How The Great British Cheese Company Mastered a 6x Seasonal Shipping Surge With ShipStation

From Christmas markets to year-round ecommerce

The Great British Cheese Company started the way a lot of beloved UK food brands do: at a market stall. Keith Jenkins began selling handcrafted waxed cheese truckles and chutneys at food shows and events across Britain, building a loyal following one event at a time. Today, his son Jason helps run the operation—and what began as a seasonal market business has grown into a year-round ecommerce brand.

What began as a seasonal side venture eventually became something bigger. Customer demand pushed the business beyond the festival circuit and into year-round online sales, transforming a small family market operation into a growing ecommerce brand. But with that growth came a familiar challenge—one that hits seasonal businesses especially hard.

“The business had outgrown manual processes,” Jenkins said. “We needed something reliable that could grow with us and cope with seasonal demand.”

When Christmas means chaos

For The Great British Cheese Company, the festive period isn’t just busy—it’s a different business entirely. On a typical day, the team ships 20 to 40 orders. In the run-up to Christmas, that number jumps to 250-plus orders a day—roughly a 6x increase in volume.

Before ShipStation, managing that spike was a manual grind. Jenkins described peak season as an exercise in controlled chaos: multiple browser tabs open, copying and pasting addresses between courier portals, printing labels one at a time, and double-checking postcodes by hand.

“Peak days were stressful because one small mistake could snowball—wrong address, wrong service, missed collection,” Jenkins explained. “It just wasn’t scalable, and Christmas felt chaotic rather than controlled.”

Processing 50 orders the old way could eat up two to three hours, and that was without accounting for the inevitable mistakes that come with manual data entry. For a small, family-run team, those hours added up fast—and during the busiest weeks of the year, they simply didn’t have them to spare.

From browser tabs to batch labels

When Jenkins brought ShipStation into the operation, the goal was straightforward: speed, accuracy, and the ability to handle seasonal shipping volume without hiring an army of temporary staff.

ShipStation connected directly to The Great British Cheese Company’s WooCommerce store, pulling orders through automatically and keeping everything synced. Instead of jumping between courier portals for APC and other UK carriers, Jenkins could manage labels, tracking, and order status from a single dashboard.

The impact on day-to-day fulfillment was immediate. What once took two to three hours for 50 orders now takes under an hour—and often significantly less once the team finds its rhythm. That’s a time savings of more than 60%, and it only becomes more valuable as seasonal shipping volume climbs.

Scaling for the season without scaling the team

The real test of any shipping solution for a seasonal business isn’t how it handles an average Tuesday—it’s what happens when order volume spikes overnight. For The Great British Cheese Company, that test comes every December.

Instead of printing labels one at a time through individual courier portals, Jenkins can now process an entire batch of orders in minutes. His team can buy and print labels in bulk while ShipStation’s order management keeps everything organized and visible. The errors that used to snowball during peak—a wrong address here, a missed service level there—simply don’t happen when the system is pulling data automatically.

The flexibility to work across multiple carriers has also been key. The Great British Cheese Company uses APC as its primary carrier alongside other UK delivery services, choosing the best option depending on service and pricing. ShipStation’s multi-carrier support means Jenkins doesn’t have to sacrifice choice for convenience—he gets both.

Perhaps most importantly, ShipStation has allowed the business to handle Christmas-level volumes without doubling its headcount. Outside peak, a small team manages fulfillment. During the holidays, they bring in some extra help, but the efficiency gains from ShipStation mean they can absorb a 6x volume increase without a proportional increase in staff.

“It’s more about efficiency than headcount,” Jenkins noted.

And when the Christmas rush hits, that efficiency becomes the difference between a smooth operation and a scramble.

What seasonal shipping looks like now

The Great British Cheese Company still shows up at food festivals and Christmas markets—that’s where it all started, and some things don’t change. But these days, when the holiday orders start pouring in online, Jenkins isn’t stressing over browser tabs and mistyped postcodes. He’s filling orders.

“If you’re a growing business or deal with seasonal spikes, ShipStation saves time, reduces errors, and makes fulfillment far easier to manage,” Jenkins said.

Ready to master your own seasonal shipping?

Whether you’re shipping artisan cheese across the UK or managing peak surges of your own, ShipStation helps growing businesses handle peak-season volume without the chaos. Start your free trial today and see how ShipStation can simplify your seasonal shipping.