Welcome to the website of the Northern Ireland based businessman Adam Ewart.

It’s flattering to be asked to speak at schools or events to encourage young people to start their own businesses, it's been a funny few years which has thrown up what I hope are a lot of encouraging stories, and I enjoy sharing them.

Karacha has gone from a bedroom business to fulfilling 30,000+ orders per year and sending container loads of Carmichael Saxophones and Archetto Violins to the USA. I've sat opposite HM The Queen for dinner, addressed MPs, started writting a newspaper column and helped over 10,000 students travel to uni without luggage all because my fiancée was stung with baggage charges.

Often before or after a talk i'm asked to provide some bio information, especially regarding what I got up to business-wise while at school, that's the purpose of this website, you'll find a bio along with links to the businesses, my blog and twitter below.

Visit the businesses here: Karacha Music – Sendmybag.com

Read my newspaper column online (apologies this is not regularly updated)

Despite not having facebook I’ve managed to find my way on to twitter and you can follow me @adamewart

**If you need to contact Adam urgently please do not rely on twitter, please contact Karacha or Sendmybag with your enquiry and it will be passed on. **

Bio:

Primary School
While others were swapping football stickers, I had a mini yellow plastic briefcase filled with various items I would try to sell my class mates. If I hit 50p sales it had been a good day!
While at primary school I also ran one Blue Peter sale from home and another from the school hall, I believe the local newspaper was invited for some much needed PR on both occasions.
Last memory of primary school age business activities I remember is creating board games and sending them off to the likes of MB – all with a very serious view of them being produced and becoming the next monopoly. Cleary that didn’t happen, but I did receive some very nice letters from the games companies.

Secondary School
I made money in the school Tuck Shop and was MD of the school’s young enterprise company but lots was happening outside of school.
Having very little start-up money rather than starting a business I decided to have a go with stocks and shares, I would order company reports from the FT (not that I understood them!) and then buy stock in companies on AIM. Due to my age this wasn’t strictly legal but I managed to buy and sell quite a few shares,  in fact an Australian mining company which I bought shares in with some birthday money was sold just a couple of years ago and I received a cheque with a 400% return – it only took 10 years!

When I turned 16 I applied for my first and only job, surprised by application process I registered my first domain name Fillajob.co.uk . The concept; teenagers looking for a part-time job would complete an online form and post a CV online. Potential employers would then visit the website and with a few clicks find eager workers in their local area. Not having a clue how to build a website with the functionality to actually do any of this led to the business stopping before starting.
Shortly afterwards I noticed the rise in people opting for contract mobile phones over PAYG. This was over 10 years ago and contract phones were nowhere near as prevalent as they are today. I realised that as people changed contracts they would be left with a spare phone, these phones were often still of a much higher spec than the still more common PAYG models. Most people would either trade in their old phone for £20-£30 or keep it in a drawer. I knew I could sell them online, often for £100+, so I started distributing leaflets for Middle-Men-Mobiles ( “The Middle Man that Makes you Money”), I went door to door and handed out leaflets in the street in my branded t-shirt.
At the same time as selling the mobile phones I’d also branched out into ink cartridges and LPs – often making more money in a week from my mini enterprises than from my part-time job.   
As school friends started to apply for university I saw a gap in the market for a student portal (this was before any of current big student portals existed), so I registered the name “Karacha.com”, as far as I was concerned it was just a quirky made up word which I would used to create a brand (I know now of a city by the same name).
Just as I was getting ready to have my first go at web design since Fillajob.co.uk an opportunity arose to buy 2000 music books from a bankrupt shop in London.
I bought the books for about £300 and went on to sell them for several thousand, in doing this I saw what I believed was a much more profitable gap in the market, ditched the student idea, bought a book on ecommerce web design and went on to launch Karacha.com as an online sheet music retailer.

