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Founder@ Interview
Interview with Chris Thomas
“As humans we never stop evolving, and I think it’s important to look backwards, reflect on your personal growth, what’s worked, what hasn’t and how can that help me make my next steps better..” – Chris Thomas
Today we feature Chris Thomas, the founder at Cake. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
I’m Chris Thomas, CEO and Founder of Birmingham-based eCommerce agency Cake. Cake is an eCommerce consultancy specialising in helping brands scale their online business.
Following its launch in January 2017, Cake now employs 20 people and works with some of the UK’s greatest retail companies, as well as local, independent businesses.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
I originally started my working career as an accountant with KPMG at the age of 22 because I wanted to gain a good understanding of how businesses were run and ultimately what made a business successful.
When my father became ill, I planned a career break from KPMG and took over the family business, running several stores in The Oasis which included a jeans store, women’s fashion store and shoe store. I applied my learnings from KPMG to running the stores and launching an online business called Cloggs, which sold branded footwear.
What started out as an experiment became a 15 year passion of selling shoes and learning my craft in ecommerce, I eventually sold the business to JD Sports in 2017.
After the sale, I intended to take a well earned career break but I could see there was a gap in the market for an ecommerce agency that truly understood the retail industry.
During my time at Cloggs, I worked with several agencies but I found that they weren’t flexible nor agile enough to sit alongside a retailer. This along with my passion for running my own business and owning management is what led to Cake.
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Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
Cake is an agency based in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter and founded by retailers for retailers. First and foremost, we are a consultancy that helps brands understand their potential online and helps them develop a business plan to execute it.
With over 17 years of experience growing online stores, the team advise businesses of all sizes and specialise in helping brands perfect their online proposition and take their digital strategy to the next level. The path to growth is rarely a straight line and we help them navigate the high and lows to keep tem focussed on the end goal.
I like to position the agency as a consultancy rather than just an offering of individual services because we are experts in our field; the digital marketing, design and website development is the tactical element of the business.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
After co-founding Cloggs in 2002, I very much started on the ‘front-line’ so to speak. In the early 2000s we were still a small independent shoe retailer in the center of Birmingham however, we grew exponentially which led to setting up our own online store and winning Drapers Multi-Channel Retailers of the Year in 2015.
As I mentioned before, at Cloggs I was initially “anti-agency” and managed all of our eCommerce in-house because we had worked with a few agencies and it never truly worked for us.
I left Cloggs feeling that the existing agency wasn’t agile enough to cope with the weekly dynamics of retailers but if this could be cracked there was a great opportunity to build a business around and this is how Cake began. I identified a real need for this expertise in the retail space and used my experience to set up the agency.
I felt (and still feel) that retailers try to do too much in-house, and as a result lose out on time spent on their brand, their product and the critical things that add value to them as a Brand.
You can outsource finance, HR, fulfilment and so on but you can’t outsource your core values and as Brand owners you need to spend the majority of time in this area. This is where agencies add their value, we handle the tactical eCommerce that retailers aren’t necessarily experts in, nor passionate about. This leaves time for brand owners to fulfill their values they create through their products, and it strikes a happy balance.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
I underestimated the power of building trusted business relationships. I very much ran Cloggs from behind a desk and I never really got ‘out there’ so to speak. As a result I regretted not having a bigger professional network when I left the business.
Working in professional services I now know the success of a business can be really dependent on your network, reputation and associating yourself with those with a proven track record.
Further to that, I learned from Cloggs and my time as an accountant the importance of having a close eye on numbers is crucial for business performance and growth.
I wish I had known that there is plenty of time to get it right, despite society pressuring you to have it figured out by the time we’re 30. I have had a couple of career changes and would never have known in my 20s I’d be where I am now. I think we put too much pressure on ourselves to succeed too quickly. In reality, building your career the right way is being content with making mistakes along the way, learning from them and helps give you a measured approach to success.
I almost forget about the Cloggs years because now I’m so consumed by Cake, but it’s important to reflect on how far you have come rather than constantly looking to the future.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
I would tell myself not to feel the need to know everything, it’s too stressful! But as a young man, leading the business I always felt like I had to know everything.
One of the happiest moments in my career was waking up in my 30s and realising ‘it’s ok, you don’t need to know that, ask someone else!’
I’ve definitely carried this into Cake. I want the brightest and best talent in our space to come and work for us, I want them to know more than me and I want to learn from them.
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
As a manager, I think it’s important to strike a balance between tactics and strategy, having good visibility across the team but being able to take a backseat as well. It’s only when I have downtime that I can properly think about our next moves as a business.
More generally thought, we strive on having a simple approach and try not to overcomplicate things. We have a simple hierarchical organisation, which empowers the team at each level to be self-sufficient and not micromanaged.
One management framework I learnt as an accountant 25 years ago, which I love and always circle back to, is the ‘8 Criteria of Excellent Cultures’ which we embrace as a company and form the basis of appraisals and company reviews.
It comprises components like leadership; knowledge management; strategic planning, getting things done, sticking to what you know and being results driven.
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
I wish I had known that there is plenty of time to get it right, despite society pressuring you to have it figured out by the time we’re 30.
I have had a couple of career changes and would never have known in my 20s I’d be where I am now. I think we put too much pressure on ourselves to succeed too quickly. In reality, building your career the right way is being content with making mistakes along the way, learning from them and helps give you a measured approach to success.
I almost forget about the Cloggs years because now I’m so consumed by Cake, but it’s important to reflect on how far you have come rather than constantly looking to the future.
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
For me, that would be founding Cake. I’ve loved every minute of it so far despite its challenges, but we’ve gone from a team of just me to 20 in under 4 years. I have learned so much over that time and I’m so proud of what we’ve built here and I hope that we continue to grow.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
Broadly speaking, the pursuit of happiness! But another is to remain on this trajectory of growth and turnover. Also, we are really passionate about recruiting local, homegrown talent so we hope to continue doing more of that.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
As humans we never stop evolving, and I think it’s important to look backwards, reflect on your personal growth, what’s worked, what hasn’t and how can that help me make my next steps better.
I find this kind of reflection to be inspiring because it’s easy to get caught up in where you want to be and who you want to be, but it’s important to recognise who you have already become. Only when you reflect on your growth do you see how achievable it is.
A favourite value of mine is being resolute. I think being purpose-driven, and having a can-do attitude is a really important mindset. A favourite quote of mine is by Henry Ford ‘whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re probably right.’
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Cake”
To learn more about Cake Visit https://cake.agency/
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