As non-essential gift retailers look forward to welcoming back customers on Monday (June 15), Nicolette Byrne, owner of gift shop Number 45 in Newport, Shropshire, is among those eager to open her doors again, albeit with reduced hours. The initial plan is to open from 10am-3pm on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
“We’ve made a few changes to enable our customer’s and staff to feel Covid safe,” confirmed Nicolette. However, I do have mixed emotions, especially with regard to my staff,” she admitted. “As for people unable to get in to see us, we’ll go to them.”
So how has Nicolette adapted to lockdown over the past 11 weeks? “With the Number 45 team on furlough I’ve put my energy into making a recovery plan for my business, so I set up a ‘shop‘ on my Facebook page to enable my customers to still be able to purchase gifts, although on a limited scale,” she explained.
The next stage of the plan was to build an ecommerce website, while working from home. “It’s still under construction, but we’re hoping to go live with it in July. However, the Facebook shop has been such a success that we have invested in a Number 45 van to enable us to take special gifts directly to our customers.
“I set the team a challenge to create a delivery slogan for us, and the winner was our part time assistant Abbie Lovatt who came up with: ‘You click, we drive…. delivered by Number 45’.”
Nicolette continued: “Being able to make safe doorstep deliveries to our customers that are in quarantine, self-isolating or home based is proving very popular and has been keeping me very busy.”
Top: Number 45 in Newport.
