Within a month of setting up Hawkins & Brimble, founder Stephen Shortt was flying out to China in order to tout his men’s grooming range.
“We’ve been export-centric from the beginning,” says the entrepreneur, 49, who launched the business five years ago.
“We were in Shanghai, Beijing for about two weeks meeting anybody who would see us, some big companies as well – like Hutchison Whampoa. We were surprised by how welcome we were. There’s a real appetite for British products.”
Cheltenham-based Hawkins & Brimble makes shaving, beard and skincare products in the UK and sells them in 24 countries around the globe. The firm made revenues of £1.3m last year and “turned our first healthy profit since inception”, says Shortt, who used to work for the family business, a distributor for the likes of Unilever and Procter & Gamble.
In the early days, the UK accounted for 70pc of its sales. Today, China is his number one market.
The country is the UK’s third-largest export market for goods, which were worth £25bn in 2019, a sixfold increase in real terms since 2005. The number of UK jobs relying on doing business with China has almost doubled during the period, according to Cambridge Econometrics.
Businesses like Shortt’s have benefited from the rapid rise of Asia’s middle class with more disposable income as well as the boom in e-commerce – the country’s online retailing market is worth $2 trillion (£1.4 trillion), more than America’s and Europe’s combined. It has become a giant shopping mall for 850m digital consumers.
“China is nearly half of the world’s e-commerce,” says David Lloyd, Alibaba’s managing director in the UK and Nordics.
Home-grown companies or brands including Dyson, Burberry and The Hut Group’s Myprotein all sell on Alibaba’s platforms, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon. During 11/11 – a shopping event akin to Black Friday – British brands sold $494m of goods to Chinese consumers.
The e-commerce behemoth, and its co-founder Jack Ma, China’s most celebrated tycoon, however, have made headlines recently. After Ma argued in October that the country’s regulators were stifling innovation, the blockbuster float of his fintech business, Ant Group, was cancelled and Ma has not been seen since.
Political tensions are also at play as relations between the UK and China have soured over protests in Hong Kong, the Huawei ban and more recently the abuses against the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
In a move likely to plunge relations with Beijing to a new low, earlier this month Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, revealed new export controls designed to stop British firms – knowingly or otherwise – using products sourced from Uighur slave labour camps. The Uighur homeland of Xinjiang province is an important source of cotton.
Some British retailers will have to carry out more due diligence on their supply chains. Big name retailers including H&M and Stella McCartney said in November they cannot guarantee they are not profiting from Uighur forced labour in China to make their wares despite their best efforts.
H&M, the second-largest fashion retailer in the world, said that due to the complexity of the global supply chain “there is today no solution available to fully trace the origin of cotton used in final products”.
Stella McCartney, which takes pride in its sustainability credentials, said the traceability of certain raw materials, such as cotton, “is extremely difficult”.
Alibaba’s Lloyd, unwilling to be drawn into specifics about Ma or China, says: “I think there’s a lot of noise like the political environment between countries. Companies, businesses, I think, just need to look past that because trade brings countries together.”
He says that increased tensions haven’t interrupted the flow of goods from the UK to China. The main concern of most UK exporters tend to relate to the practicalities of setting up shop over there.
Hawkins & Brimble’s Shortt says: “In terms of China, I’m not overly worried. I think China wants to engage in business with the world and, as far as I can tell, so does the Department of Trade and Industry.
“It’s business as usual, as far as I’m concerned.”
Another business seemingly undeterred by the present situation is Swansea-based Cyden, a cosmetic technology company backed by Sir Nigel Rudd and early Betfair investor Richard Koch. It made sales of £49m in its last financial year, up from £25m the previous year mostly from selling Smoothskin, a slick permanent hair removal device, to Chinese shoppers on Alibaba’s platforms.
Simon Boyd, its sales director of four years, says the firm exports 95pc of its production from its factories in Wales “and our biggest export market globally is China”. Headcount has jumped from 38 staff to just under 450 employees before Christmas during his tenure.
“In the first 12 weeks after I joined I visited China six times,” he says. “Look, not everybody is successful [there]. But actually you can test and learn or find out really quickly if you’ll succeed.”
He adds: “British businesses sometimes undervalue the value of brand Britain when they export to other markets.”