Karacha Music
The early days of Karacha Music saw quite literally thousands of sheet music books littering the halls and rooms of my parents’ house, I had a business phone line installed in my bedroom and my first continuous business was now up and running.
The website I built myself was utter rubbish, but enough people at least tried to buy from it to make me see it was worth investing in having a proper one built.
Around the time of having the new website designed I started to stock some musical instrument accessories alongside the books, it quickly became apparent that accessories had much more margin than books so as time went on books disappeared from our catalogue altogether.
Keen to expand the range I met with a number of distributors, many of which were old fashioned and unwelcoming. In the end to open a couple of accounts I had to kit out a local corner shop pretending it was a music store (ably assisted by the owner Chris), just so the distributors would supply me, they didn’t want to supply online only businesses.
As the months passed I became less impressed by the margins and products offered by the distributors so I decided to trace a number of the products back to source, this led me to manufacturers in Germany and USA. I approached the factories to make products to my specifications and so my first own brand products were created under the name “Karacha Elite”.
Around this time something quite amusing happened, a UK distributor went bankrupt, as I had already been dealing with one of their manufacturers  in the USA I took the opportunity to pick up the exclusive rights to a couple of their branded products for distribution within Europe. Another UK based distributor, one who had previously refused to supply me also approached the USA manufacturer but it was too late, the deal was mine, the MD of the UK distributor who had refused to supply previously was now one of my customers – I never hold a grudge, but he pays a premium.
Around this time I won a couple of shell live wire awards, which led to lots of press and gave me a real insight into the power of PR, in the following years I would secure hundreds of pieces of press, including Archetto Violins on the Daily Mail’s back to school list, in the Guardian every week for a month by running their Christmas competition, supply products for TV giveaways and essentially do whatever it took to get my brands out there for the smallest amount of money possible.
Musical instruments accessories sold well but the real money was always going to be in musical instruments themselves, so to that end I met with new distributors and was again surprised by their lack of common sense. A number of distributors wanted to sell products to me (as a new account) for less than what some of their other customers where retailing them for – what a joke!
The only way forward in my mind was therefore to create our own ranges of musical instruments,  this was risky on a number of fronts, to manufacture would take up a lot of capital, and there was a question of whether anyone would buy unknown brands – but you don’t really think about it that way at the time. My plan was to create products at least 10% better than the branded products and sell them for at least 10% less, I was convinced if I achieved this they would sell, luckily I was right.
At first it was a struggle, especially with the banks, I needed c. £140,000 and unsurprisingly no bank wanted to lend – I don’t quite remember the full details but I kicked up such a fuss speaking to politicians / press / local business community I managed to get the Managing Director of the Bank to call the local branch and in the end my loan was approved.
I then visited china for the first time, met with manufacturers, and Carmichael Woodwind and Archetto Violins were born, that was going on for 5 years ago, since then the ranges have developed and we now only stock products which we manufacturer ourselves. Archetto has gone on to become the UKs bestselling coloured violins and our complete beginner saxophone pack has even been demoed by one of popular music’s best known players, Brian Travers from UB40.
Now I was selling musical instruments I needed more space, the previous year I’d moved from my parent’s house to an enterprise agency but that still wasn’t big enough so I signed the lease on a warehouse, not wanting to miss a trick I had a room built at the entrance to the warehouse and opened my first music shop.
Around this time the recession started to kick in and there was a noticeable change in retail habits, in order to minimise costs after 18 months I closed my warehouse and move all stock to a warehouse in Oxford, at the same time relocating my shop to a more prominent position.
We continually adapted and changed product spec and prices throughout the beginning of the recession in order to try and stay ahead of the competition, as competitors went bankrupt we survived and it was looking good. Then one day in September I got a phone call from the fulfilment warehouse in England who told me that they had gone into administration, this was a massive problem, it was out busiest time of the year and we had suddenly lost our ability to fulfil orders. Worse still the warehouse owner warned that the administrators would likely try to seize our stock, the bankruptcy was of course nothing to do with Karacha, we simply contracted the warehouse to hold our stock and fulfil orders but it could take weeks for the administrators to understand this and release it.

So there was nothing for it, 6am the next day I was on  a plane to England, I had a NI haulage company standing by to send lorry’s in and had organised an empty warehouse in NI to hold the stock – this was organised on the assumption i'd actually be able to get my stock (...there was no possibility it wasn't coming out of that warehouse)! On the way to the warehouse I must have spoken to 10 other fulfilment warehouses, I even stopped off and met with one company on the way to Oxford.  The Swindon based company I met was keen for the business and offered good rates, they even offered to organise haulage from the old warehouse, so that became the plan. The next day at 5am we headed to the warehouse before the administrators arrived, I paid newly redundant employees in cash and started filling lorries, some hours later as I drove to Swindon in a car with violins bows all around my head I couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer madness of it all.
The next day was another early start, the new fulfilment warehouse had really gone out of their way we even had the children of the owners in helping to count small items!
All in all it was a crazy couple of days, on the Thursday morning a 40ft container had just been unloaded in oxford joining a considerable amount of stock which was already in hand, I was sure we were heading for our most profitable Christmas to date. Little did I know at the time the next morning I'd be flying to England and Saturday would be spent moving stock like a scene from planes trains and automobiles. Testament to everyone involved by Tuesday orders where being fulfilled as normal and customers were unaware of the drama! It just shows you, no matter what you do to protect your business other factors outside of your control can still have a massive effect, and when they do you just need to get on with sorting it out!
Over the next year I started to get ideas about expansion, a number of our products were now best sellers in their categories in the UK and it was time to expand. After a busy summer of meetings in America, finally in October 2011 our first container of stock arrived in the USA. I’m pleased to say we've already fulfiled thousands of orders directly from our USA fulfilment centre and some of our products are already top 3 results on the biggest retail website in America.

Sendmybag
Sendmybag was started overnight back in 2007, my girlfriend was hit with excess baggage charges so I setup a simple service for her and students like her. I struck a deal with some of the major logistics providers that they would accept suitcases up to 30kgs, and deliver door to door anywhere in the UK.
From 2007 – 2011 I would go months without ever getting involved in the day to day running of the business, it was entirely self-sufficient, growing only on word of mouth and customer service was handled by one dedicated person with help from Karacha staff.
Entirely on word of mouth by 2011 we’d helped more than 10,000 students travel back and forth to university. As 2011 went on the number of enquiries from people asking for international services grew and grew, I spoke to some of the international logistics companies and we added international routes. The response from customers has been incredible, without advertising Sendmybag international has delivered to and collected baggage from over 40 countries.
When I looked into the reason for this new demand for international baggage services it turned out that airline baggage charges had risen by more than 1000% in only 4 years, to over $4 Billion!
The opportunity for Sendmybag is massive, airlines want to become luggage free and people are clearly sick of the charges, this is now more about the future rather than the past so I can't write about it yet, but needless to say plans are afoot which I believe will leave Karacha looking small fry. Sendmybag is going to be built into the first affordable, reliable, global, door to door luggage service. Phase one is to become known nationally and if you keep your eyes and ears open duirng 2012 I think you may just spot us...