Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - Page number 83 - November/December 2021

83 RETAILER INTERVIEW experience. This sets us apart from Amazon and other online retailers. Whilst most of our customers are women we do pride ourselves that we have a lot of male customers who enjoy and engage with many of the products we sell and validate our claim to be a gift shop for everyone. We really try to have unusual items and books, which mean you could find the perfect but unexpected gift for anyone you needed to. What’s your USP? Our collection of gifts and books is curated to offer something surprising, interesting and unexpected for our customers. We constantly strive to be different. We offer a level of personal service and attitude to our customers, which they find appealing and often lacking in other places. Our shop is a beautiful environment and whilst we don’t have a coffee shop ourselves, anyone can bring a take away coffee and enjoy it on our terrace where we have comfy chairs and a selection of reading copies of books to browse. We now run a programme of events of all kinds from book club and author events to crafting and kid’s sessions. Christmas will be very special this year as we have managed to secure Santa for a few Saturdays in December, so we hope this will be popular with our younger customers. What are your current bestselling lines? Our new bookshop with over 4000 titles is proving very popular and we offer special Indie bookshop editions of new titles, signed copies and author events – books account for over 50 percent of our sales. In gifting we have a wide range of brands and items which are perennial favourites – wonderful Herdy UK ceramic sheep, cool Squelch transparent wellies, our make-your-own Giant T Rex Head and our own commissioned Malton Tea Towels are firm favourites. Whilst we are not a card shop we hold around 2000 cards at any one time and focus on great design and quality, artists and illustrators such as Mark Hearld and Emily Sutton who are local and whose artworks make wonderful cards and decorations. Are you active on social media, and how do you use it for your business? We find Instagram is our favoured social media platform for the gifting shop with Facebook a close second. Twitter works best for the bookshop. We don’t do offers, competitions and chase followers too much – we cherish and value the followers we have and try and post content that they readily engage with and enjoy. What brands do you stock and why? We have over 100 suppliers and tend to cherry pick items from suppliers that fit our criteria for things that are engaging, different, low on plastic where possible, designed well, have a good price point and which we love ourselves. Some of our favourites are: Quail Ceramics – quirky and unusual ceramic animals in the form of everything from egg cups to money boxes and pencil pots. Designed in England and all hand painted by a family in Sri Lanka. Lancaster & Gibbings – beautiful hand made English pewter gifts made in Devon. Repeat Repeat – fabulous white bone china made in the Staffordshire potteries Our own Malton tea towels designed by a local artist and printed in Suffolk. Herdy UK – fantastic cute Herdwick sheep from a company in Cumbria who support hill sheep farmers and produce gorgeous gifts of all kinds. 1894 Sign Company – bespoke metal signs made to order in Sheffield by a company that started out making black and silver car number plates decades ago and who still do produce them from classic cars. We’ve even visited the factory and had a go at making one ourselves! Kilner Jars and Mason Cash baking bowls – iconic and beautiful Merchant & Mills sewing accessories – a British company producing a simple but stylish range of scissors, thimbles, pins, needles and measures, which bring delight to crafters. How often do you change up your window dressings and displays? Our window displays became a very important way to communicate with our customers during lockdown, as so very many locals walked around town with dogs or for their exercise. They enjoyed looking in our windows so we changed them every three to four weeks. We now have a programme of planned themes for our windows and continue to change them every five or six weeks, although the book windows change more often and, when the town has events happening such as the music or food festival, we have a window to support these. 