IT’S A QUIET morning in Darlington, a town in northern England. But business inside Funky Fidgets, a sensory-toy shop, is brisk. Postmen traipse through the door for the first of three daily collections. Shelves are packed floor-to-ceiling with brightly coloured stock. A customer arrives, dispatched by his daughter to buy the latest stress ball. It is hard to believe that the firm, which ships worldwide and has 14 staff, was founded by an 11-year-old.
Alex, who started selling toys online during the covid-19 pandemic, is one of a growing number of young British entrepreneurs selling on TikTok, a Chinese video app. TikTok Shop, a service which lets users buy products without leaving the app, is the source of most of Funky’s orders. Around 300,000 small businesses in Britain also use it; most of its sellers joined in the past year.
Outside Asia, Britain has proved unusually fertile ground for this new kind of shopping. Its high streets have declined faster than those of its European neighbours, and British consumers have embraced Chinese-style live commerce more readily. Around 57% of Gen Z and Millennials watch shopping streams such as TikTok Shop live, where sellers can broadcast themselves packing orders and chatting to customers. Viewers can in turn watch staff pick and pack their items in real time. It’s not only youngsters who watch with the same obsessiveness as their grandmothers watch QVC, a mesmeric home-shopping channel. Mason Miller, of The Fat Butcher, a butcher’s some 70km north of Funky Fidgets, reckons 60% of its customers on TikTok are 40- to 60-year-old women.
More surprising is that those online followers are willing to turn up to physical shops. Funky Fidgets, which has half a million followers on TikTok, can attract four-hour queues outside its shop on Saturdays. Some customers travel from as far afield as London and Edinburgh. “We bring a lot of tourism into Darlington,” says Melissa Brunskill, who for now runs the shop day-to-day while her daughter is at sixth-form college. It is an early sign that this sort of commerce could give Britain’s ailing high street a lift.
Now 16, Alex remains closely involved in the business. She designs products (Funky has its own lower-cost line based on viral brands), handles customer service, carries out stock takes and holds brand meetings, all while studying accountancy. Her plans are considerably grander than her mother’s. “I want to keep it as small as I can,” says Ms Brunskill. “She wants to have stores all over the world.”
