Well, we both cannot believe that next month Petworth Pop Up will be celebrating its first
birthday!!!
In just a year we have hosted 11 events and had over 87 small businesses take part in our
markets. We were also approached by Chichester District Council who asked us to go ‘On
tour’ with them to their ‘Market & More at The Cross, Chichester’ and now the National
Trust at Petworth House have asked us to team up with them to co-ordinate a fabulously
exciting Christmas makers market in December too! So, you could say it has been quite a
year for us…… and we feel this is only the start of things to come!
Although for both of us Petworth Pop Up is a side-line to our main jobs, we both are
extremely passionate in what we are doing and love the change it gives us both from our
day-to-day jobs. You could say we both love to have our fingers in many pies and both
having such similar work driven attitudes…..with a bit of fun thrown in as well….. and this is
why we feel this all works so well.
Over the years we have both followed similar paths in wanting to follow our dreams and run
our own businesses. Despite having conventional jobs with security, we gave them up to
open our shops – For Cathy this was back in 2015 as Dales Country Interiors (now called
Maggie & Belle), and for Georgie it was back in 2018 As Kissed By Betty and now GK Creative Consultancy. This drive and passion have certainly been the recipe which was needed to start
this journey and one we hope to set as examples for our children.
Its defiantly not an easy path to choose, especially in the start or when faced with a global
pandemic, rising living costs, being single working parents and childcare to arrange!
However, having each other to bounce ideas off has been fantastic and gives us the
confidence to be a little bit braver or bolder in business decisions. Because there are two of
us, it has helped us grow and find strength - even now in our own businesses!
We both feel the best bits of our Pop Up journey are our customers – the wonderful and
talented stallholders. We love meeting new faces, seeing our regulars and getting to know
all our incredible stall holders - their stories and their journeys of how they became the
business they are today! Many of these are so inspiring and all come from a similar place –
passion and drive to succeed in creating something beautiful. We also love seeing our
stallholder’s network with each other, chatting, giving tips and support and even becoming
friends. It is everything and more we hoped for.
We see the future is bright and with the way that the rapidly changing consumers buying
habits are going there is definitely more focus on the handcrafted industry booming and the
desire to shop local, shop independent and buy British!
The dreams we have, and continue to work towards, are; getting a networking evening
organised (which we know we keep saying every month, growing our online platform, to
continue our ‘on tour’ partnerships with other organisations and to FINALLY one
day….maybe one day… have our very own bricks and mortar shop! So watch this space and
lets see where year two takes us!
Love
G&C xxx
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