Small Business Case Study: G7th, the Capo Company

"Now we're having to look quite seriously at things like Amazon as to how we can move things forward. But again, that's challenging because you don't want to damage the music industry, the bricks and mortar stores - and we're seeing more and more of them closing. It's really hard, but at the same time you've got to move with the times"

“At the moment, our trade is about a third in the Americas, it's about third in Europe including the UK, and then it's 1/3 everywhere else. It's much higher in the EU than it is in the UK at the moment. The UK is not a great market for us right now.”

“So we hired somebody in Ireland to act as our authorised representative, which obviously costs us a certain amount per year. It's like £300, £500, something like that? But immediately I can think of people who are going to struggle with that - that's going to affect their profit margin.”

“Complying to the regulations wiped off a chunk of the profit margin from everything”

"Absolutely (people have stopped selling to the EU). I remember we were speaking to people and they’d done things and then they were being advised, “Oh, that's not quite right. You need to do like this,” and they're getting messed around. And I haven't spoken to anyone recently since the deadline. But everybody's the same. You mention it and they just roll their eyes. “What a faff. What an absolute pain in the neck”. But then I remember as well, there have been other people who've just had to post on their social media, “We can't ship to the EU anymore.”

“Brexit was the same when we hit the Brexit date and I turned off EU sales for about a year. So again, I've spent six or seven grand on my website just so I can post stuff into the EU from our UK warehouse - and I still get returns, I still get people charged VAT when it arrives. I cannot ship into Ireland. Everything I ship to Ireland gets booted back. Everything I have to do with FedEx, which costs about four times as much.”