TWO students have set up an online pick ‘n’ mix delivery service for Oxford during the height of lockdown.

Jenny Bates, 21, from Reading, and Elle Nash, 21, from Cornwall, who both study at Oxford Brookes University, came up with the idea over lockdown to create their business ‘Jellees’.

Miss Nash said: "Everyone loves sweets, and over the first lockdown whilst I was working in Tesco and Jenny was working in a care home we decided to set up a business.”

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Jellees is an online sweet delivery service, where customers can choose which pick ‘n’ mix goodies they want in a box, ranging from 500g to 1kg.

Miss Nash said: “For my birthday Jenny sent me a kilo of pick ‘n’ mix, and we thought this is something we could do.

“So we looked online at some other places doing it, and figured out how we could do the same – but make it better.

Oxford Mail:

“We went to get our sweets from Hancock’s wholesalers because they are the best quality for the best price, then we ordered delivery boxes from Amazon, and created a sticker with our personally designed logo.”

Miss Nash and Miss Bates have been ‘best friends for over four years’ and are always known for ‘making trouble’ but over lockdown decided to ‘channel this energy into creating something really positive’.

The pair both row for Oxford Brookes University team, so upon creating the business decided to reach out to GB rowers they had encountered and see if they would promote their sweet selling business if they sent them a kilo’s worth.

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Miss Bates said: “We thought the worse thing that could happen if we set up a business would be that we would have a lot of sweets to eat ourselves – and we both love the sweets so that wasn’t an issue.

“We started to message GB rowers, and they started making videos for use on their social media accounts which was great.

Oxford Mail:

“A lot of celebrities like AJ Pritchard from Strictly Come Dancing and Josh Kempton from Love Island also were happy to help promote us.”

The pair offer free deliveries in Oxford and across the country.

Miss Bates added: “When we initially started the business we were living in different parts of the country, I was in Reading and Elle was in Cornwall, so we set the business up virtually.

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“We were staying up until 2am every night that first week, then going to work at the care home or at Tesco, but it was through that hard work that we were able to set up the initial funds for the business.”

The pair now hope to set up their own Youtube channel to show young people that they can set up a business if they set their minds to it and they don’t have to be the ‘most intelligent’ person to do this, ‘just very determined’.

Miss Nash said: “We didn’t expect the success we have had, we thought it would last a month or so when people were in lockdown, and we were really scared with the initial money we had spent on our sweets, but the risk was definitely worth it.”

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Miss Bates added: “On Monday we had our busiest night delivering on record.

“We have learned so much from Jellees and in the future, we hope to set up our own multi-million-pound company.

“We are already looking how to expand the company, and we’ll be setting up our Christmas chocolate boxes this week.”