Where it all began

We’ve had an excellent start to the active life of Gladstone / Hellen. Thanks so much for all of your support before Christmas. We got off to a far bigger and brighter start than we dared imagine.

Inevitably, sales are pretty quiet at the moment, but it is such a relief not to be pushing discounts. I always found this period so depressing when we had Pedlars because so much of the good work that we’d done before Christmas was undone by the Sale and then the further discounts and all of that stuff.

Of course, many businesses have discounts built into their pricing and customers know that, so January Sales work for everyone. But we don’t have that sort of margin or volume, so here we are, quiet with sales but thinking about the future with optimism and excitement.

Caroline and I were in New York with our two younger children for Christmas, then back at Glen Dye in the Highlands for Hogmanay. We have both been hugely inspired by our travels. Sarah was in Hawarden and had a terrible bout of flu, but I can tell -by the volume of inspiring messages- that she’s now back in rude health.

So, what will we do with that inspiration that will make Gladstone / Hellen grow and thrive? It’s a long-term project and although we have come a long way in the last year, we have far further to go. 

But first, I want to tell you about the beginning. I’ll keep a long story short.

When Caroline and I met on the cusp of 1986 and ’87 she was designing gifts and homewares for Laura Ashley, working alongside the icon herself. I was running a record label that I had established for Warner/Chappell Music. Sarah wasn’t born.

About a decade later Caroline and I started Pedlars, and several other retail and hospitality ventures followed, some of which you may know. That’s where Sarah comes in; in 2017 she sent me a DM and asked to meet for a coffee, so we did.

Sarah had studied fashion design at Leeds, before completing an MA at Kingston, designing for Top Man and Oliver Spencer and moving back home to North Wales. We met, got on well and pretty soon she was doing some work for us, and I was helping to publish her legendary magazine/book about Welsh craft (which is one of Sarah’s true passions) called JWRNAL. 

Fast forward a few years and Pedlars is over, while Sarah is Creative Director at Hawarden which means that, working alongside me, she is responsible for the look, feel, smell and sound of all of our ventures. 

We three work well together, and I kept on thinking that maybe, if we combine Caroline’s skills in homewares, Sarah’s in clothing and mine in making things happen and looking good, then perhaps we could create something special. We chat about it.

On February 5th last year I pushed the button marked WHAT DO YOU THINK? and started a WhatsApp group called ‘An idea that won’t go away’. This is what we said…

And 10 months later we launched.

Big love from us three.

Charlie, Caroline and Sarah x