Riseup Labs built a dedicated Growth Operations team for Jolliman, helping the UK retailer grow from roughly 20–30 organic customer inquiries per day to more than 100 new inquiries daily, process 100+ phone orders per day, expand marketplace operations, and support growth without building every function in-house.
Jolliman Essentials Ltd is a UK-based multi-channel retailer offering value-focused men’s clothing, footwear, home essentials, and lifestyle products through its e-commerce website, Amazon storefront, and social media channels.
As the business grew, its small internal team was increasingly stretched across customer acquisition, phone orders, social media, and marketplace operations.
The problem was not a lack of opportunity. It was capacity.
Jolliman initially engaged Riseup Labs to solve one immediate operational challenge: handling customer calls and phone orders more consistently.
The model worked.
As the partnership developed and Jolliman looked for further growth, the engagement expanded beyond traditional BPO into a broader Growth Operations model covering paid customer acquisition, social media management, order processing, and Amazon marketplace operations.
Today, Riseup Labs operates as an extension of Jolliman’s internal team—helping generate demand, process orders, manage digital channels, and create the operational capacity required to support continued growth.
Jolliman had built an established retail business, but its internal team was responsible for multiple functions at the same time.
As customer demand increased, several pressure points became more visible.
Before the Growth Operations engagement, Jolliman depended primarily on organic customer acquisition.
This generated roughly 20–30 customer inquiries per day, but there was no dedicated paid acquisition function continuously managing campaigns, audiences, creative, and performance.
To accelerate growth, Jolliman needed a more predictable way to generate new customer demand.
Phone ordering was an important part of Jolliman’s customer journey.
However, a small UK-based internal team could not consistently handle the volume of incoming calls—particularly outside standard UK working hours and during weekends.
That created a straightforward growth constraint:
Customer demand existed, but the business did not always have the capacity to capture it.
Unanswered or delayed calls could mean missed orders and inconsistent customer experiences.
Customer service was only one part of the problem.
The same internal team also needed to think about:
As the business grew, managing every function internally became increasingly difficult.
Jolliman already had an Amazon marketplace presence, but the channel did not have a dedicated specialist continuously managing listings, pricing, account health, marketplace performance, and optimization.
This meant a potentially valuable second sales channel was not receiving the same operational attention as the core website.
Jolliman did not simply need more staff.
It needed an operating model capable of expanding alongside the business.
Instead of hiring individual specialists and customer-service employees one by one in the UK, Jolliman could build a dedicated distributed team around the functions that were limiting growth.
The objective became clear:
Generate more demand, capture more orders, strengthen digital channels, and free the internal team to focus on the parts of the business that required their direct attention.
Riseup Labs expanded the initial customer-support engagement into a dedicated Growth Operations function covering four interconnected areas.
Riseup Labs assigned a Media Buying Specialist to manage approximately $3,000 in monthly advertising spend across Google and Meta.
Campaigns are continuously managed and optimized across areas including audiences, creative, messaging, targeting, budgets, and performance.
Before paid acquisition was introduced, Jolliman was generating approximately 20–30 organic inquiries per day.
The Growth Operations model now generates 100+ new customer inquiries every day, providing the business with a much larger and more predictable source of customer demand.
Result: Customer acquisition moved from primarily organic demand to an actively managed growth channel capable of generating more than 100 inquiries per day.
Generating additional demand only creates value if the business can convert that demand into orders.
Riseup Labs built a six-agent Order Processing Team dedicated to handling Jolliman’s inbound phone orders.
The distributed operating model provides greater coverage across periods that were previously difficult for the smaller internal UK team to support consistently, including demand outside standard working hours and on weekends.
The team now processes more than 100 phone orders per day.
Result: Jolliman gained the operational capacity to capture significantly more customer demand without having to build a large in-house call-handling operation.
A dedicated Social Media Manager took responsibility for Jolliman’s ongoing presence across:
Facebook • Instagram • TikTok
Instead of social media activity competing with other internal priorities, content publishing, community activity, audience engagement, and channel performance could now be managed consistently.
