Darrly, a story of 10 beautiful years
The early days of Darlly
How a bizarre Indian essential oil led to the Darlly Decade . . . The summer of 2009 Phil Moseley and Gil Gingell were together working on a marketing project for The London School of Tropical Medicine. They had been asked to take an amazing natural oil called Neem to market in order to rid the world of nasty bed bugs.
Gil, former Commercial Director EMEA for advertising giant McCann Ericsson and Phil, former marketing director and founder of Sundance Spas UK were sharing a beer after work (as they often did) talking about the fascinating world of Hot Tubs.
Phil recalls telling Gil the world of spas wasn't in a particular good place following the crash of late 2008, however, there were still a lot of spa owners out there who needed replacement filters for their tubs but filters were hard to get hold of, very slow in delivery and poor in quality.
With Gils' 20 years' experience of financially guiding large corporations and generally getting them to work globally and Phil's 15 years' experience in the spa world, his connections and marketing instincts, the partnership was an easy-going dynamo.
In November 2009 Filters4Spas was formed.
Darlly's decade
The UK market was reasonably easy to move into, as it proved at its first show Spatex 2010. But the bigger, faster growing market of Europe was the real target and following a couple of trips to China a year later an official partnership was struck with Hangzhou Darlly Filtration Equipment and Darlly Europe Limited became the group owner.
At this time the brand Darlly was totally unknown anywhere in the world, however, following International trade shows in Lyon, Barcelona, Cologne, Bologna, Stuttgart and the annual Spatex in just 3 years the brand was now not only recognised in USA, more importantly, it had become the leading replacement filter brand throughout Europe.
Over the decade some fundamental principles were applied to lead to the success of the business.
However, quality of product and the service in supplying that product has always been top priority. Theresa Zhang, International Sales Director for Darlly, enhances this further:
Working with Darlly Europe this past 10 years has been an absolute pleasure, Phil and Gil have brought dynamism, development and innovation to our business partnership and we send our sincerest congratulations to the Darlly Europe Team in achieving what they set out to do in becoming the number one filter brand in Europe.
Both are family run businesses and a strong friendship has blossomed during the process which is very evident.
Reinvestment after reinvestment in stock, marketing and business systems has also started to pay huge dividends which has ensured very little in price rises over the last 10 years. Their prices have increased by just 14% over 10 years and that is against a background of a £ to $ fall in value of 20% and inflation of another 20% over the same period.
Prospects and projects for the next 10 years
Now a multi-million-pound business with 1.2 million filters supplied to 26 European countries during the decade, Gil and Phil are both looking forward to working together for another decade with exactly the same team, with special thanks to Elaine and Jim to whom they have a lot of admiration and give great thanks. It's teamwork including their agents and distributors throughout Europe that got them here.
After their first year the Darlly team celebrated the end of the year at the Christmas markets in Birmingham, so it was fitting to take the Darlly team and friends to a real Christmas market in Vienna to celebrate its decade.
