How Kriya helped Skandel Boathouse pursue more opportunities
The idea behind Skandel Boathouse was simple: supply great seafood to top chefs cooking in some of the finest kitchens across the UK. Two years on and the business has grown beyond co-founders James and Alex’s wildest expectations.
Beginnings of Skandel Boathouse
Their inspiration came from James’ childhood holidays at his family boathouse on the tiny island of Veiholmen in Norway. They would catch lobster and crab, cooking and eating what they had caught almost immediately. Alex grew up in Devon so is no stranger to enjoying seafood just minutes from the water.
Both former chefs, James and Alex’s shared passion for food sparked the first ideas for Skandel Boathouse. They found a big difference between the amazing seafood they had grown up eating and what they had to cook with in London.
“We wanted to have a really simple business where we sold the best seafood to some of the chefs we knew,” James explains. “We very quickly realised that there’s so much opportunity there. The chefs really care about quality and where the food comes from.”
James and Alex created a just-in-time business model underpinned by sustainability. Fresh seafood comes into the Skandel Boathouse headquarters at 4am and is fully distributed by 10am. They repeat this process every day, never holding any stock, so they can guarantee unparalleled quality.
From distributing a few kilograms of crab meat daily, Skandel Boathouse signed their first deal with a major hotel in a matter of months. Before long, they were distributing half a ton of Devon crab, manuka smoked Arctic salmon, wild sashimi tuna and Arctic mahogany clams every day.
Rapid growth and cash flow challenges
This rapid growth created a cash flow challenge for James and Alex: “When we started we were turning over £3k a month. That quickly turned into £100k and within a matter of months up to £300k. When you grow that fast, you start thinking how do we keep the business going? How do we keep our commitments with customers and how do we keep our operations smooth?”
Up until that point, Skandel Boathouse had been paying their fishing partners for stock within 30 days. With the growth of the business, they suddenly found themselves getting paid on 60-day payment terms by their major hotel customers. This created a shortfall. They also needed to expand, moving from a single car to a fleet of vans and taking on new premises.
How Kriya's invoice finance helped in closing cash flow gaps
James and Alex explored invoice financing as a solution to their cash flow challenges. They considered working with their own bank but were put off by the lengthy application process. They also felt that the bank didn’t really understand what Skandel Boathouse was all about.
Alex describes how they came to partner with MarketInvoice instead: “The journey with the banks just seemed like such a hassle when we needed to sort this situation out very quickly. We decided to come to MarketInvoice because they offer an innovative solution and are far more driven towards entrepreneurs like ourselves.
It was a quick onboarding process and we felt very much at the centre of what they were doing for us. They provided immediate funding which meant we could address our challenges straight away and move forward with running the business.”
James and Alex have big plans for growing the Skandel brand including a global expansion to the USA, Denmark and the Netherlands. Their online supermarket featuring a range of specialty artisan food products is set to launch later this year.
“We also have an exciting media project coming up,” James adds. “We’re taking eight of London’s top chefs out to a tiny island off the northwest coast of Norway. We’ll be foraging and fishing, asking key questions about where our food comes from.
Obviously to do all of this we need to have the capital behind us. Working with MarketInvoice gives us the freedom to explore these opportunities.”
“We expect our B2B revenues to double as a result of providing Kriya’s flexible payment terms to our trade and business buyers.”
Stuart Zissman, Head of Financial Services
Halfords is the UK’s leading provider of motoring and cycling services and products. Its customers shop across over 1,750 fixed and mobile locations including, Halfords stores and garages, as well as its website, halfords.com.
Today, around a quarter of Halfords turnover is business-to-business. They sell to organisations of all sizes including SME businesses, garages, and workshops, offering discounts on automotive parts and tools with their Trade Card, as well as directly to larger commercial and government customers that buy in bulk.
However, like many well-established enterprises, Halfords found its future growth was challenged by the legacy processes of its past. Find out how they’ve teamed up with Kriya to remove the friction from their B2B commerce.
Halford's challenges
“The exam question” says Halfords’ Head of Financial Services, Stuart Zissman, “was how do we make selling to business and trade buyers less labour-intensive?” Having already overseen a successful consumer finance proposition at Halfords, it was clear to Zissman that their B2B offering had potential to grow by introducing a simple and effective credit solution.
