stage models, container unloaders, and occasional blog writers amongst a myriad of other things. Hippychick has provided a constant stream of entertainment – which is exactly the point – this article isn’t about us, but instead to reflect on the company that’s always been in the background and more than occasionally in the foreground of our lives for 25 years now.

The beginning & Early Years (1999 – 2005)

The start of the company and subsequent years in Spaxton aren’t memories that are readily available to me so I’m relying entirely on second hand information.

That said, I am reliably informed that my parents had no phones, no delivery van, and were regularly the scourge of the local post office causing enormous queues by sending orders out.

Every room in the house apart from the kitchen was used as a store room and resources were spread so thin that a 7-month pregnant Julia Minchin was having to unload vans filled with heavy AROMAKIDS liquid by herself.  

My first memories of Hippychick start in Bridgwater, when what is now still a confusing warehouse was truly labyrinthine. I remember playing hide and seek amongst racks of the (now sadly no longer sold) Shoo Shoo’s (small leather children’s shoes available in all sorts of shapes and sizes) and making nests in hidden corners of the office.

Understandably, my halcyon days are remembered a little differently from Mum and Dads’ perspective…

Shoo Shoo were a client based slightly unhelpfully in South Africa and although the scale up from home operation to a commercial premises is the sign of an evolving business, it also ushered in some of the trickiest times the business has ever seen.

The move in 2003 meant costs massively increased just as my sister joined the family. Pure exhaustion and a sense of battling on every front are the overriding emotions Mum especially focuses on when talking about these particular years.

Yet despite the never ending days, the business was quickly growing and evolving from pipe dream into commercial operation. In fact, both parents highlight that the forklift truck was brought around this time and that was the moment that for them when Hippychick was an entity to be taken seriously.

The company was now growing in terms of employees and products and was starting to expand at a much faster rate.

Rack of Shoo Shoos hung up in the Hippychick Warehouse
Shoo Shoo’s was one of Hippychick’s first brands.

Middle Years (2005 – 2015)

Growing the business meant endless trade shows all over the country and even further afield. A practice that still fills the business calendar to this day.

2005 was a successful year with the relationships fostered during the early years starting to bear fruit, the result of which being that Hippychick became a supplier to major national retailers such as Boots, Mothercare, and Tesco.

Mum and Dad put the expansion down to versatility and continual adaptation. Picking products for the future rather than just sticking with a set list of bestsellers. Different relationships with a wide variety of suppliers and customers meant they could find formulas and ways of working to suit each individual need.

Accompanying this was a switch from analog business practices into the digital age. A process not merely concerned with starting to use email as a work tool but centered around foresight in becoming an early adopter of Amazon – a then relatively small ecommerce platform.

Industry recognition started to follow this expansion with success at the national and regional awards and I vividly remember feeling a mixture of pride alongside confusion as to why my mother was going to be speaking on the radio and had her photo in the paper.

From this mid-noughties to early 2010’s timeframe, a lot of the Hippychick conversations I remember interacting with involved Mothercare and Toys R Us. Both were key to early Hippychick success but fast forward to the present day and both businesses are barely recognizable in current form from the industry powerhouses that they were 5/10 years ago.

Julia and Jeremy with the Somerset Business Awards 2011
Julia and Jeremy at the Somerset Business Awards in 2011, with their award for “Business of the Year (5-50 Employees)”

Growing Pains

Trademark Incident (2013 – 2020)

I think I started to appreciate some of the random vagaries of entrepreneurship when Mum and Dad told us a container had been seized in China. A Trademark Troll (apparently a real term) had claimed the Hippychick trademark abroad and consequently had rights to a container full of stock that was urgently needing to be sent out to waiting customers.

£30,000 of stock was lost and never recovered, which was just the start of an 8 year saga which cost a huge amount of time, energy, and money. A painful lesson in international business.

