Retail Interview Sarah Laker
‘Our customers are fabulous’ Stationery Supplies owner Sarah Laker talks to Naomi MacKay about her two Cheshire shops, her social media strategy and waiting for awards results!
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e spoke to Sarah at a busy time, when she had just taken part in Small Business Saturday, and was looking forward to two awards ceremonies. Just as we went to press, Sarah bagged the RETA retail award for Best Non-Specialist Independent Retailer North. She is also nominated for a Boss Federation Award. Sarah owns Stationery Supplies; two shops in Marple and Wilmslow in Cheshire. She explains: “I’ve had the Marple shop for 16 years and the Wilmslow shop has been open [on and off through lockdown] for a year and a month.’’ So how did she get into retail in the first place? “I was a nurse, and did my training straight out of school. I loved looking after people but the other bits of the job really started to bog me down. I knew I wanted to run my own business, and we looked at a few different shops. I helped in my friend’s
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sandwich shop and knew that wasn’t for me. Then the stationery shop in Marple came up for sale, but by the time my husband and I got to look at it it was already under offer and someone else bought it. “So we spent two years looking around different businesses. Then one day my friend rang me and said that the stationery shop was back up for sale. But it was under offer again! We were on holiday in Wales, and my phone started ringing with messages from the estate agent saying the sale had fallen through and were we still interested. We bought it, I left work on the Friday and walked in the shop on the Monday. “I didn’t know anything about running a business, but I loved stationery and cards. I had a two-year window until my nurse registration ran out, so I thought
“People have really gone back to sending cards and keeping in touch with people over the past couple of years’’
I’d have two years to make it work, or go back into nursing. “I knew about the Wilmslow shop through the Office Club - a stationery dealership group I belong to. It does conferences, training and so on - it’s a great thing to belong to. So I’d known the shop owner for 10 years, and he kept saying he was coming up to retirement and did I want to buy the shop? We did just that in the summer after the first lockdown in 2020. Our daughter Molly hadn’t been working due to an anxiety disorder and we thought if we bought that business, she could come and work for us, with the aim that eventually I would retire and she could take over. “The Wilmslow shop was more traditional. We’d only been open three weeks when we went into another lockdown [it was only open for six weeks between January and April 2021]. However it gave us time to revamp,
