Discover how Frankie Thorogood built and scaled multi-million-pound eCommerce brands, navigated challenges, and learned invaluable lessons in entrepreneurship. From risk-taking to resilience, get insights on winning in the ever-evolving digital marketplace.

Frankie's Career and Advice

Tell us about your career so far and the essential turning points that got you where you are today.

When I left university, I wanted to work in advertising. I applied to almost every ad agency in London and was rejected by them all. I knew in my heart that I really wanted to start my own brand, rather than just work out how to sell someone else’s product.

Eventually, I got my ‘big’ idea and became the first person in the UK to sell football snoods. Initially, I wanted to sell into retail, but someone I knew suggested putting them on eBay to make more profit per unit. In the end, the margin was actually worse, but that’s what got me started in eCommerce.

I could see the snood craze would die out, so I moved on to the next thing quickly and launched TCA, specialising in compression sportswear, which was a growing category at the time. Over the next eight years, TCA became a fully fledged sportswear brand.

I noticed that everybody was shopping on Amazon, but there was a massive gap in quality and aspirational brands on the platform. I decided to ignore what everyone else on Amazon was doing, and instead of focusing on cheap prices and low quality, we did the opposite. In 2016, we launched the Elite Tech Short, which became, and still is to this day, the number one selling running short on Amazon UK.

After nine years, I felt it was time to move on, and we sold TCA. This was a big moment for me, as I had previously taken very little cash from the business. It felt great to take my chips off the table and start the next adventure.

The next adventure turned out to be pottery. People say it seems like a random next move, but in reality, I’ve always been product-agnostic. I care about great products, great brands, and interesting business models. I tried air-dry clay during lockdown, and it struck me as a great opportunity to reinvent the product. I also launched a few other arts and crafts brands in a similar vein at the same time, a couple of which are still performing well. However, Pott’d has taken the lead and become a super high-growth company, now with a team of 15 and eight-figure revenue.

Looking back at your career, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self?

Trust other people and delegate way, way sooner. Practise the 80/20 principle and spend time on the big levers, not the small things. Buy bitcoin.

Entrepreneurship and eCommerce Lessons

Having built two multi-million-pound brands in very different industries, what common challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them?

The process of starting and scaling the two different brands has brought up many of the same issues, but having solved them once before, to my surprise, the second time around has sometimes been almost laughably easy. However, one problem we’ve had with both is how to continue to grow through new products. You have to constantly update products and cannibalise your own sales by introducing new and better options, or someone else will do it for you. The solution is for everyone, and especially the design team, to be passionate about the product, talk to the customers, and constantly think about and generate new ideas.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to break into the eCommerce space today?

Life is a lot easier when you start with a great product. If you get that right, it makes it much easier for everything else to fall into place.

Cross-border expansion can be a huge challenge for eCommerce brands. What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from scaling your businesses internationally?

Biggest lesson: it’s boring, difficult, annoying paperwork and logistics. Most founders and entrepreneurs hate this stuff, so find someone who loves it and let them help you.

What do you think is the biggest mistake brands make when trying to expand internationally, and how can they avoid it?

Either doing it too late, when they are stagnant and desperate for more sales, and/or trying to do it all at once, which spreads resources and focus too thin.

When it comes to Amazon vs D2C, what are the pros and cons of each model, and how do you decide which is right for a brand?

The right thing for any D2C brand is to be active on both. If you’re primarily a D2C brand and have no presence on Amazon, you are throwing money away. If you want to play the Amazon game, then be aware that your edge is going to be very thin. There are only a few variables to play with, which is why it so often comes down to price. And being in price wars is not fun for people or margins.

Ultimately, D2C is usually about demand creation, and Amazon is about demand capture. If you’re good at driving traffic and have a ‘new’ product concept that requires education, and are at the middle-to-higher end of the market, you’re going to struggle to get anywhere on Amazon at first (but you need to be there for the future). If you’re good at sourcing products at below-average costs and enjoy researching and spotting new opportunities, then you might want to start an Amazon-only business.

What’s the boldest decision you’ve made as an entrepreneur, and what did you learn from it?

In 2016, I decided to launch five times as many new products as we had in previous years. TCA was doing really well, and everything I touched was turning to gold. That was my bold move. Twelve months later, the company was crippled, almost completely out of cash, and on the brink of bankruptcy, as those new products hadn’t sold anywhere near as well as I’d thought. It took three years of hard graft, begging, borrowing, and (not quite) stealing money to keep us alive. I learnt the meaning of the term cashflow.

Quick-Fire Questions

• What is your favourite social media platform, and why?
  Instagram is the only one I use, and I secretly hate myself for it. I think there’s a lot of cool creative stuff happening on TikTok, so I also hate myself for not using that.

• What’s one trend in eCommerce you predict will take off in 2025?
  People have been saying social commerce every year for a decade, so maybe its time has finally come.

• Is there a recent marketing campaign from any brand that really caught your attention, and why?
  Honestly, I’ve seen very little that’s made an impression on me recently.

• What’s one book, podcast, or resource that has significantly influenced your entrepreneurial mindset?
  I recommend The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz a lot.

• How many unopened emails do you currently have in your inbox?
  6,799. Yeah, I probably won’t reply to you.

• What is one of your proudest moments in your career?
  When I finally hit breaking point and outsourced to a 3PL, instead of fulfilling all my orders by hand and keeping the stock in the family living room – it was a proud moment the first day I didn’t walk to the post office.

• What is something you’re still looking forward to achieving in your career?
  I’d still like to get Forbes 30 Under 30.