Brexit (ongoing)

Undoubtedly for a small business heavily dependent on shipping to and from Europe, Brexit has provided, and continues to provide, a multitude of challenges.

Currency fluctuations alongside huge volatility in shipping and transport rates have been the catalyst for near disaster more than once.

Covid

The pandemic changed things very quickly. Dad was grounded as a person at risk and working from home whilst Mum went into the office. I think both would admit they probably would have been happier if roles had been reversed.

My night time dissertation writing schedule clashed heavily with Dad’s early morning get up and go attitude. Yet whilst the extent of my problems were family discussions around work ethic, the business was having to sell goods at a loss as shipping prices went up 1500% after Covid.

Price increases by no means guaranteed quality either – the scale of the problem was brought home when hearing that a container filled with already late stock was now on its way to Le Havre as there hadn’t been enough time to unload the ship in the UK.

Far from being compensated, the business now had to cover the cost of a missed transfer in the UK and get a lorry into France at short notice. All with customers waiting.

It’s just one example of the type of issue that the Hippychick team were dealing with on a daily basis. Yet despite gorgon knots such as the international shipping crisis awaiting them, the bravery and willingness of employees to come in when possible and ensure that orders could be sent out ultimately saved the business.

A series of 3 images - left: Hippychick gift bags in the van. Middle and Right: Hippychick gift bags and toys in front of a school and nurseries.
In March 2020, in the very first month of Lockdown, we raided our warehouse and dropped off toys to our local nurseries and schools.

Ukraine

More currency fluctuations and shipping turmoil are brought by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

However, I think the enduring Hippychick memory from this period is when Mum and Dad manage to organise a Hippychick branded 40ft lorry full of supplies to go to Ukraine. Dad drove there and back and there was a tangible sense of being able to use a long existing knowledge of trade routes and contacts for positive change.

Jeremy and the Drivers with the Hippychick Van that went to Ukraine
The Hippychick lorry, filled to the brim with supplies for the people of Ukraine and Jeremy and his team of Drivers.

Hippychick Today

The current website, logo, and PR strategy (rambling blog excluded) are all slightly smarter than what Hippychick initially brought to the table.

Amazon is perhaps no longer aptly described as an exciting new way forward for the business but instead an all-encompassing titan of online industry that takes careful managing…

Nevertheless, many things that have ensured the business’ longevity haven’t changed. The Hippychick office still contains many of the familiar faces from my childhood (a particular shout out to Steve, Rose, Scott, Sarah, Alan, and Mike) who all have an incredibly detailed knowledge of the industry and without whom the business wouldn’t exist.

Products may change but the commitment to getting orders out as soon as possible  remains, Dad is occasionally caught blowing up the new crocodile creek product line until 1am at home.

The key tenet of maintaining good relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers is still firmly in place.

Final Thoughts

Putting 25 years of business into a small piece of writing is always going to miss the majority of the pleasure and pain that accompanies the endeavor.

That said, even from just thinking back to my own experiences alongside asking my parents about their own reflections, the theme running throughout has been one of resilience.

The timeline isn’t one of hard work at the beginning and then sitting back and enjoying watching a business grow. In fact the last 15 years seem to have been intent on bringing about an ever more difficult conveyor belt of challenges.

Yet there has never been a reliance on anyone else to do the work, from a heavily pregnant Mum unloading containers at the beginning to Dad still pumping up inflatables now. Of course, this is all aided by a fantastic team in Bridgwater who are in many cases more like a family than employees now.

Problems have changed certainly over 25 years in their scale. Products have come and gone (bar the evergreen Hipseat) but seeing my parents work harder than ever today to combat a myriad of challenges not limited to increasingly volatile container prices, a global Pandemic, and a hugely different baby market technologically to when they began only furthers a sense of admiration of what they have built.

Hippychick may have grown up over the years through both necessity and entrepreneurial innovation, but it remains at heart true to what it was 25 years ago, a family business.

The current Hippychick Team

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