When Amy Knight and her team at Must Have Ideas set out to launch their own shopping channel, they weren’t just thinking about sales – they were rethinking the entire teleshopping model. By developing a custom in-house platform called Spark, they transformed a traditionally expensive, resource-heavy broadcast into a lean, data-informed, and human-supported operation. In this interview, Knight shares how tech innovation, old-school customer service, and strategic problem-solving powered their bold leap from e-commerce to TV. Entrepreneur UK finds out more…

What inspired you to tackle a specific problem in the tech industry?
Having our own shopping channel had always been a dream of ours, but the traditional costs and manpower associated with running a live 24/7 operation made it completely out of reach. As an e-commerce business with an older customer base, and with our background in direct shopping, moving onto TV felt like the natural next step, but only if we could make it cost-effective while still creating a channel that felt live.

That’s where Spark is our in-house, custom-developed software that powers virtually every area of our business. Spark automatically schedules and stitches together pre-recorded segments – sometimes filmed months apart – into seamless hourly shows. The result is a channel that looks and feels live but only costs around 10% of a traditional live teleshopping channel.

What unexpected challenges did you face while addressing this problem and how did you solve them?
One challenge we hadn’t anticipated was just how different our TV audience would be from our online shoppers. Many of them don’t spend time online at all – some don’t even have email addresses. For a data-driven business like ours, accustomed to analysing clicks and conversions, that was a real eye-opener. We ended up investing in even more customer service staff to handle the higher volume of phone orders. It was a reminder that sometimes the best solution is old-fashioned human support.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about solving tough tech problems?
Technology should always serve the needs of the business, not the other way around – Spark works because it’s designed to solve our problems. And that if a solution requires a human touch, then that’s most likely to be the best solution!

What advice would you give other tech entrepreneurs facing similar challenges?
Where possible, develop and use your own custom software – particularly if your business has unique needs. As a data-driven, tech-driven, primarily e-commerce business, we were pretty fed up with using technology that just didn’t work for us. Having Spark has been a real game-changer and allowed us to innovate in ways that wouldn’t have previously been possible.