Irish business at your fingertips
A one-stop online shop for Irish brands and products launched this week.
Croía Ireland is a new online trading platform where Irish businesses can connect with a targeted, wider audience. Croía aims to become the heart of Irish businesses, with Croía meaning ‘heart’ in the Irish language.
The online platform is offering free membership to suppliers for its services for November and December, ahead of the busy Christmas season.
To date, Croía has signed up over 100 Irish suppliers from small businesses to larger brands and has curated a select range of premium products including gifts and hampers, jewellery, homeware and decor, beauty, food and drink, Irish designer clothing, artwork, and cards.
Founded by entrepreneur Ciara Hennebry during the lockdown in early 2020, Croía Ireland saw a gap in the market to set up an online platform to support the growth of Irish brands and products. In October 2020, Google Ireland reported that searches for ‘just buy Irish’ peaked with an increase of 3,495 per cent, the search term ‘shop local Ireland’ searches increased by 540 per cent and ‘buy Irish gifts’ searches increased by 200 per cent.
Ms Hennebry said: “Shopping locally and supporting Irish talent has always been a huge passion of mine and so the Croía journey began in 2020 as I saw this as the perfect opportunity to give back to Irish businesses and provide to them not just a selling platform, but an empowering and encouraging community to become a part of. Our vision is to become the go-to online store for high-quality Irish goods that are fashionable and made with love.
“We want to promote longevity and durability in online purchases; a piece from Croía is something to have in your heart always. 2020 has been a tough year for us all, especially for our homegrown businesses, but we have been delighted to see the welcoming and positive reaction so far from both suppliers and potential consumers alike, so we cannot wait for launch day and the Croía journey to begin.”
The official launch of the website took place on Tuesday 24 November. For more information, visit croiaireland.com.