1. B2B buyers expect payments terms
“All successful B2B propositions have some sort of financial support” Zissman explains. Whether large or small, Halfords’ business buyers want to be invoiced on payment terms. This is especially beneficial for garages and workshops, which thrive on efficient working capital cycles, allowing them to source parts upfront and defer payment until they have received compensation for their services.
Halfords recognised the opportunity to enhance their offerings by providing scalable trade credit, which was previously untapped. As Zissman says, "offering payments completes the circle."
2. Manual, unscalable processes were holding back growth
Halfords' hands-on approach to B2B processes presented an opportunity for greater scalability and growth. Wholesale orders, managed via account managers, involved manual quotes and purchase orders, which added complexity.
“We’d like to say yes to every single customer that wants to order from us,” says Head of Trade Card, Chris Millan. However, processing these detailed orders for existing buyers took time, limiting the retailer's ability to proactively attract new business and expand their account base.
What Halfords sought was a way to make their B2B offering more accessible and achieve a better economy of scale.
“We work with sole traders, business customers and government entities. Kriya is the only supplier that could support all three.”
Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
The search for a solution
Recognising the need for change, Halfords set out to find a way to modernise its B2B offering. With Kriya's 12-year track record and willingness to collaborate on a solution for their unique requirements struck a chord with Halfords.
A solution for all B2B buyers
Halfords has a diverse buyer base and needed B2B payment terms that could be offered to limited companies, government entities and sole traders.
Multichannel
With trade customers already purchasing online and in-store, Halfords needed a solution to offer payment terms holistically across their sales channels.
Risk expertise
With their focus on Motoring and Cycling, Halfords sought a partner with strong expertise in finance and payments, including robust credit and fraud detection capabilities, to help onboard their buyers.
“We are experts in motoring and cycling, and to ensure exceptional service for our customers, we decided to partner with Kriya, specialists in B2B payments and lending decisions.” Stuart Zissman, Head of Financial Services
The B2B vision
Halfords partnered with Kriya to transform their B2B offering. By integrating Kriya PayLater with their Trade Card, the retailer is combining trade discounts for B2B buyers with the ability to pay on account for online and in-store orders.
Adopting an eCommerce-first model has a number of advantages. Firstly, providing online buyers with highly-demanded payment terms expands the businesses they can sell to. Secondly, much of their offline business can be shifted to a self-serve, online checkout. Not only does this provide a smoother buyer experience, it also frees up the Halfords team to focus on the customers where their expertise has the most impact.
The near-infinite scalability of the Kriya solution means Halfords can not only improve their overall B2B customer proposition and experience, but they can also see financial benefits through the partnership too.
“Offering trade credit through payments makes it much slicker. It’s something buyers are familiar with from the consumer world.”Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
Wholesale change
Halfords have kicked off their payments transformation with their wholesale offering.
Business buyers come to the Halfords wholesale team to place bulk orders and request custom details, such as branded bikes and accessories. Before Kriya, this fully offline sales channel required multiple teams and processes to transact each order. This process led to delays and hampered conversion, such as inventory becoming unavailable during the order, or customers purchasing elsewhere.
By streamlining the entire wholesale workflow into Kriya Merchant Portal, Halfords now have a single, automated flow for processing orders.
Wholesale buyers are first onboarded into Merchant Portal. This screens for credit and fraud risk, directly providing their sales team an instant spending limit decision for the buyer. Orders can then be placed on payment terms and invoices are automatically generated for the buyer. Additionally, Kriya assists with credit control by managing payment collections too.
“We needed a way forward that was less hands-on because the whole process was very, very manual.” Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
How it works
The buyer places a wholesale order with Halfords
Halfords onboard the buyer into Kriya’s Merchant Portal
Payment terms selected and purchase complete. The buyer pays at the end of the following month.
Partnering for growth
Reflecting on the journey so far with Kriya, Zissman says “It’s that personal touch and relationship that makes the difference to the product we’re building together.” For Zissman, it's not simply outsourcing the expertise to a third party. “It’s more like we’re onboarding Kriya into Halfords and by extension they’ve become part of our team”.
There’s a busy roadmap ahead for Halfords and Kriya, with plans to bring the whole multichannel offering to market by the autumn of 2024.
We're very excited about this development,” says Millan. “Introducing payment terms to our Trade offering eliminates barriers that previously slowed us down and unlocks opportunities with a vast number of businesses we haven't historically engaged with.”
