Gift Focus - Mar/Apr 2019 (Issue 112)

Why did you open Mustard, and what were your backgrounds when you came to shop life? We are a mother and daughter team and both come from different backgrounds. Patricia (the mother) owned a health and beauty salon for 15 years, and I (Esther, the daughter) spent 15 years combining freelance design and teaching CAD to university design students. Patricia sold her salon and was looking for another business when the shop became available. Too big for her own plans, it prompted me to propose my lifelong ambition, first to work with my mother and second to open a design-led gift shop. It provided Patricia the opportunity to continue selling and advising people on aromatherapy oils and allowed me to source and sell the kind of products I always wanted to find in gifts shops but rarely did. We both have a passion for supporting other small UK businesses and love the opportunity the shop gives us to do this. Where did the name come from? Mustard is an old term for “great” that my mother-in-law has always used. You can find it referenced in the Urban Dictionary! How did you choose your space? Our shop chose us really. We were offered opportunity to rent the space through a family friend, and as soon as we saw it, we knew it was right for us. Not too big and not too small, as Goldilocks would say! We have fantastic light from a large shopfront, and Oadby is a small but lively town. We have an active local community of independent shopkeepers, coupled with the pull of some larger high street names. We also benefit from an abundance of free parking, which means the town pulls customer from all over the county. We are particularly popular with customers who prefer to avoid city-centre shopping.  What kind of products do you stock? We sell homeware; children’s toys, from new baby gifts to books; and a wide range of general gifts, from wallets and bags to jewellery, scarves and diffusers. Because of Patricia’s background, we also stock a wide range of aromatherapy and wellbeing products. Our range of destress products is always very popular. I choose all the art prints and the screen prints from U Studio in Bristol, and these always sell well for us. We have made a feature of our huge range of cards by dedicating a massive wall to them. We love supporting lots of independent designers through our cards sales! How often do you add new products to the store, and what’s important to you when choosing new products? I source products throughout the year through endless online research. We receive a lot of speculative emails from product designers, which sometimes provide us with new suppliers. We love the reaction we get from new customers as they walk around and take in the experience at Mustard. We have a simple, clean aesthetic in the shop. Our shelving is very open and never tightly packed with stock. We like the products to sing from the shelves. We try to stick to the old ethos of everything being useful or beautiful, which means we are a knick-knack-free We interview Esther Payne about her and her mother’s Leicester gift shop, Mustard Bright ideas giftfocus 85 retailer interview