As featured on BBC Farming Today!
Well it was a pleasant surprise to get a phone call from Caz Graham – a freelance reporter often commissioned for BBC Farming Today and for Cumbria Life magazine to name just two!
Caz wanted to know about all things wellies, so we invited her to the farm to see for herself. It was a perfectly cold day for her to come and find out more.
The interview was part of a BBC Farming Today feature on how farmers broaden businesses to bring in extra income. They were interested in how we diversified from sheep to wellies.
We explained that we wanted to produce warm wellies for kids, so they wouldn’t cry over frozen toes when on the farm with us at lambing time.
Caz also learned about Elvis – the manufacturer we found in China– and how nearly 11 years on, we’re still going with business getting better every year. Caz looked around our Welly Barn which is set out with racking and shelving, piled high with boxes of wellies. She loved to see how we run it all form the barn – with a small shed built inside the barn for our office.
WOW! We’ve had a huge response to the broadcast – which was on air when I was helping a neighbouring farmer scan sheep – (lots of twins expected this spring!).
Our web traffic went mad and it’s been fantastic to get lots of welly orders – we’ve had a far higher percentage of orders from men than we’ve ever had in the past. They tell me it’s because as a farmer I’m a professional welly wearer.
School teachers have been in contact wanting to explore a project with us – we always like getting involved with kids and schools – so if you know of one or have an idea – get in touch!
Here’s an extract from the programme – just in case you can’t access the Listen Again feature on BBC 4 Farming Today – (starting at 4 minutes). We’ve included most of what is said below:
Caz Graham BBC Farming “It’s freezing – we’re in a wet farmyard and my feet, even with two pairs of locally sourced gorgeously knitted woolly socks inside my wellies, are like little blocks of ice. It was just this kind of frozen feet scenario that pushed Simon in to the world of insulated welly sales.”
3 years ago, in 2015, we decided that we actually had a business that we could take forward. As most farmers know, a farm of 150 acres in this day and age struggles to be viable. We took the bold decision to sell our sheep and actually concentrate all our time on the welly business. I loved my sheep, I loved farming but at the end of the day, you’ve got to make things viable, you’ve got to make a living out of whatever you do – and we can see real potential in this market.
