UNITED KINGDOM / AGILITYPR.NEWS / October 06, 2026 / A Preston-born entrepreneur who invested just £5,000 to launch five live-commerce studios in Stockport has grown the business into a seven-figure-a-month operation 16 months on, as live shopping gains traction as a sales channel in UK e-commerce.

Founder Ash Patel's company, KOVA, now employs more than 140 people, including 120 presenters and supports more than 40 brands, with a further 35 brands on its waiting list.

Patel, who has spent around a decade working across marketing, digital media, e-commerce and consumer brands, previously helped launch and grow consumer brand Desso, taking it into major retailers and appearing on Dragons' Den. It was during this period that he became closely involved with TikTok as it developed its e-commerce offering, working with agencies and other businesses across the platform's wider ecosystem.

That experience led him to identify a gap in the UK's live-commerce market. While brands were increasingly being encouraged to treat live streaming as a genuine sales channel, Patel found that many of the services on offer, some charging around £250 an hour, did not match the production quality, consistency or brand standards that established businesses required.

Rather than accept the market as it stood, Patel researched where live commerce was heading, travelling to China to study the far more developed live-shopping ecosystem built around Douyin. Seeing the scale, professionalism and infrastructure behind Chinese live commerce convinced him that the UK was still at an early stage, and that there was room to build something considerably more ambitious.

He returned to the UK and invested approximately £5,000 to launch KOVA with five studios in Stockport, initially offering a white-label live-commerce service to agencies across the country. This allowed KOVA to operate behind the scenes for a wide range of brands and categories, rapidly building expertise in presenters, production, scripting and conversion.

Within six months, the five-studio operation had grown to ten, before KOVA expanded again into a significantly larger site in Trafford Park. KOVA has since achieved S5 Platinum status as an official TikTok Shop Partner (TSP).

Ash Patel said, "We started KOVA with around £5,000 and five studios in Stockport. We didn't begin with a huge investment or a massive team: we started by doing the work ourselves and learning everything we could about what makes live commerce actually perform.

"For me, the journey is also proof that you don't necessarily have to be in London or start with millions of pounds to build something ambitious. I'm from Preston, and we've built KOVA in Greater Manchester because I believe the North West has the talent, creativity and energy to become a serious part of this industry."

For more information, please visit www.mykova.co.