A clothing company is turning to e-commerce as a way of avoiding the worst of the foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Beamish-based Carryon Clothing has been selling its range of outdoor garments at country fairs and agricultural shows since 1977.

As the foot-and-mouth disease has spread the firm's main distribution channel has all but disappeared and news of more cancelled shows has begun to threaten a formerly healthy business.

Now Carryon Clothing has responded by re-examining the sales potential of the web.

Co-owner Trevor Alexander said: "We already had an e-commerce web site, but it wasn't designed to maximise sales.

"To sell more over the web, we needed to target the site towards specific customer groups and build a clear strategy for on-line and off-line promotion."

With help from Business Link County Durham, the company brought in e-commerce marketing expert Jacquie Potts from MarketWise Strategies. Jacquie explained: "Carryon Clothing has had such a strong market at rural events that it has never really needed to promote itself. The foot-and-mouth outbreak however changed all that and meant that a completely new marketing strategy was needed.

"By analysing the market segments that Carryon Clothing serves, and determining what those customers would require from a web site, we have been able to develop an action plan to increase the number of customers buying online."

Trevor Alexander added: "The analysis carried out by MarketWise Strategies is now being used to guide our web developers, so that customers will be able to find our site more easily and buy from us with the minimum of fuss."

Gary Atkinson of Business Link County Durham said: 'We supported this work by MarketWise Strategies as part of the UK On-Line for Business programme. Carryon Clothing has been quite a success story for rural enterprise and for the local textile industry but it now faces a problem that is not of its own making.