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New
child health website Smallfolk.com Focusing on the formative years.
New website for children delivers digital dosh for Great Ormond
Street Hospital (GOSH)
A new
website for parents and carers of pre-school children goes online
today ((Monday 26 June 2000), offering the largest source of child
health information available in the UK, in partnership with Great
Ormond Street Hospital’s Children’s Charity. Smallfolk.com
is a one-stop provider of information, product and services to parents
and carers of children in their formative years (under five). Smallfolk.com’s
exclusive Internet alliance with Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s
Charity is a key part of the firm’s innovative marketing and
operational model that addresses the major challenges faced by Internet
Business-to-consumer (B2C) firms. Smallfolk.com relies on cause-related
marketing as the primary means of customer acquisition. In this
way Smallfolk.com hopes to reduce its spending on conventional ‘dotcom’
advertising.
Instead
it will channel a proportion of its marketing budget into child-related
good causes in order to increase brand-awareness. Online sales of
products from toys to toiletries for the under-fives will help to
raise funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital. For every £1 spent
on products, Smallfolk.com will donate 5p to the Hospital’s
Children’s Charity towards vital equipment for the Hospital’s
work with sick children.
The
lower overheads of a pure Internet operation, allow Smallfolk.com
to maintain highly competitive prices while supporting GOSH. Co-founder
Ilesh Kotecha, said, ‘As a single parent working long hours
in the City, I found it hard to find reliable and readily available
childcare information. Great Ormond Street Hospital was the ideal
partner. They provide high quality information and also allowed
us to help support sick children and their families in the process.’
New website for children and Great Ormond Street Hospital cont’d
Smallfolk.com is unique among UK E-tailing sites in following a
fully distributed operational model. Software development, for example,
is outsourced to the firm’s own offshore offices in Chennai
(formerly Madras), India, whereas web-hosting is outsourced to the
U.S.
Initially,
Smallfolk.com is being launched for the UK parenting community,
but within a year it plans to be a multi-lingual website across
the European Community. Smallfolk.com can be found at www.Smallfolk.com
and www.Smallfolk.co.uk . - ends - Contact: Jan Jananayagam Smallfolk.com,
on 020 8426 1887 or Kathy Chellew or Jo Hookes, Great Ormond Street
Hospital, 020 7829 8671. Note to editors: Note to editors: 1 The
medical expertise has been sourced from Great Ormond Street Hospital.
2 Smallfolk.com has reduced its set-up costs by setting up its own
software company in Madras, India, to maximise the donation it can
give Great Ormond Street Hospital. 3 Smallfolk.com comprises 3,000
pages of child health advice and information, and sells 1,300 lines
of baby products and equipment, including clothes, books, CD-ROMs,
prams and cots. There is also the chance to get price reductions
through a bulk purchase pool. 4 Smallfolk.com was co-founded by
two former investment bankers who met in a lift in New York two
years ago while both working for Credit Suisse First Boston. Both
Jan Jananayagam, 31 and Ilesh Kotecha, 36, came to Britain as refugees.
Jan’s family fled civil war in Sri Lanka and Ilesh escaped
persecution in Uganda under General Idi Amin in the 1970s. The pair
are both computer science graduates, and Jan also holds an MSc in
Applied Mathematics and an MBA from INSEAD Business School in France.
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