Blillov, an automotive accessories retailer based in Rushden, Northamptonshire, moved into a warehouse space nine times the size of its previous premises, six months ahead of schedule, after online sales surged when it started selling on Temu.
“It really picked up faster than we expected,” said Artiom Samolov, 37, founder and managing director of Blillov. “It brought a different customer base that we hadn’t met before.” Within a year of listing, the platform accounted for about one-fifth of its turnover and pulled forward the company’s warehouse expansion and recruitment by six months.
Samolov founded Blillov in 2023, selling lubricants and car care products from global brands. He built the catalogue around the products he used on his own car and ran the business out of a garage for the first year. As sales picked up, he moved into a warehouse. Blillov later launched its own brand of lubricants, brake cleaners and maintenance sprays, which now sell alongside the global brands.
A different customer base
Sales of one product, Polygard Traffic Film Remover, showed Temu was bringing in a different customer base. The professional-grade cleaner, designed to remove stubborn road dirt and traffic film from vehicles, sold more than eight times faster on Temu than across all other sales channels combined.
The platform’s seller tools also shape how the business operates. It shows Samolov which products are better performing so he can stock accordingly. Popular items stay in stock and stockouts have dropped.
He has shifted from ad-hoc ordering to weekly replenishment for top performers, sometimes bringing in three to four pallets at a time. Higher order volumes have also helped Blillov negotiate better terms with suppliers, lowering the cost per order on several lines.
Nine times the warehouse space
By early 2026, those order volumes had outgrown Blillov’s 1,000 sq ft warehouse. In February, the company moved into a 9,000 sq ft site in the same town.
“We always wanted to move to a bigger warehouse,” Samolov said. “Adding Temu as a sales channel sped that up by half a year.”
The new space has increased capacity and cleared bottlenecks in picking and packing. Blillov can now organise stock more systematically as sales continue to grow. To date, it has fulfilled more than 23,000 orders on Temu and ranks among top sellers in the platform’s Car Exterior Care category.
New hires and a Rushden shop opening
This summer, Samolov is hiring five staff members for the warehouse and opening Blillov’s first physical store at the same site, after customers began asking to collect orders in person. The store will stock over 1,400 products.
Blillov is also planning to expand its catalogue into automotive parts and tools for the first time. Samolov isn’t stopping there. “My long-term goal is to build Blillov into the UK’s leading online destination for automotive parts, lubricants and vehicle maintenance products,”he said.
