With a predicted £1.3tn online shopping market by 2025, Manchester’s Rainy City Agency has targetted the US market as key to its ongoing growth.
Almost 80 per cent of Rainy City’s current client base is already US-based, and this week founder and MD Rebecca Worsley, the UK’s first female head of a Shopify Plus Partner, headed to New York to host an event aimed at drumming up more US customers.
Rainy City teamed up with Shopify itself to meet with existing and prospective customers and share how scale ups by the agency, using Shopify, are resulting in improved customer experience and significant sales uplifts.
Rainy City’s existing US projects include Utah-based children’s clothing brand Sparkle in Pink, Oregon-based crafting kit and workshop company Klum House, and family-owned online jewellery business Ben Garelick, from Buffalo.
The agency announced in August that 2022 revenues would exceed £1m, despite having never undertaken any fundraising since launch in 2017, and Worsley has identified the US market as a way to keep the figures rising. The 2022 Digital Market Outlook estimated revenue from retail e-commerce in the United States at roughly $768 billion in 2021. It forecast that by 2025, online shopping revenue in the U.S. will exceed $1.3 trillion.
Worsley said: “We’re at an exciting stage of the agency’s journey, and our global ambitions are stronger than ever. The US market has a great understanding of the Shopify platform – it can literally transform online fortunes with its scope and functionality.”
The agency is planning to grow its US presence through further events and in time potentially opening up an office.
Beyond the US, the agency has also been working for Canadian/Ghanaian shea butter producer Baraka Shea Butter. Interventions have resulted in revenue increases of 96 per cent for the shea butter producer, which has not only driven trade for the brand, but has also offered vital financial support for the West African community around it.
This increasingly globalised outlook comes as the agency recently announced its first £1m turnover projection, as well as the expansion of its team with a newly appointed Operations Director, John Paul Atley.
