Holly & Co

Holly & Co is an online marketplace for small businesses from the founder of Not on the High Street, Holly Tucker. Holly & Co approached Can Factory in 2022, looking to create a new online marketplace supporting small businesses in the UK. Curated by Holly & Co, each small business has a bespoke “shop-front” selling thousands of unique, handmade gifts, jewellery, art and other products. The platform also supports helpful content for small businesses and offers a plethora of business advice presented in bespoke content across the site, from articles, blog posts, video content and Holly’s podcast.

Launched in October 2023, Can Factory developed a full-stack solution from the ground up, working closely with the Holly & Co team to introduce a unique front-end and back-end e-commerce marketplace solution for customers, Co’s (sellers) and Holly & Co’s business needs.

Can Factory took an iterative approach to development and delivered the solution incrementally in fast-follow phases. The onboarding, including inventory creation for each company within the marketplace, required that the admin tools be delivered considerably earlier to ensure product upload could begin in parallel with other development. The build was fully bespoke, allowing for flexibility and customisation throughout the build process.

A dual-mode admin system was created for Holly & Co. and onboarded Co’s, which allows financial management, content management, product inventory data, order fulfilment, stock management and reporting, as well as a range of other needed customer service tools. The content management system was designed to be block-based, allowing Holly & Co. ultimate flexibility and control over page and content creation. Post completion of this system it was then used to build all content sections of the site.

A service layer provides support for business logic and data management and covers areas such as order and data processing with integration to CRM tools inclusive of HubSpot and Klaviyo.