What began as a way for the Scottish home and garden seller to clear surplus stock has turned into a powerful growth engine.

Joining Temu as a seller helped home and garden retailer Marco Paul move excess post-pandemic stock and bring in the additional revenue needed to invest back into its workforce.

“I never expected to do great numbers on Temu, I thought it could help us clear some of that stock, the historical bad buys of Covid,” said Caitlin Barrett, managing director of the West Lothian based business. “I never expected Temu to be one of our main revenue streams.”

Like many home and garden sellers, Marco Paul had enjoyed strong sales during the pandemic lockdowns, but as restrictions eased, maintaining that level of demand became more challenging.

“I’ve always worked in retail and it’s often felt like you were basically trying to keep a store open for as long as possible, trying to stem the loss,” Caitlin, who joined the business in July 2022, said. “When I joined Marco Paul, people were not spending online in the way that they had been shops were open again.”

With excess stock to move, Caitlin knew she needed to find new ways to reach customers. The decision to join Temu was also shaped by operational practicality.

“We decided to really go for it with Temu because there was no set up time,” she said. “The direct integration with Linnworks, for both stock and orders, meant onboarding was seamless.”

Temu’s straightforward sign up process meant Marco Paul could test the platform without upfront costs, but operational integration was also important for scale.

“We probably wouldn’t have joined without a direct integration with Linnworks. Not having a direct link between our live stock and a sales channel doesn’t work for us. We sell on too many platforms for this and custom development builds are too expensive for SME businesses. We trade on 20 marketplaces and Linnworks integrates with each one. It is one of the main reasons we are with them”.
—Caitlin Barrett, Managing Director, Marco Paul

Marco Paul joined Temu’s local seller initiative in February, fulfilling orders from its 100,000 square foot warehouse in Broxburn, where the number of employees ranges from 40 to 85 depending on seasonal demand. Within months, sales on the platform began to rise and today Temu is one of Marco Paul’s top five revenue streams.

“We had some real revenue come in through sales of items like garden trellises and larger products, then that very quickly turned to car and pet cleaning products which now sell better on Temu than they do on other platforms,” Caitlin said. “It is going from strength to strength for us. I am now expanding ranges, stocking more volume and making buying decisions specifically for Temu. We have not done that with any other channel this quickly. It just shows you the level of growth and the customers we are reaching.”

Additional revenue streams like Temu have allowed Caitlin and the team at Marco Paul to invest in their employees by increasing wages and taking on an additional apprentice.

“This year we became a Living Wage Accredited Employer which is something I was really passionate about,” Caitlin said. “A couple of pence extra an hour may not seem like something I should be shouting about but to a small business it is a lot. It is also a lot to the team members who are maybe working 40 to 50 hour weeks. It is £20 a week extra in their pocket that I would rather they had.

“So we worked really hard for that accreditation and it genuinely is extra revenue streams and launching on a new platform like Temu that drives profitability a little bit higher and allows us to do that.”

With Temu now firmly established as one of Marco Paul’s key sales channels, Caitlin says she often shares her experience with other independent retailers exploring new routes to market.

She says: “When I speak to other sellers who aren’t on Temu I’m asking them why they’ve not done it yet. If they’re already using systems like Linnworks, the integration makes it straightforward to test without a big time investment. It’s a really good move.”

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