It is a quiet morning in Darlington, a market town in northern England, but business inside Funky Fidgets is brisk. Postmen traipse in for the first of three daily collections; shelves groan under floor-to-ceiling stock; a customer arrives on his daughter’s orders to buy the latest stress ball. Few would guess that the sensory-toy firm, which ships worldwide and employs 14 people, was founded by an 11-year-old. Fewer still that its busiest shop window is a Chinese video app.
Alex, the founder, began selling toys online during the covid-19 pandemic. Now 16, she remains at the heart of the firm: she designs products, handles customer service, conducts stock takes and chairs brand meetings, all while studying accountancy. Most of Funky Fidgets’ orders arrive through TikTok Shop, a service that lets viewers buy without leaving the app. Around 300,000 small British businesses now use it, most having joined in the past year. Britain has proved unusually receptive to this kind of commerce. Its high streets have withered faster than those of its European neighbours, and its shoppers have taken to Chinese-style live commerce with enthusiasm: some 57% of Gen Z and millennials watch shopping streams.
The formula resembles an old one. Sellers can broadcast themselves packing orders and chatting to customers, and viewers can watch their own items picked and boxed in real time. Youngsters follow the streams with the same obsessiveness their grandmothers brought to QVC, a home-shopping channel. Nor is the audience exclusively young. Mason Miller of The Fat Butcher, a butcher’s some 70km north of Funky Fidgets, reckons 60% of his TikTok customers are women aged between 40 and 60.
More surprising is that digital fame translates into footfall. Funky Fidgets, which has half a million followers, can draw four-hour queues outside its shop on Saturdays, with customers travelling from as far afield as London and Edinburgh. ‘We bring a lot of tourism into Darlington,’ says Melissa Brunskill, Alex’s mother, who runs the shop day to day while her daughter is at sixth-form college. It is an early sign that live-streamed retail could help revive, rather than merely replace, Britain’s ailing high streets-a cheerful inversion of the received wisdom that the internet is what killed them.
Mother and daughter do not entirely agree on the destination. ‘I want to keep it as small as I can,’ says Ms Brunskill. ‘She wants to have stores all over the world.’ On current form, the smart money is on the teenager: Funky Fidgets already has its own lower-cost product line modelled on viral brands. The high street’s saviour, if it has one, may turn out to be a 16-year-old with a ring light and a head for figures.