Why we closed our Not on the High Street Store

When we paid (somewhere in the region of £600 - £800 I can't remember exactly) to join Not on the High Street as a ‘partner’ in 2012 shortly after setting up our business, we felt proud to be a part of the marketplace. It felt like a place for designers,  makers and crafters, where small UK businesses would thrive and be supported. Photo below of our significantly younger selves in our Manchester workshop around this time!

Fourteen years on, the site feels like a place where deliberately dishonest content is rewarded and genuine craftspeople are penalised in favour of profits. To understand what’s happened here, we need to go back to the beginning:

The original concept of Not on the High Street was in selling unique and quality items produced in the UK, not available in any high street or any chain stores.

The company has at some point changed hands, the online world has changed and yes, there are challenges as a result of this but they seemed to lose sight of their initial vision, yet still expect to dine off it’s original good reputation.

For the first few years we sold a reasonable amount through Not on the High Street, especially in the run up to Christmas (for a 30% rate of commission of course, they don’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts!). From about 2019 onwards, this dwindled to the point of really selling very little in the past 2 years. Why is that? In short, to us it felt like a dramatic lowering of standards in terms of who is allowed to sell on the marketplace, in order to keep up with competition from other gift websites.

Instead of remaining a high end marketplace, someone sat in an office in London seemed to have decided the best direction for Not on the High Street to go was to try and compete with the entire rest of the internet. We started getting pressure to remove delivery charges, to offer an almost permanent discount sale and to slash our prices in half in the name of Black Friday.

It takes hours and hours to make or forge something. Plus all the hours thinking and designing before you even get to that point, not to mention the years of training and developing the skill in the first place. And yes, prices do reflect that.  And no, genuine makers can rarely afford to do Black Friday sales. You would have thought a ‘champion of small British makers’ like Not on the High Street would have been able to grasp this concept, but apparently not.

To be clear, At Black Fox Metalcraft we have no issue with competition. It makes us strive to be better at what we do, and that’s how it should be. It’s when the playing field is not level that we have a problem. 

There is a very big difference between a company who makes what they sell in the UK, and a company who imports mass produced items. We also have no problem with mass produced metalwork sold at low prices. It’s just that you cannot fairly put the two side by side with one dressed up as the other. It’s a massive con for the customer, and it makes the work of British makers look overpriced when it isn’t.

A random site on the internet I can do nothing about, but you would think that a company like Not on the High Street who claims to be a champion of small British craftspeople would put some effort into the quality control of content on their own site, wouldn’t you? No, no they don’t seem to do that. They appear to us to allow sellers of mass produced machine made items to describe their work as ‘hand forged’ or ‘hand crafted’ and that I find pretty galling.  There may well still be some good stuff on the site, but finding it would be tricky given that dishonest listings appear to be widely permitted.

In June this year we received an email that I at first thought was some dodgy spam; one of the classic ‘you owe money’ emails from a known, trusted brand. I ignored and deleted it until a second email came in soon after. Turned out it was actually real – it was Not on the High Street and they had introduced a fee for sellers who do not reach a specific target in a month!

So rather than be penalised for being an honest British business who makes what we sell, we have closed our store on Not on the High Street. We are instead focusing our energy on local craft events and makers markets, where customers can see and appreciate the effort that has gone into our work. Perhaps this will be for the best in the long term and we will be able to craft a future on our own – onwards and upwards for us being proud of what we do, and not compromising our quality for someone else's profits!