OUT of Eden, the hotel and guesthouse furnishing mail order company based at Kirkby Stephen, is now the town’s biggest private employer and continues to prove that a flourishing business can have its roots in a rural location.

From its base on theoutskirts of the town, the company, which employs about 35 people and has an annual turnover of£5 million, supplies about half of the 20,000 hotels and B&Bs in the UK, with customers stretching from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.

With a 2,000-strongproduct list, the firm, which was taken over by Ian and Janet Hartley 17 years ago, now ships out three million little bars of soap a year.

The business started off life as Cumbria Hotel Furnishers, founded by Jack Hutchinson, of Cockermouth, as a one-man-operation which involved going around the Lake District and making inquiries door-to-door.

Having been made redundant at the age of 56, Mr. Hutchinson saw a gap in the market of selling beds to guesthouse owners and hoteliers in the Lake District and also supplying them with towels andtextiles.

Mr. Hartley’s parents, John and Eva, owned Temple Sowerby House Hotel in the early 80s, so he had some knowledge of the challenges faced by those working in thehospitality sector which includes hotels andguesthouses.

For the first year, Mr. and Mrs. Hartley, who are both aged 52, and have two children, Jenny and Guy, replicated Mr. Hutchinson’s business model, but found that door-knocking was unsatisfactory as itinterrupted people’sworking day so they wanted to find a better way to be proactive in obtaining custom.

They set to work on building up a database of guesthouses, B&Bs and small hotels fromaccommodation guides and created an A4 leaflet which was mailed out to 2,000 potential customers. “That doubled the size of the business,” said Mr. Hartley.

In 2000, the year before the foot and mouth crisis hit Cumbria, the name of the business was changed to Out of Eden as the result of wider marketing nationally which included sending a brochure to members of the Farm Stay scheme, which is a national directory of farms offering bed and breakfast and self-cateringaccommodation.

The company, having outgrown its premises at Hartley Fold, had theofficial opening of a new£1 million purpose-built extension in 2008 at itscurrent Home Farm Buildings location on the outskirts of Kirkby Stephen.

Mr. Hartley said that at first they tried to match competitors on price, before realising that because they were dealing with such small volumes that wasn’t the wayforward. Instead, it became apparent that what they could do best was source items which were not being provided by anybody else things like a washable pillow.

It was this innovative approach which helped Out of Eden grow into thebusiness that it is today. “We found a niche in the marketplace by finding products for people which they couldn’t findanywhere else,” said Mr. Hartley, who added that they also came along at a time when nobody else was interested in the B&Bsector because the average order value was so low.

Having built up adatabase of every bed and breakfast business in the UK, they were able to set themselves up as a mail order company alongsimilar lines to stationary company Viking Direct.

Although the company set up a website in 2003, it’s only in the last couple of years that it has really started to notice the effect of the Internet which has probably brought with it as many challenges as it has benefits.

“B&Bs can now search on Google to find a product they are looking for,” said Mr. Hartley.

While the company still mails out a reasonable amount of catalogues, it is beginning to do moree-mail and electronicmarketing involvingnetworking tools like Facebook and Twitter.

Mr. Hartley said the biggest challenge facing a growing company in a rural area was getting the right premises.

“When we outgrew Hartley Fold it took about three years to find Home Farm, but we weredetermined to stay in Kirkby Stephen. We want the company to reflect the community spirit andvalues of the rural area where we are,” said Mr. Hartley.

Looking to the future, Mr. Hartley said he would love to develop and create a range of toiletries which could be produced on-site that would enable them to be branded as being made in Cumbria. The demand for locally-sourcedproducts was now very big.

“I reckon we can keep growing and couldprobably double our turnover without having to double our staff,” said Mr. Hartley, who added that new products which Out of Eden was about to launch included recycled toilet paper which tapped into the ever-growing “green market”.