Interview with Jay Soni, Founder and CEO, Yorkshire Fabric Shop

Jay, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an ecommerce expert?

I’m Jay, and I founded Yorkshire Fabric Shop and Create Fabrics. Both are dedicated to selling high-quality furnishing and upholstery fabrics to both trade professionals and individual customers. We’ve even had the honor of working with big names like Warner Brothers Studio and the Dorchester Hotels, which has been a fantastic experience. I’ve spent over 15 years in the textiles and furniture industry, and I’ve also worked in the digital realm. This mix of experiences has helped me build solid relationships with suppliers all around the globe and craft brands known for their commitment to quality, customer care, and, above all, an obsession with customer satisfaction. Yorkshire Fabric Shop is our direct-to-customer arm, where we offer more than 6,000 different fabrics and provide custom, made-to-measure services. We’re based in North West England, and we have a hangar display where customers can come and see the variety and quality of our products in person. My journey to becoming an e-commerce expert has been driven by my passion for delivering the best possible products and services to our customers.

What key experiences or insights have shaped your perspective on the ecommerce landscape?

One event that’s had a significant effect on my approach is taking note of how online retail has been becoming more customized and personalized. More and more customers want to be actively involved in the design as well as the material and functional choices, and we responded by integrating tools that allowed them to interactively design their garments and see how fabric choices affected the final product before ordering. It’s not about selling fabric, it’s about creating a unique experience. Another big lesson involved the logistics of ecommerce. It became clear to me early on that, however good the product and/or experience on the website, in the final instance satisfaction is all about delivery – literally! We are obsessed with optimizing supply chain and packaging to ensure that products reach customers quickly and in perfect condition. This material-world focus, on what happens behind the screen, helps reduce returns, increase repeat business, and build the trust that, if you order from us, you’ll get world-class service every step of the way.

You’ve mentioned using QuickBooks Commerce for Yorkshire Fabric Shop. How have you seen ecommerce platforms evolve, and what excites you about the future of these tools?

Where once the focus of e-commerce platforms was just an online shopfront, a digital catalog, and a shopping cart, now it is as if they have become ‘business-in-a-box’ solutions. By leveraging QuickBooks Commerce, for example, we have been able to synchronize and streamline not just our sales, but our inventory, our customers, and even some of our marketing. It’s like an online retailer’s Swiss Army knife. Online retail brands have had to become a jumble of bolted-on bolt-ons, all held together by time-consuming manual labor. These platforms are becoming much more holistic. What I’m most excited about in these e-commerce tools is the growing integration of AI and machine learning. I look forward to the potential enhancements in personalization.

Imagine AI that could anticipate your fabric preference based on your past behavior or current trends. With more sophisticated integration with other technologies, I’m also excited to see more nuanced interactions with technologies such as AR, where you are able to virtually drape fabrics over furniture at home for a real-time preview of how a particular fabric looks and fits before you buy. This kind of innovation will empower customers in a whole new way, allowing for an even richer, more interactive, and intuitive shopping experience. It’s not just e-commerce that’s going to look like this in the future. It’s retail.

Your insights on offering free shipping and its impact on sales are intriguing.  Beyond free shipping, what other ecommerce strategies have you found particularly effective in attracting and retaining customers?

At Yorkshire Fabric Shop, the one thing that’s been most effective for my e-commerce sites is live, real-time customer service – augmented by chatbots, but with genuine human beings at the end of the line. We answer questions, yes, but we also help customers through the buying process much more easily. It also individualizes the shopping experience. The more a customer feels that you’re there for them during the shopping experience, the more likely they are to buy and to come back.

Secondly, we have had great results with video as part of our content strategy. This is not about video product placements but more about educational content that helps our customers understand the differences between the fabrics we sell, what those are best used for, etc. Rather than just selling, we are creating an expert in fabrics. Telling, instead of selling, builds trust and loyalty, and customers do come back because they have created an awareness about fabrics in general.

These tactics do not think about transactions as transactions: you buy something and leave the store. I want to create a community, a source of information, and a relationship. The one-time buyer is thinking about my company and coming back because he or she feels educated about fabrics and therefore confident about the decisions made.

You’ve highlighted the importance of inventory management and using the ABC analysis method. Can you elaborate on any other inventory challenges you’ve faced and how you overcame them?

You can’t know what deadstock is until you get in there and open boxes, but one of the biggest challenges is deadstock – the items that do not move. It is frustrating because they are just taking up space and tying up your capital. So that is when I got creative with bundling. Mixed-fabric packs at a discount, which really helped move the slow-moving stuff, got customers familiar with a fabric they may not have originally been interested in and drove more interest and purchases down the road.

One of the other things that was a challenge for us was seasonality – there are fabrics that are going to sell more during the winter months, and lighter fabrics that are going to sell more during the spring and summer. We have a predictive analytics tool that will look at the trends from the previous season and help predict how much we should be ordering. That way, we’re not stuck with extra inventory at the end of the season, when the weather changes. One of the biggest problems with clothing retailers is when you have the inventory and suddenly you’re stuck with it, and you can’t move it. So seasonality is big. This has helped us control inventory flow, and keep ourselves as profitable as possible.