The increased operational focus has strengthened Jolliman’s publishing consistency, reach, engagement, and overall social presence while supporting its wider customer acquisition strategy.
Result: Social media became an actively managed part of the growth operation rather than an additional responsibility for an already stretched internal team.
Riseup Labs also assigned an Amazon Marketplace Executive to manage Jolliman’s marketplace operations.
The specialist works across areas including:
With dedicated ownership, Jolliman has been able to improve marketplace performance and develop Amazon as a stronger second sales channel alongside its own e-commerce website.
Result: A previously under-managed channel now has dedicated expertise and continuous optimization behind it.
One of the most important parts of the Jolliman story is how the partnership evolved.
The relationship did not begin with Jolliman handing over four business functions at once.
It began with a specific operational problem: customer call handling and order processing.
Riseup Labs built the team, established the operation, and demonstrated that a dedicated offshore delivery model could work effectively with Jolliman’s business.
The initial operation was deployed in less than one month.
Jolliman’s leadership also visited Riseup Labs’ Bangladesh operation for a week of in-person training and process alignment, helping the team understand the company’s products, customers, brand expectations, and working processes.
As Jolliman saw the results and looked for additional ways to grow, the relationship expanded.
Call Handling → Order Operations → Paid Acquisition → Social Media → Amazon Marketplace Management
What started as BPO evolved into an integrated Growth Operations partnership.
Building the same level of specialist capacity entirely in-house in the UK would require multiple separate hires.
Based on current UK salary benchmarks for comparable customer service, social media, digital marketing, and e-commerce positions, the base salaries for a nine-person team similar in size to Jolliman’s current Growth Operations operation could approach £269,000 per year before employer contributions, recruitment expenses, employee benefits, leave coverage, management overhead, or out-of-hours staffing requirements.
Riseup Labs instead built a distributed operation using skilled professionals across Bangladesh, the Philippines, and the wider region.
The purpose of the model is not simply lower labour cost.
It gives Jolliman access to:
Specialist expertise + larger operational capacity + extended coverage + faster deployment + flexible scaling
without requiring the company to recruit and build every function independently in the UK.
Jolliman moved beyond relying almost entirely on organic demand.
Paid campaigns now provide an actively managed acquisition channel generating more than 100 customer inquiries per day.
The six-person order team provides the capacity required to respond to customer demand at scale.
More than 100 phone orders are now processed every day.
The distributed operating model reduces the limitations created by relying on a small internal team operating primarily around standard UK working hours.
Dedicated social media ownership creates more consistent activity across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Amazon now has a specialist responsible for continuously improving listings, account health, pricing, conversion, and wider marketplace performance.
Routine growth and operational functions no longer have to compete for the attention of Jolliman’s small internal team.
The internal business can focus more heavily on product, fulfilment, commercial decisions, and overall strategy.
A dedicated Media Buying Specialist created a scalable paid acquisition channel alongside Jolliman’s existing organic demand.
Dedicated order-processing capacity ensures that increasing demand can be handled instead of becoming an operational bottleneck.
A distributed team allows customer operations to extend beyond the limitations of a small UK-only workforce.
Dedicated Amazon management gives Jolliman the expertise required to continue developing a second major commerce channel.
Additional operational capacity can be added without Jolliman having to repeatedly recruit, onboard, and manage separate internal teams.
Jolliman’s internal staff can spend more time on the areas where their knowledge and leadership create the greatest business value.
What began as a solution for call handling developed into a broader growth partnership.
Jolliman went from relying primarily on 20–30 organic customer inquiries per day and a small internal team with limited call-handling capacity to an integrated operation that now:
Most importantly, Jolliman gained an operating model capable of growing with the business.
Instead of treating customer acquisition, customer service, social media, and marketplace operations as separate problems, Riseup Labs brought them together as one coordinated Growth Operations function.
Whether the bottleneck is customer acquisition, call handling, social media, marketplace management, or the processes connecting them, we can build a dedicated Growth Operations team around your business.
Start a conversation with our team to solve complex challenges and move forward with confidence.
