Visiting businesses

Tuesday

Today I’ve visited three rural businesses at the local area. One rural shop, one farm restaurant with B&B and one farm with specialities on flower and gardening business. They’ve all got different specialties but I think the farm restaurant with B&B was the most interesting.

“Hopes of longtown” is a village store with focus on local made products and social community for the people living in this area. It’s nestled at the foot of the black mountains in South-West Herefordshire. When moving around I was thinking about how do they actually get customers and why should someone ride a couple of miles just for shopping?
They do have some marketing by the social medias and the focus customer departs on seasons. In the summertime it’s mostly tourists and visitors. But the rest of the year their usual customers are local people living in the area. They also do corporate with some other organisations by having events in the area to get people a reason for visiting.

Most of the products are made in the local area and that makes that it often has a higher quality than products for example in the big warehouses.
Their biggest threats are some farmers markets close to the shop. But there is a difference in that the farmers market has to have testing and more personal selling.

Another rural business is the “White Haywood Farm Restaurant”. It’s set in a 400 year old barn near the Olchon Valley in Craswall, South-West Herefordshire. This company use to feed lambs for using in their food. The restaurant is opened 3 days a week for lunch, but they recommend you to reserve a place anyway. It’s owned by a Pauline and Philip Goodwin, who both has a background in the farming and cooking business.
It all started when they were able to by the farm from relatives, and in 2006 they established the company. All since the start-up it has been going well and there are always people visiting for lunch. The number of lunch depends from day to day but it seems to be between 2 and 50.
If you want to stay by night the can give you a room in the B&B placed at the loft of the barn for a worth price.
The farm cultivates about 980 acres of land and it produces almost every food for the restaurant.
For the future they want to have bigger facilities to make the work easier and expanding the business. This may be a bit difficult because of the nature and neighbours. They have tried social media for marketing, but because of the weak internet signal that often becomes kind of difficult.

The last business to report from is “Wiggly Wiggers”. It’s a company promoting self suffiency and natural gardening. They’ve got 500 hectares of land in a distance of maximum 25 miles away from the farm. Wiggly Wiggers use to grow wheat and flowers. The flowers are main product which is marketed by their internet page where the customers are able to choose exactly witch kind of flowers they want for their bouquet. The wheat is used to make natural gardening products.
The B2B customers are recently built on a long way traditional relationship with trust deals. The company has about 10 people working and they often work at the local place near to the customers, why they use Skype to communicate.
Maybe the name makes it difficult for the customers to find the company because it does not really refer to flowers, but they are on social media and so on to make it more common.

The day has been very interesting and we have got some problems to solve for the companies during the seminar. This companies are very good examples for hoe to make the rural area alive.