Posted by Yoann Martin, Technical Director, Notonthehighstreet.com

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Yoann Martin, Technical Director at notonthehighstreet.com, an online marketplace that supports growing small businesses by offering a route to market for designer-makers who would otherwise lose out in the battle with retail giants.

As Holly Tucker, co-founder of notonthehighstreet.com, attended a London design market to sell her beautiful, homemade door wreaths in 2005, she had an idea: small businesses from around the world should able to sell their items beyond the physical spaces of marketplace stalls like the one she currently stood at. Holly instantly knew that her former advertising agency colleague, Sophie Cornish, would be an ideal partner in the quest to take less ordinary, independent and beautiful products to a global audience.

In 2006, they built a platform to bring together the most original items from the best small businesses globally, making it easy for consumers to browse and buy. Since then, our company has grown to a team of 180 across three offices, and our online store now brings together more than 150,000 original lifestyle products from more than 5,000 of the UK’s most creative small businesses.

In the early days, we worked together by walking to each other’s desks, but as we grew in both size and geographical distribution, we knew we needed a better way to collaborate systematically and from different locations. So, in 2012, when we had 96 employees, we moved to Google Apps. We no longer need to be at headquarters to share information and feel like a team.


Over the last few years and across the company, our ability to make decisions based on data has improved thanks to immediate sharing via Google Drive, Docs and Sheets. We’ve equipped teams to be more responsive, with greater visibility into their data, files and planning materials. Above all, we’ve connected different teams across departments and offices, maintaining the close communication that helped us thrive when we were just a three-person team. Here are the ways in which we’ve streamlined our ways of working:

• A culture of documentation: The product team diagrams their workflows in Docs and uses Sheets to keep track of the terms for new service providers. Within the software engineering team, engineers, testers and product managers can all store campaign-related updates in a single shared Sheet.
• Unified campaign assets: We develop marketing campaigns faster thanks to centralised Drive folders containing planning docs, briefs for creative agencies, pdfs, pictures and video assets. The settings in Drive allow us to easily share these assets internally and with our agencies.
• Cross-team customer service: Account managers and customer service reps use Sheets to track customer queries that need attention. If there’s a customer service or inventory issue, a representative can quickly flag it by entering a comment into a shared Sheet, and the account manager can call the seller to get more information.
• Mobility: Our account managers travel across the UK to maintain relationships with our thousands of sellers. While meeting with a client, an account manager can access a Google Sheet to pull up statistics about commercial sales, SEO ranking, and merchandising. Because Sheets is stored in the cloud and constantly updated, we know the data is fresh.

The success of the site depends on the quality of products, and we work closely with our sellers on an ongoing basis to support their needs, particularly when it comes to challenging areas such as product development and scaling to meet huge demand. For instance, we’ve worked with Wendy Harrison, founder of a personalised print company called Letterfest, since autumn 2008. The business began with Wendy operating out of her spare room, and now she employs 10 full-time staff and four freelancers. Letterfest brought in more than £1 million in transactions through our platform last year. Our priority is to continue to evolve the way we work. For this, Google Apps has broken traditional barriers, making our lives easier and enabling our teams to work better and more collaboratively.