Challs - The business context

Video transcript

Graham Burchell, Managing Director, Challs International

We were a small company – we were very much a minnow trying to swim with the sharks – we’d been in business for a number of years and were moderately successful, our problem always was that we were competing with big, multi-national brands with huge advertising and marking spend and our main markets were the big supermarkets.

The sector we’re in is a big sector dominated by multi-nationals, with big brands with a total value of pushing many millions if not billions and we were just a small company operating in that sector. In terms of customer profile, the main customers and hence the main market is with the major multi-nation retailers, the Sainsbury’s’, the Tescos, Asdas and the like and a handful of companies control 70 or 80% of that market.

As a company we manufacture household cleaning chemicals, we mix the chemicals and we put them into bottles, in essence, that is what we do. We had a number of products that were associated with plug-hole care, from unblocking to freshening. But as business had grown over the years and we were looking for different opportunities, we’d expanding the range considerably and had a whole range of products in there from oven cleaners to window cleaners, fabric cleaners etc and some of those had under a brand that we had developed earlier called Buster. So it was a broad range of different products that didn’t necessarily make sense.

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