It is hard to believe that the firm, which ships worldwide and has 14 staff, was founded by an 11-year-old. IT’S A QUIET morning in Darlington, a town in northern England. But business inside Funky Fidgets, a sensory-toy shop, is brisk. Postmen traipse through the door for the first of three daily collections. Shelves are packed floor-to-ceiling with brightly coloured stock. A customer arrives, dispatched by his daughter to buy the latest stress ball.
Outside Asia, Britain has proved unusually fertile ground for this new kind of shopping. Its high streets have declined faster than those of its European neighbours, and British consumers have embraced Chinese-style live commerce more readily. Viewers can in turn watch staff pick and pack their items in real time. It’s not only youngsters who watch with the same obsessiveness as their grandmothers watch QVC, a mesmeric home-shopping channel.
Around 57% of Gen Z and Millennials watch shopping streams such as TikTok Shop live, where sellers can broadcast themselves packing orders and chatting to customers. Mason Miller, of The Fat Butcher, a butcher’s some 70km north of Funky Fidgets, reckons 60% of its customers on TikTok are 40- to 60-year-old women.
