THE BIG INTERVIEW
Daring to be
different
Some independents take a long time to open a second shop. Many never bother. Holly Wilson decided to do it the hard way by taking over a long-established business only two years after opening her first shop. The owner of Prep Cookshop and Richard Dare in north London clearly is a retailer who is up for a challenge LIKE MOST ASPIRING independent retailers, Holly Wilson had in her mind’s eye exactly how she wanted her shop to look. She wanted to preside over a rather cool, rather beautiful, cookshop, with minimal displays of carefullyselected special products on show. Price was not going to be a major concern. It was going to be the sort of place she wanted to shop in but could not find. So much for the theory. Reality made its presence felt very soon after Holly opened Prep Cookshop on Stoke Newington Church Street in north London in February 2014. The sparse displays of expensive goods made the shop resemble an art gallery, but they did not hold the interest of the local customers. “You could certainly see the shelves back then, but people came in, couldn’t see what they were looking for among the sparse displays, so walked out,” Holly remembers. “I had to change my merchandising mix pretty quickly.” Today’s Prep is a very attractive cookshop trading across compact ground and basement floors. While it is not as minimally stocked as it was, it retains a stylish ambience and the products have clearly been selected with someone with a great fashion eye. Fashion was, in fact, Holly’s profession before she became an independent retailer. She spent 10 years as a garment technologist, working for companies like Coast and Whistles to ensure that their clothes met the correct technical standards. It’s a job where attention to detail and understanding how things perform to do the job they are meant to do is essential. It’s proved to be good training. Holly has two children, Tabitha, who is seven, and Archie, who is five. It was when she was on her second stint of maternity leave that she began to think it was time for a
new career because as a garment technologist she had to spend a lot of time travelling to factories in Asia. “Even as a teenager, I fancied having a shop. Originally I was interested in a fashion shop but having lived just 10 minutes’ walk away from Stoke Newington Church Street for five years, I began to think what it was missing was a really good cookshop. It’s a bit of a foodie area and a lot of the residents work in creative or design-led industries, so I thought it was a good idea,” she recalls. Church Street, which has a strong selection of independents was her chosen location, but it took 18 months to find the right premises at the right rent, so there was plenty of time to clarify the concept. “I wanted it to be a really practical shop, filled with products that everyone would need, but beautiful products. I didn’t want to compete with John Lewis and I didn’t want it to be one of those cookshops that has so much stuff you can’t see what you are looking for.” As well as presenting more stock, Holly rejigged her pricing architecture soon after opening, keeping her topend products but dropping her entry price points: “Not enough people wanted to pay £12 for a quirky mug.” There was also an insight into the local clientele: “Stoke Newington is an interesting district, with a very familyoriented community. Parts of it are down-and-dirty and border some of the rougher parts of Hackney. The houses here are expensive but no one has much disposable income because they all have huge mortgages to pay! Superficially, it feels affluent but it’s not.” Today Prep Cookshop has its more design-led products, gadgets and gifts on the ground floor area, while the larger and more practical products are kept downstairs. An idea of Holly’s original vision is seen in the bespoke shelf units