Why I’m Building for the World from Lancashire

Lancashire made things for the world long before anyone had heard of Silicon Valley.

The mills that defined this part of England didn’t just supply the north. They supplied the planet. Cotton, textiles, engineering — products made in towns like Preston, Blackburn, and Burnley ended up on every continent. The industrial north didn’t wait for permission from London to matter. It just got on with it.

I think about that a lot. Because I’m building something global from a desktop in Preston, and I want to tell you why that’s not a limitation. It’s the whole point.

Lancashire Has Always Built for the World

There’s a version of the UK tech story that goes like this: the only places where serious things get built are London, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. Everywhere else is a nice place to live but not somewhere you build a company with global ambitions.

That narrative is wrong, and Lancashire’s history proves it.

Richard Arkwright invented the water frame here. James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny here. The industrial revolution — arguably the most significant economic transformation in human history — was largely designed, built, and exported from this part of the world. Lancashire didn’t ask for a seat at the table. It built the table and shipped it internationally.

I’m not claiming ShopWithMore is the spinning jenny of ecommerce. But I am saying the instinct to build something meaningful and send it out into the world is woven into this place. It feels like the right place to be doing what I’m doing.

The London Assumption

When people hear that a tech company has global ambitions, there’s an automatic assumption about where it must be based. London, usually. Or San Francisco. Or one of the handful of cities that have been anointed as the only acceptable addresses for serious startups.

I’m originally from London. I know that world. And I chose not to build ShopWithMore there.

Partly that’s practical. The cost of everything in London — office space, talent, living — adds overhead that a bootstrapped founder doesn’t need. But it’s more than that. There’s a kind of thinking that takes hold when you’re surrounded by people doing the same thing in the same place. An echo chamber that rewards certain kinds of ambition and quietly discourages others.

Building in Lancashire keeps me grounded. I deliver parcels across five square miles of Preston. I see the people who shop online every single day — not as demographics or user personas, but as actual people waiting for actual packages. That perspective doesn’t come from a co-working space in Shoreditch. It comes from being here.

💡 The Real Advantage

Distance from the echo chamber is a feature. When you’re not surrounded by people chasing the same trends, pitching the same investors, and attending the same events, you think differently. Sometimes that means being slower to catch on. But it also means being clearer about what actually matters.

What Building Here Actually Looks Like

Let me be honest about what this means in practice, because there’s no point romanticising it.

It means doing everything yourself, at least at the start. There’s no cluster of technical co-founders down the road. No angel investor network you bump into at industry events. No talent pipeline from a nearby university feeding CVs through your door. You build what you can build, you learn what you need to learn, and you move forward anyway.

ShopWithMore is built on a desktop. The backend runs on Supabase and Render. The frontend is hand-coded. The AI integrations — the parts that actually make it different — were figured out late at night after the deliveries were done and the family was settled. It is, in the most literal sense, a one-person operation.

And it works. It works because the idea is right and the execution is disciplined — not because of the postcode.

“You don’t need to be in the right place. You need to be right.”— Justin Hodnett, Founder, ShopWithMore

Built Here. For Everyone, Everywhere.

ShopWithMore launches in the UK. But it was never designed to stay there.

The platform is being built with international expansion as a first-class concern from day one — not something bolted on after UK success. Ireland comes first, then France and Germany, then the rest of Europe and beyond. The architecture supports multiple languages, multiple currencies, and multiple affiliate networks across different markets. The vision is a genuinely global AI-native ecommerce platform, and that vision was formed here, in Lancashire, not imported from somewhere with a better postcode.

There’s something fitting about that. Lancashire’s greatest products were never just for Lancashire. They went everywhere. The ambition was always bigger than the geography.

ShopWithMore is the same. Built here. Proud of it. Going everywhere.

Start shopping at shopwithmore.co.uk — wherever in the world you’re reading this from.