street life
I You might not realise you want something, but then you see it in Rossiters and you suddenly do
We love a colour co-ordinated window display!
s there any shop more quintessentially ‘Bath’ than Rossiters? Jolly’s may be bigger and older, but its offer is more easily replicated elsewhere; Found and 8 Holland Street and [fill in your own favourite hip shop of the moment here] may be cooler, but they’re tiny – and complete newcomers, relatively speaking. But Rossiters of Bath is quirky, eccentric, of unexpected size, and full of surprising details – sure it’s posh, like Bath itself is in the main, but to call either one of them that alone is to miss the point. This is very much an individual vision. Wander around Rossiters and you’ll see what we mean. You’re forever finding a new staircase, turning a new corner and bumping into something you didn’t anticipate. The buying is interesting too: my classical crushed velvet slipper armchair came from here, but then so did my sleek glass coffee table, a bizarre Italian thing, as much piece of art as a picture book repository (though it copes with said duties well enough), with twin stacked glass surfaces that swing open wide or close demurely like ladybird wings. “In 2010 Rossiters celebrated its 50th anniversary,” says Peter James, one half of the husband-and-wife team behind it, “and next year will be our 60th trading in Bath. The store started out as one very small unit, in the area that’s now our greetings card department, and over the decades we expanded up and down Broad Street to our present size.” Which immediately explains the beautifully bizarre layout, where you’ve never quite sure which level you’re on or where the next turn will take you. In this, it’s much like Bath itself – and a visitor’s experience of Rossiters will be much like their explorations of our city, but on a miniaturist’s scale. They’ll constantly find themselves lost, but delightfully so. “First time visitors can’t quite believe our labyrinth,” Peter says. “They describe us an an Aladdin’s cave, a TARDIS, a rabbit warren. The journey from room to room is definitely part of our charm.” Peter and his wife, Ann-Marie – like so many in Bath – used to live in London. He was a management consultant, she was a senior clothing buyer for Marks and Spencer, and when they bought Rossiters over 20 years ago they found a business in fine fettle. “It was a lovely store, doing well, so we made only very minor changes initially,” Peter says. “We felt we needed to fully understand it before embarking on any development.” What was changing, though, was the retail environment around them. The period of Peter and Ann-Marie’s tenure here has also been the time the internet has changed the way we do everything – shopping very much included – in ways both obvious and which we’re only now starting to understand. In this period, for instance, Lovehoney – just two miles across town in Newbridge – has gone from a few boxes of stock and a kitchen table to a £58m business, without (a few small-scale experiments aside) messing with bricks-and-mortar at all. “No retail business can afford to remain stuck for long,” Peter says, “so over the years we’ve had to reconfigure our offer to reflect changing tastes. We’re always on the lookout for exciting new product and suppliers – the quality of our sourcing underpins the brand – but we also work hard to move forward with existing partners. Indeed, our biggest sofa brand has been working with us for nearly 30 years, though both they and we have changed enormously in that time.”
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