十一岁开店、五十万粉丝：英国小城的解压玩具店靠抖音国际版火了

In northern England there's a small town called Darlington.

On a quiet morning, much of the town is empty, but one toy shop is very busy.

The shop is called Funky Fidgets, and it specialises in sensory toys you can squeeze, pull and twist in your hand.

The postman comes three times a day to pick up parcels headed all over the world.

The shelves run from floor to ceiling, packed with brightly coloured toys.

A customer walks in and says his daughter sent him to buy the latest stress ball.

The shop has fourteen staff and sells worldwide.

It's hard to imagine that its founder was only eleven when she opened it.

The founder's name is Alex, and she started selling toys online during the covid pandemic.

Now most of the shop's orders come through TikTok Shop.

While watching a video, users can place an order directly without leaving the app.

In Britain, about three hundred thousand small businesses use it too, most of which joined only in the past year.

Outside Asia, Britain is a place where this new kind of shopping has done especially well.

One reason is that British high streets have declined faster than those in other European countries.

Another is that British people are more willing to embrace Chinese-style livestream shopping.

About fifty-seven percent of young people in Britain watch shopping livestreams.

In a livestream, the seller packs orders while chatting to customers.

Viewers can watch in real time as staff pick out the things they bought and pack them into boxes.

And it's not only young people watching; some get hooked, just like grandmothers glued to TV shopping channels in the old days.

At a butcher's shop seventy kilometres to the north, Miller estimates that sixty percent of its TikTok customers are women aged forty to sixty.

Even more surprising, online fans are also willing to come to the physical shop.

The toy shop has half a million fans on TikTok.

Every Saturday, the queue outside the door takes four hours.

Some customers even travel specially from London and Edinburgh.

Alex's mother, Brunskill, said: we bring a lot of tourism into Darlington.

Alex is at sixth-form college now, so her mother runs the shop day to day.

It's also a sign that this new kind of shopping might help bring Britain's high streets back to life.

Alex is sixteen this year, and she's still closely involved in the shop.

She designs new products, and the shop also has a cheaper product line based on brands that are popular online.

She also handles customer questions, does stock-takes and holds meetings with brands, all while studying accountancy.

But mother and daughter have very different ideas about the future.

Brunskill said: I want to keep it as small as I can.

But she says her daughter wants to have shops all over the world.

If you were Alex, would you grow the little shop, or keep it small forever?