About Jolly and Useful.co.uk

JollyAndUseful.co.uk was founded by Sarah from Dinghams, a small family-owned group of cookshops in southern England. Helped by her husband and their British Shorthair cat, Monster, they together brought over three decades of retail and IT experience to the company (although Monster's contribution to this was, admittedly, relatively minor).

Taking the company name from a suggestion by Sarah's sister, the original aim of JollyAndUseful.co.uk was to bring together into one place a highly desirable range of goods for children and for the home, with the unifying theme that everything in the shop had to be either very jolly or very useful— - ideally both. JollyAndUseful.co.uk sticks to this principle: There's no room here for anything that is only a little bit jolly and a little bit useful. We carefully examine everything that comes our way and reject an awful lot of it; we would rather carry a smaller, more selective range of goods that we know customers will take delight in than make people trawl through boring items to find the good ones.

Our approach to online retail is born of being online shoppers ourselves since the early days of the Internet; we think that buying on the web should be easy, fun, quick, and rewarding. We hope you will notice the effort that goes into our photography and our product descriptions (always written by us, with the products in front of us). When shopping online before setting up J&U, we became very irritated by seeing site after site with exactly the same product information because they were all using the descriptions and photographs straight from the manufacturers. This seemed lazy: Where was the evidence that the seller knew their products? Where was the love? We vowed that JollyAndUseful.co.uk would be different, and we think that our customers appreciate the effort we make properly to show and tell them what they are buying.

JollyAndUseful.co.uk is based in the beautiful English city of Salisbury, home of the Magna Carta and Europe's oldest clock. We try to run the company as responsibly as we can; all our local transport is by bicycle, for example, so the parcel you receive from us starts its journey to you powered without noise or pollution by a human being, just how it should be. If you're ever in Salisbury and see somebody on an orange bicycle then say hello - it might well be one of us!