Marvling Bros Ltd

Its creators Hayley and Emma have built an ever-expanding enterprise out of squeezing items into compact corners, with their range of matchbox gifts – marketed as being small enough to keep in your pocket, but big enough to make a lasting impression – capturing the attention of online shoppers and high street retailers. 

However, while the popularity of their products prove that size doesn’t matter in the world of gifting, Marvling’s entrepreneurial owners have discovered that it very much does matter when it comes to logistics and storage. 

The businesswomen were forced to rapidly reappraise their perspective on room when their matchboxes, despite being diminutive by design, began to monopolise almost every inch of living space in their respective homes.

“Our sales suddenly went crazy, and we simply weren’t prepared for it,” the pair explained, recalling how the heat was turned up on their micro gift business when interest in ‘Hot Stuff’ – a matchbox containing four miniature vials of some of the hottest chilli powders ever tested – caught fire as a consequence of featuring on the Not on the High Street website.  

“We went from selling at craft fairs to having to make and pack thousands of orders,” continued Hayley. “Emma’s son had to give up his bedroom just so we had somewhere to put stock and neither family had space for a Christmas tree – we were a gift company that had no room for Christmas!”

The scale of Marvling’s storage headache became even clearer when, in a bid to meet demand, its founding partners placed a bulk order for 5,000 envelopes to be delivered to a residential address.

“It didn’t dawn on us what that number would actually look like, and it came as a shock when the envelopes arrived by articulated lorry, stacked on a pallet and the driver asked us where our forklift was,” they added. “We ended up having to stash boxes in our cars and we had no idea back then how much space our tiny things actually took up.”

Fast forward a decade, more than 600,000 sales of matchbox gifts including Hot Stuff and plentiful additions to their product range – such as the heart-warming ‘hedgehug’ – and Emma and Hayley are relishing the reclaimed room in their home lives thanks to the services of Big Yellow.

“We sat down with a business mentor last year and the first thing they said was ‘get that stuff out of your houses’, so we did and it’s the best thing we’ve done and it will be the last thing we get rid of,” said the creative duo, who were inspired to set up Marvling Bros after self-proclaimed ‘competitive mum’ Hayley went all out to try to win her son a primary school competition that challenged students to fill a matchbox with as many things as possible by adding concepts to her list of contents, such as pitching cumin and a grain of rice as a takeaway curry.

"The relief when we moved the stock out of our houses and into Big Yellow was immeasurable. Paying for storage was something we had put off and put off because we didn’t think spending money on space felt right but it has proved tremendous value – you can’t buy getting rid of the level of stress we had been experiencing."

Hayley, who was convinced by Emma that her inventive matchbox stuffing skills would impress customers far more than they did her son’s teachers, added: “I can’t big up Big Yellow enough. Prior to taking space at the Romford store we had storage at another site which had limited parking, no reception to speak of and you rarely saw any staff.

“At Big Yellow the place is kept immaculately – there’s not a speck of dust anywhere, there’s plenty of parking and the team are never too busy to help or chat, they are so friendly.

“We no longer have to worry about being in for deliveries and whoever thought of the branding is a genius! The use of yellow makes the whole place feel more cheerful and that’s a massive thing when you are going to be spending hours at a time there.”

Citing the flexibility to expand Marvling’s 150 square feet of space to avoid being haunted by a similar ‘Christmas past’ as another gift, Emma concluded: “As we continue to grow, we will extend our space at Big Yellow, we don’t want the worry of our own warehouse and what we have works for us and our homeworkers who pack our matchboxes.”

For more information, visit https://inamatchbox.com/