The owner of a delicatessen has extolled the selling power of the internet after shifting £500 worth of cheese ahead of the new Wallace and Gromit film.

Helena Hudson runs The Real Eating Company in Western Road, Hove, which sells the gloriously named Stinking Bishop cheese, from Gloucestershire.

When she discovered the product was going to be featured in The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, she immediately launched an online advertising campaign to cash in.

She sent an electronic newsletter to more than 900 subscribers and paid for a sponsored link on Google which appears at the top of searches under "Stinking Bishop".

Remarkably, she was the only stockist to have thought of the idea and, before long, orders for the cheese - which has a "meaty flavour" - were rolling in from all over the UK.

Helena said: "We were the only stockist highlighted on the search engine so the response was incredible. Within seven days, we had made £500 - which is a lot of cheese.

"The great thing is most of the buyers were new customers and they were not local. We had orders from all over the place, Edinburgh, Cornwall, Nottingham, Liverpool.

"The whole process was so easy and quick to set up - literally ten or 20 minutes - which made it even more satisfying when the orders started piling in.

"Obviously, you have to be careful that you're not put in a position where you can't cope with the orders but if that looks like happening, it would only take ten minutes to close the campaign."

The internet now accounts for 20 per cent of Helena's retail business and is her fastest growing market. She has no sympathy for retailers who choose to ignore the web.

She said: "At the very least, it should be a first port of call for potential customers.

"That's pretty basic and it's what people expect but it is also a stream of revenue which can help turnover.

"It's quiet at the moment, you can't always drag people into the shop but if you have orders being dispatched for delivery at the same time, it can tide you through quieter periods.

"We have invested between £8,000 and £10,000 on our web site, making sure it was designed properly, but we have made that money back already. It's about lateral thinking."

Meanwhile, the poor old farmer whose smelly cheese stars in the new Wallace and Gromit movie is worried about how to cope with an expected surge in demand.

Charles Martell, 59, said he was flattered when asked if Stinking Bishop could be used in the duo's new adventure, which is released next month.

But the father- of-two is nervous that the film will have the same dramatic impact on sales as it did on Wensleydale cheese, which featured in an earlier cartoon.

He said: "Apparently, the people making Wensleydale were going to close and now they have a £10 million turnover.

"I'm not much of a businessman. I must say I am a bit worried about it."

Tuesday, September 27, 2005