Heather Emery
Heather Emery is Co-Founder of Love Logs, offering a fast, reliable delivery service for sustainably sourced firewood, cooking wood and charcoal.
She used her 10 years in experience in logistics, working with customers like ASOS and Gymshark, to offer a modern eCommerce experience in an antiquated industry.
- Tell us a little bit about your business…
Love Logs is a family business run by myself and my husband, Paul, with three key values – quality, convenience and sustainability. We’re passionate about the planet so we never use any plastic in our products or packaging, we sell only British wood to reduce road miles and we plant a tree for every order. We understand though that just being sustainable isn’t enough – you need to offer a product and service that’s as good or better as the competition or your customers will go elsewhere. We genuinely believe our wood is the best you can buy in Britain with the fastest, most convenient delivery – and we’ve got nearly 3,000 5* reviews to prove it!
- How did you get into the industry?
Completely by chance! We bought a pizza oven during lockdown and had a terrible experience buying wood online – it took ages to get to us, the product wasn’t the right size and it was packaged in an obscene amount of plastic! From my experience working with online retailers I knew I could offer a better customer experience, and with Paul’s passion for outdoor cooking, he knew he could create the right products. We took the leap, quit our jobs and poured all of our savings into starting the business.
- What are the biggest opportunities and challenges in your industry?
Our biggest opportunity is the changing demographics and attitudes of people who burn wood. The ‘traditional’ way of calling your local tree surgeon to ask him to dump a plastic dumpy bag on your drive at some point in the next few weeks doesn’t work for anyone under 50! Customers expect the ‘Amazon experience’ in every aspect of life and we’re now offering that for a product where they’ve never had it before.
Our single biggest challenge is the great British weather! 2023 gave us a cool, wet summer and an unseasonably warm winter. Unsurprisingly, customers buy less wood when the winter is mild, and we see charcoal and cooking wood sales drop when it rains in the summer – nobody wants to be huddled under a gazebo cooking pizza on their own in the rain!
4. How do you get the most out of the people who work for you?
We don’t hire anyone at Love Logs but we recently moved to a 100% dropship model so we work with four different wood producers around the UK to ship directly to the consumer based on our specifications. Managing your dropship partners is very different to managing people who actually work for you.
We want every customer to have a great experience with us so we need our dropship partners to be on form every day, and to be as passionate about our products and our brand as we are. We are really clear on our expectations and give them the tools they need to pass those down to the team – whether it’s regular training sessions or something as simple as posters on the wall.
We visit them regularly and share some of our positive reviews and customer feedback so they feel motivated to keep giving us and our customers the best products and service they can.
We’re also fair and reasonable about pricing – with inflation as crazy as it’s been over the past few years our costs have increased dramatically but we never try to beat our partners down too far on price – it’s more important to us that they maintain the high standards and feel excited about our growth. We don’t want them cutting corners to increase their margin.
5. What are the most crucial elements to your business running smoothly and being successful?
Our obsession with our customer’s experience I think is what’s allowed us to be as successful as we have. We have a returning customer rate of 49% which is almost unheard of in eCommerce because we genuinely sell the best products and give the best service in the industry. We are our own biggest customer and constantly use our products and shop our own website to see where we can be improving.
6. How has the past 12 months been for you?
We joke that running a business means living on a constant rollercoaster and the last 12 months have epitomised that!
We have some amazing successes that we’re really proud of. We saw 27% growth in sales over the winter in spite of the warmer weather, we’ve launched our US website and we’ve had our first retail order which will see us in 20 garden centres this spring.
However, last summer was tough with the wet weather and it brought home how difficult it can be to own a business and not know how much you’ll be able to pay yourself at the end of the month. We are 100% self-funded so we don’t have investors we can go to for a cash injection if we have a bad quarter.
Overall though, I love what I do and I’m happy that we don’t have an investor overlord to answer to when we make decisions – we can do what’s best for our business, best for our customers and best for the planet without having to justify it to anyone but ourselves.
7. What will the next 12 months look like for your business?
The next 12 months is all about seeing results from the investments we’ve made into our USA and retail launches.
Our initial retail launch is for pizza oven wood in 20 garden centres so we’re working hard to make that a success so that we can expand the offering to firewood in the winter and bring on more retail locations and chains over the next 12 months.
Launching the US has been like starting the business from scratch and having to get our name out there and build our brand to convince customers to give us a chance. Hopefully we’ve learned enough lessons from the UK launch that we’ll be able to make it a huge success (and have an excuse to spend our winters in Texas!)
8. What are the highlights of your career so far?
When I was younger I had a job that allowed me to travel round the world and visit New York regularly. I remember walking into Times Square for the first time thinking ‘I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to get to do this’. Had you asked me at the time, I’d have told you that nothing could ever be better than getting to travel and experience new places in the name of work.
That was before I had my own business with a brand I’d built from scratch!
If you ask me now, my highlight is always meeting our customers ‘in the wild’. Whenever we exhibit at a festival or show, customers come to our stand and are excited to tell us that they’ve been using us for a while and love our products and service or find the content we post really helpful. We often hear that we’ve made them think about plastic use in other areas of their life too. Nothing compares to the satisfaction and pride that comes from strangers telling you that they love the company that you built from nothing.
9. What’s the biggest business mistake that you’ve learnt from?
My ‘bullshit’ detector has got much better as I’ve gotten older and I trust my own judgement more. When I was younger, I was prone to trust those who were older, more experienced or more successful against my own gut feeling and I made a few mistakes, like leaving an awesome job for a company that folded 6 months later! Now when something doesn’t sound quite right, I challenge it and I’m not afraid to say no to advice and do what I know is best.
10. What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve been given?
You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do!
