Truffleshuffle.com

Sage Pay customer Pat Wood is MD and Founder of Truffleshuffle.com. He explains how a simple T-shirt bought on holiday for £10 transformed into £2.6 million business…

When Pat Wood returned from America wearing his newly purchased 'Goonies' t-shirt, he was inundated with compliments from friends, family and even strangers on the street. He quickly realised that there was a gap in the market so to test his idea, Pat bought a handful of retro t-shirts and put them on eBay. They were snapped up almost immediately and Pat decided to turn his idea into a business.

TruffleShuffle.com started life as the only online store in the UK to sell t-shirts with prints of favourite TV shows, movies, games and memories of the 1980s. It is now the number one stop for retro, licensed t-shirts, with over 500,000 t-shirts sold and a loyal base of hundreds of thousands fashionable people in the UK!

Bucking the Trend

Growing at a great rate, Truffleshuffle appears to be bucking the negative trends in general retail. With a long term plan to sell the business, or partner with larger companies, Pat and his team are working hard to increase revenue by using their valuable e-tail experience.

Made to Measure

After developing the site from scratch, within three months sales had grown to a few orders a day. “As a fan of efficiency and automation, I soon got fed up with the unprofessional interfaces of start-up ecommerce payment gateways” Pat explains. “I was selling t-shirts from my living room and most of the payment gateways that were out there were corporate and expensive, but Sage Pay's payment gateway service was simple to integrate, had useful help pages and great support staff”.

Once Truffleshuffle.com began to grow, the company's bank advised them to move to their own in-house payment gateway which, on the surface looked as though would save the business several pence per transaction resulting in a few thousand pounds per year. However, Pat soon realised that not all was as it seemed. “When I investigated this, I realised I would have to buy the servers, store my customers’ card details, pay for the integration to their systems and pay for the upkeep and security on another server. I decided to stick with Sage Pay as the charges were so transparent and in a matter of weeks, we had hit a good level with them and were rewarded with a substantial and gratefully received discount.”