Broughton Boots: A Case Study In British Export Excellence

Broughton Boots Of England

In April 2014 Tom Broughton of Broughton Boots contacted ParcelWorks after receiving information we had sent to his other business Cubitts.

Bringing back to life the English, handmade boots that his Great-Grandfather founded in 1907 provided a great back story which clearly appealed to international investors.

Tom had just successfully completed his Kickstarter campaign, to the sum of £67,522, and needed to fill 400 orders as quickly as possible.

Boots by BroughtonAfter a successful campaign, international delivery can create difficulties for new businesses as global customers can often be nervous about purchasing from abroad and be demanding.

They often do not understand their own Country’s import regulations and don’t grasp the concept of import duty and taxes. This is especially true in the USA where consumers don’t like being faced with a duty bill in order to receive their purchase.

This was one of the key benefits that we brought to the table compared to other carriers as ParcelWorks is able to calculate, manage and pre-pay duty in our shipping platform. Given that our network is specifically designed for B2C products, even where duty isn’t charged the customs clearance process is far more streamlined and products released from customs much faster than with other carriers.

ParcelWorks was immediately able to set up Broughton Boots with their own invoice account on our extensive shipping platform and with them needing to process large numbers of orders at once, it made sense that our file upload function was used in this instance.

However, to save time and help Broughton Boots process the shipment quickly ParcelWorks agreed to receive his Kickstarter orders via CSV. We then created the file required for upload, informed Tom of any questionable address formats and processed the first batch of orders.

Broughton Boots made their own arrangements to drop their consignment into our partner’s processing centre at Heathrow and items were processed and despatched the same evening.

The consignment had a 100% delivery success (as we have had on all deliveries in 2015) and we have just processed & despatched the 2nd batch of parcels for Broughton Boots.

ParcelWorks fully expects Broughton Boots to continue selling large quantities globally with the US being their biggest single market.


For a Kickstarter campaign like ours, a large proportion of orders are outside of the UK. This creates a huge minefield for international shipping – with complications of import taxes, duty, tracking numbers, confusing addresses and entirely new alphabets. Thankfully Parcelworks were on hand to help us through the process, managing it in a much more time and cost efficient way than would have bee possible otherwise.

Tom Broughton


Why has Broughton Boots sold so well internationally?

  • They are British design made in Britain. Overseas purchasers love to buy British!!
  • Their products are of the highest quality. Quality translates into any language!!
  • There is a great story behind the business. The narrative can cross borders and is key to Kickstarter campaigns.