WildDay is an internet-only operation set up by entrepreneur Michael Jackson. The site went live in March 2000. By September it was attracting over 30,000 visitors a month and expects to be turning over £200,000 a month by September this year.

Jackson was sales and marketing director at Recruitment Scotland, which had been sold to Monster.co.uk for £9 million. He says his experience at Recruitment Scotland gave him the confidence that a self-funded business could see off competition from heavily-funded rivals.

From factory sale to the outdoor life

He says the idea for the site came to him when, as a climbing and diving enthusiast himself, he attended a factory sale in Glasgow of outdoor equipment in mid-winter. People came to the sale from all over and even queued overnight to get the best bargains. Jackson believed this was a market worth tapping.

Then, at a First Tuesday meeting for internet entrepreneurs, he met Michael Green, proprietor of outdoor goods retailer Bridgemill. The two linked up and decided to re-brand the existing Bridgemill site as WildDay.com.

The site offered ecommerce powered by Actinic Catalog 3.0. The package provides the flexibility needed to, for example, offer promotional prices and to split the marketing and technical aspects of the site on to different servers.

"The site design is done internally and I believe in brutally simple designs. People have not come to the site to be entertained but to buy," says Jackson.

In November 2000 WildDay developed the business into the B2B sector, offering corporate bulk sales with extras like logo embroidery to order. At the same time it had to cope with a "massive leap" in the level of orders it was receiving - suddenly a lot more than its warehouse staff could cope with.

Outward Bound and post-office links

Jackson also brought his marketing background into play and set up links with the Outward Bound trust and small sub-post offices, giving them a percentage of sales made on their recommendation or through post office terminals, thus supporting the rural community. The site is also sponsoring the Independent Travel World exhibition.

Jackson has set out to raise the profile of the site through intensive press and public relations activities. He has won a high profile for himself and is currently in the running for First Tuesday's Personality of the Year award and Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year. He was also named 37th most eligible bachelor by The Scotsman!

He believes the keen prices the site offers have been instrumental in making the outdoor sector increasingly competitive: "We're a thorn in the side of our major competitors," he says.