The trials and tribulations of getting our wee shop!

We have a shop! 

We (the Jen's) are so excited to announce that we have a physical bricks and mortar shop! With a real door and everything! :-) As you can tell we are a little bit excited. 

Jen M has wanted to run Clan Artisan somewhere other than from her home for the last couple of years, even though she has grown the business very successfully from her lovely home, she and her family have decided it's time to get their home back! When Jen T came on board in April this year (2022) the decision was made to find suitable premises for growing Clan Artisan. 

The shop search 

We began looking for a shop or potentially a unit back in April/May and thought we would have somewhere and open by summer at the latest!! How wrong we were. We identified a property (we will call it property 1) and absolutely loved it, it was perfect, great location, fantastic internal and external and we put a deposit down . . . but then we crunched the numbers. It was working out far too expensive for the basic costs, and that was without paying our staff. We made the difficult decision to pull out and lost our deposit. 

Property number 2

We kept on looking, and we came across what was (or so we thought) the perfect property. An even better location and beautiful external frontage and at a reasonable price. We were all set, solicitors involved and all guns blazing . . . . we waited and we waited some more. We knew there was some internal work to be done but it was taking a lot longer than anticipated.

A couple of months past and finally things started to move again, the shop was nearly ready for us to move it. There was a date and everything. So we went in to view it . . . there wasn't any electrical wires, we would need to re-fit the whole shop, amongst about a million other things to get it to a basic shell to kit out. Not only did we not have the money to do this, we didn't have the time! We had been waiting months for this property and now we needed another 2-3 months to get it ready to open with a LOT of work first. We made the difficult decision again to pull out.

THE property 

We got a call to highlight a little shoe shop that was closing down (in Stirling anyway, Clever Clogs is still in Falkirk) and we thought, well we didn't think we would like it really and that it wouldn't be suitable but how wrong we were! It was perfect (actually this time!) and both Jen's had butterflies and knew this was 'the one'.  We got the keys on Saturday 1st October! 

What has this taught us? 

A few things really but the main thing is . . . go with your gut! If there is something telling you it isn't right then listen to it! It has also taught us that solicitors are descendants from sloths . . . ha ha ha. It has been a long process, months in the making and we have learned many things along the way. It most definitely is not for the faint hearted! 

To the future 

We are very excited about opening our shop and we hope you will visit and spread the word. It's not been an easy journey already and I'm sure we will learn many more valuable lessons along the way and we will keep you all updated!!

Cheers to our lovely little shop.