GTSE co-founder and eCommerce director Tom Armenante doesn’t pretend the last few months have been calm.
Having recently moved his family from Leeds to Manchester just before Christmas, he describes life as “very busy” – not least because he’s balancing the demands of scaling a fast-growing eCommerce business with family life.
“I’ve got a little one-year-old baby and a four-year-old,” he told me recently. “Life is chaotic.”
But that’s very much in keeping with GTSE’s story – a business built on momentum, constant iteration and a drive to make buying trade consumables easier for customers.
From Chesterfield roots to Manchester HQ
While GTSE is now firmly embedded in Manchester’s business ecosystem, Armenante is keen to point out its origins.
“Myself and my business partner (CEO Freddie Miller) are from Chesterfield,” he explains.
“The company’s initial registered address was Freddie’s parents’ house, where they were also directors.”
In the early days, GTSE’s location was less about building a brand presence in a major city and more about simply finding a base and getting started.
However, as the business grew, Manchester became the natural home.
Miller took the leap first – leaving his day job in finance and moving to Manchester, initially setting up from WeWork in Spinningfields.
“He started in the WeWork in Spinningfields,” says Armenante. “We had a shared desk in there when Freddie first took the plunge.
“Now that we’ve grown, we have a great space in the WeWork on John Dalton Street.”
The cable ties foundation
GTSE began with a simple concept: sell cable ties online, build repeat B2B demand and scale from there.
Armenante says the original idea came from Miller’s parents, who had experience running retail businesses and saw potential in an eCommerce-first approach.
Cable ties – a low-return, repeat-purchase product – felt like a smart place to start.
It helped that Miller had already experimented selling some stock on eBay, but to make the concept work properly, they needed a website and a way of generating demand.
That’s where Armenante came in.
After university, he started work at a digital marketing agency in Leeds, focusing heavily on eCommerce, SEO and performance marketing. It has since developed into Connective3.
When Miller approached him about taking the cable tie idea further, the pieces clicked quickly.
“I threw a Magento 1 website together,” he says, describing it as being “held up by the sticky tape that we sell”.
“I think the whole build cost £150, which is probably the cheapest Magento website build in the world!”
Digital-first thinking
The company’s competitive advantage and selling point wasn’t being first to sell cable ties, but more so how it approached the market.
Armenante explains: “We are digitally native. Through the digital expertise we’ve got, we try to make it as frictionless as possible for the B2B customers.
“That’s where a lot of our incumbent suppliers and existing consumables, businesses and trade businesses really struggle, because they just don’t make every element of the journey as frictionless as possible.
“We just want everyone to be able to get the products they need reliably and as frictionless as possible. We’ve taken as many strides as possible to make B2B consumables purchasing a digital-first process.
“Customers have deadlines and we don’t like to leave people waiting.”
That digital capability is now embedded across the business, in areas like marketing acquisition, product pages, payment options, operational responsiveness and customer service.
Product range expansion
While GTSE started with a single product category, the business has steadily expanded based on what customers were already asking for.
The company now sells more than 25,000 products, ranging from cable ties and tape to warehouse safety products, racking, conduit, storage boxes and signage.
GTSE team
The former Matalan head of SEO says the strategy emerged naturally from buyer behaviour.
“We started realising that a lot of our customers buy other complementary items as well,” he explains.
“You’ll be surprised at the range of applications that tape and cable ties have.”
Rather than being restricted to one niche, the business positioned itself as a broader supplier of consumables and trade essentials, built around repeat purchasing and high retention.
The customer base is now wide, spanning one-person electricians through to large organisations, with use cases ranging across construction, repairs, solar and events.
B2B and B2C
The business operates with a dual-channel model and has seen huge growth on Amazon.
“We do 3,000 orders a day on Amazon,” Armenante reveals.
That marketplace volume covers a mix of consumer and business purchases, while the company’s own website is predominantly focused on B2B.
“Everything through the website is B2B,” he continues. “The majority of customers buying direct are ordering by the box rather than the pack.”
But while Amazon has clearly been a huge growth engine, Armenante is realistic about the long-term trade-off.
He explains: “They’re all Amazon’s customers at the end of the day.
“That’s why we are focusing on investing in growing our own B2B channel.”
The COVID turning point
Like many eCommerce businesses selling home and trade essentials, GTSE saw a sharp spike during lockdown.
“When the Government shut down all the physical DIY stores, everyone was stuck at home, everyone raided Amazon, and so our sales went through the roof,” says Armenante.
The company became Amazon’s Choice for its tape products and demand surged even further when the first lockdown ended and businesses rushed to restock.
“We went from selling a pallet a month to a pallet every couple of days, of certain lines,” he recalls. “It was absolutely mad.
“It was a difficult time for everyone, but as a business we took full advantage of the business opportunity there.”
The company even had to resort to air-freighting stock – a costly move, but one that helped maintain momentum when supply chains were under pressure.
Expanding into the US
One of the biggest recent strategic shifts has been the firm’s push into North America, launching GTSEgroup.com
The company now has a dedicated VP of sales for North America in Jason Burton, bringing “11 years’ worth of cable tie sales experience”, and is already working with large-scale B2B customers whose demand far exceeds typical UK volumes.
GTSE also has a warehouse operation in Indiana, helping it serve US clients with faster fulfilment and better stock availability.
But as with any international expansion, it hasn’t been frictionless.
Armenante notes the business has already moved onto its second third-party logistics provider in the US after the first wasn’t up to standard – and that the process has required serious internal resource.
As a result, the US has taken longer than expected to get off the ground, “but we are still seeing strong growth”, he says, partly because of the time and investment needed to lay foundations properly.
Even so, he believes the upside is enormous.
“The US is just massive,” he says. “We’ve not even scratched the surface of it yet.”
ASCEND
Armenante is part of GM Business Growth Hub’s ASCEND Scale Up Programme and says the biggest value is being able to share challenges with other entrepreneurs who understand the pressures of scaling.
“It’s hard to seek advice sometimes when you’re running your own business,” he says.
“I know we have a team of 15 but sometimes it can get a bit lonely running the business.
“There’s no better people to get advice from than people who have done it – and that’s what you get with ASCEND.
“The people on the cohort are very open not just about their successes but some of the struggles and you can learn a lot.
“I’m a big fan of networking. I think, speaking to different businesses, you can learn a huge amount, especially from local businesses in your area.
“There’s also opportunities to work commercially with some of these guys. It’s been great getting to know these guys and have that network there.”
The next targets for the business are to grow B2B in both the UK and the US, invest in tech and keep making the buying journey easier.
GTSE is also exploring AI and platform development as a way to scale with a lean team.
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