Chris Morse, Head of Merchant Communications, PayPal

 

As a way to help pay off her student loans, cheese aficionado Claudia Lucero cooked up a way to combine her love of cooking with the popular “farm-to-table,” home grown movement and launched Urban Cheesecraft, a company that sells do-it-yourself cheese kits. She initially started selling the kits at her local farmers market, and soon expanded her business to online and created an Etsy storefront, accepting PayPal as the means of payment.

 

The holidays are her busiest time of the year, with sales increasing by as much as 80 percent from October through November. Customers ship kits to where they are traveling for the holidays so they can make cheese with their friends and families. They also take the kits on camping trips and vacations, and have even asked Claudia if the cheeses will coagulate at varying altitudes!

 

Claudia credits her early success to her online storefront, which helped opened doors for her to collaborate and develop custom cheesemaking kits with Williams Sonoma. She offers a number of payment options online, however an average of 50% of her customers over the last 5 years use PayPal for checkout because it is a trusted brand and is easy to use. With the help of PayPal, Urban Cheesecraft has also developed an international following, with kits being sold to customers in Australia, the UK, Germany and she hopes to expand to Japan.

 

Original author: PayPal-Forward