Switching gears to social commerce, how do you see platforms like TikTok Shop changing the way businesses connect with consumers online?

I believe that platforms such as TikTok Shop are completely changing the way that brands connect with consumers. What TikTok Shop is doing differently is bringing entertainment and shopping together in one place – meaning it’s not just about releasing a product and hoping someone buys it, it’s about creating content that is entertaining, that shares a story, and also shows a product in a way that feels more real and human. It really changes it from a transaction to an experience for people to connect with. To me, in the fabrics industry, what is most exciting is that TikTok Shop can scale us small brands to a global scale with the help of viral user-generated content, much beyond just a catalogue-style approach. Through the creator community, we can engage in DIY and upcycling-themed content, relevant to different genres and subcultures, extending our brand’s reach from fabric design and different applications. Not only does presence grow, but consumers also build an emotional connection with the brand, and become brand influencers. The game-changer here is that TikTok Shop is about creating communities and trends rather than just e-commerce.

Based on your experience with Yorkshire Fabric Shop’s presence on TikTok, what advice would you give to businesses hesitant to explore newer social platforms for ecommerce?

Although we don’t sell through direct selling on TikTok at Yorkshire Fabric Shop – we’d rather people bought directly from our website rather than through external social platforms – my view is not to be afraid of newer-generation social channels, especially when it comes to brand awareness. As a platform, TikTok is an amazing place to experiment, showcase your products in ways the more formal structure of a website or regular e-commerce platform can’t facilitate, and, ultimately, be much more personal. Brand awareness is not just about making the sale. It’s about demonstrating your brand’s personality and having a presence that allows you to have a dialogue with your target audience.

For those companies that might be nervous about taking a leap of faith into these newer platforms, go small. Don’t just dive right into selling. Create content that ties in with your brand and is fun, and informative, shows your products within a given lifestyle context, a quick tutorial, behind-the-scenes, or even collaborate with an influencer. You are making a space for your brand to exist alongside your target audience and, in turn, let them feel like they know your brand while easing into any e-commerce strategies if that feels right. It’s the balance of brand building vs. audience converting to true engagement and, hopefully, sales.

Looking ahead, what emerging trends in ecommerce do you believe will have the biggest impact on businesses like yours in the coming years?

One of the trends that I am following, and one that I really believe is going to make a big difference in my business in the next 5 years is AI powered personalization in ecommerce.

So currently there’s lots of companies out there where you get recommendations of products and the basis of a level of personalization given to you, but I imagine that this will only get better and more personalized as well so that the customer’s whole journey through the site will be designed to the customer, customized product displays, and the system itself is aware of what fabric it should suggest for you based on your style.

For instance, if you have a particular style of design, then you don’t have to actually go into that store and be like: ‘show me florals, show me Japanese, show me vintage,’ because it will know what your style is and it will present the products to you already personalized to you. Basically, you’d need something that would read your customers’ design preferences and, instead of having to do anything, decide what fabric to show them, what colors to show them, what patterns to show them, based on their preferences.Another thing I’m interested in is an emphasis on greener e-commerce platforms.

Consumers are increasingly conscious of their purchase’s ecological footprint, and I imagine we will see a trend toward websites where sourcing, production and other sustainability considerations are made visible. And for manufacturers, such as my own, who deal a lot with textiles, it could be about creating a channel that advocates for sustainable materials, or joining the channels that advocate for sustainable methods. Not ‘selling a product, but selling a story’. It’s about offering something that will reflect the customer’s ideals, even making them shop a bit more mindfully.

For aspiring ecommerce entrepreneurs, what is one piece of advice you wish you had known when you were starting out?

A key piece of advice I wish I’d known going in was that you should have your supply chain dialed in from the get-go. I think novice e-commerce entrepreneurs get excited about and focus a lot on the front end; the web design, the marketing, the experience for the customer when they arrive – all that stuff is important, no doubt. But what I learned the hard way is that people can have the most amazing-looking website, they could do everything right with their store, but if you don’t have a rock-solid grasp of where your products are coming from, how long that takes, what you do when they’re late, it doesn’t matter how great your store looks or how many people visit.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

One last thing, e-commerce business folk: narrow your focus. Know who your perfect customer is. At the very beginning, I thought I was making myself available to as many people as possible. I thought that by doing so, I would be increasing my chances of sales. But I was fooling myself, because that was only diluting my efforts. It’s important to realize who your product is for, and focus everything. Everything, from your messaging to your product selection, to your visuals, should speak to that target. When we started to focus on specific customers—for example, designers looking for contemporary upholstery fabrics—everything started to fall into place.

Our marketing became more targeted, and the engagement of our customers grew exponentially, because again, we stopped trying to become everything to everybody.