We were delighted to join our longstanding client Ralawise for their supplier day at Chester Races for the season finale meeting this weekend. It was a really good opportunity to chat and socialise with their e-commerce team, directors and owner, outside the often frenetic pressures of day to day business as we often have several projects running concurrently as well as any support issues.

It was great too to meet up with some other suppliers, specifically our business partners Datel including owner and good friend Alan Simpson. Datel provide ERP and other business management solutions to Ralawise and our e-commerce platforms integrate with the Sage system they implemented and support.

Ralawise have been a key customer of ours for over 15 years, since we built their first e-commerce platform in fact. Back then the company’s turnover was in the mid £20 millions but they’ve since grown revenues beyond the £120 million mark and it’s fair to say e-commerce has helped to transform the business as it’s become their largest sales channel.

During the last 15 years we’ve worked on numerous web-based projects for Ralawise, developed new e-commerce platforms and built a completely bespoke white label solution which powers over 1000 reseller sites and has been very commercially successful. We’ve also supported their International expansion completing a major project for a key customer in Denmark.

We continue to work with Ralawise on an ongoing basis with a continuous development program delivered within Agile processes. This structure, which we introduced 3 years ago, provides Ralawise with a very flexible and responsive service which covers ongoing development as well as support. It’s delivered with complete transparency and provides the kind of visibility and control that can usually only be delivered by an in-house team.

The business was named on the Sunday Times HSBC International Track 200 league table (a ranking of Britain’s mid-market private companies with the fastest-growing international sales) earlier this year and is clearly a real winner, sadly unlike most of the nags I backed on Saturday.