Ecommerce & Digital
What Happened When We Lost Our Biggest Retail Channel Overnight
1 December 2025
On the thirty-first of December 2020, the UK left the European Union’s single market and customs union. For a business that had spent fifteen years building a wholesale distribution network across the UK and Ireland, the change was not gradual. It was immediate, structural, and brutal.
Overnight, our UK retail relationships became cross-border trade relationships. Customs declarations, import duties, VAT at the border, additional compliance requirements, and delivery delays that our retail partners had neither the appetite nor the infrastructure to absorb. One by one, the conversations happened. The orders stopped coming. The revenue that had taken fifteen years to build began unwinding in a matter of months.
This is what happened next, what we did about it, and what I learned about building a business that does not depend on a single channel’s survival.
The scale of it
By mid-2021, the wholesale revenue from UK retail accounts had declined by approximately seventy percent. The accounts had not gone away. They were still there, still interested in the products, still recommending them to customers who asked. But the administrative and cost burden of cross-border import had made the economics unworkable for smaller orders, and the uncertainty around further regulatory change made larger retailers reluctant to commit.
The loss was not a competitor taking our market share. It was the rules of the game changing in a way that made a channel we had invested in heavily suddenly inaccessible. There was no-one to negotiate with, no relationship to repair, and no amount of product improvement that would fix it.
What remained was the decision about what to do.
The financial position
The first thing I did was the thing I would advise anyone to do in a business crisis: build an honest picture of the financial position before making any decisions.
That meant rebuilding the financial model with a realistic cashflow forecast for the following twelve months under three scenarios: if we managed to recover some wholesale volume quickly, if we recovered none, and if we actively pivoted to ecommerce and the pivot took longer than planned. All three scenarios needed to be survivable. The ones that were not survivable needed intervention: cost reduction, additional working capital, or a decision to wind down an entity that could not be made viable.
The picture was uncomfortable. It was also clarifying. It told us exactly how much runway we had, which decisions were urgent and which could wait, and what the ecommerce business needed to look like to replace the lost wholesale income.
The pivot
We had been selling online for several years, but the ecommerce operation had always been secondary to the wholesale business. Good products, reasonable listings, basic advertising. Nothing that had been built with the intention of carrying the business on its own.
Building it to that point in a compressed timeframe, with the cash position under pressure, required a different approach from the ground up.
The listing quality on every marketplace account was rebuilt. Product photography, copy, backend keywords, A-plus content. Not because it had been bad before, but because it had not needed to work hard before. Now it needed to convert at the level the business depended on.
The advertising was professionalised. A proper campaign structure with margin-based ACOS targets, negative keyword management, and weekly optimisation. The spend increased significantly but it was now being managed rather than set and monitored.
The SKU strategy was rationalised. Products that had existed for the wholesale channel, in formats and pack sizes that suited retail shelf, were replaced or supplemented with SKUs designed for the ecommerce buying behaviour in each market. The German bulk purchasing behaviour I have written about elsewhere: we adapted for it. The result was product lines that did not previously exist but outperformed the original range on Amazon.de within twelve months.
The VAT and compliance catch-up
The compliance position that had been manageable as a secondary channel became urgent as a primary one. Amazon Pan-EU FBA was the fulfilment model that made European distribution work without country-level warehousing, but it created VAT obligations in every country where Amazon stored our stock.
We had not been managing this adequately when the volume was lower. At the new volumes, the exposure was material. Getting compliant across the relevant EU jurisdictions while the business was simultaneously rebuilding its revenue model was not ideal sequencing. It was, however, the reality, and it was manageable with the right specialist support.
The lesson is that Pan-EU VAT compliance needs to be understood and managed from the point of enrolment, not from the point at which the business becomes large enough that ignoring them becomes risky.
What the business looked like twelve months later
Twelve months after the wholesale collapse, ecommerce revenue had recovered approximately seventy percent of the lost wholesale income. The margin on that revenue was higher than the margin the wholesale business had generated, because we were selling direct at retail prices rather than at wholesale prices.
The business was leaner. Some costs that had existed to service the wholesale operation had been eliminated. The team had changed: skills that mattered for ecommerce, platform management, digital marketing, data analysis, had been brought in or developed, and some skills that mattered primarily for wholesale had left.
It was a different business from the one that existed before Brexit. In some respects it was a better one.
What I would tell someone facing the same thing
Move fast on the financial diagnosis. Before you know what you can do, you need to know what you can afford to do and for how long. Build the honest cash picture first, even if you do not like what it shows. Especially if you do not like what it shows.
Do not wait for the situation to stabilise before making decisions. In a crisis, the situation does not stabilise while you wait. It deteriorates. The decisions that are difficult to make early become urgent decisions made under more pressure later.
The pivot is possible. Properly modelling the channel decision helps you see the path forward. Revenue models that look unshakeable are more fragile than they appear, and businesses that look too dependent on a single channel to survive its loss are sometimes more adaptable than the numbers suggest. The adaptation requires speed, clear thinking, and a willingness to build something genuinely different rather than a slower version of what existed before.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) who built and ran two international product businesses over twenty years, including leading a full channel pivot from wholesale to ecommerce following Brexit-driven market disruption. If you are navigating an ecommerce transformation, I can help.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.