David: Household Goods and Vintage Supplies
The Blueprint to springboard a business forward
David owns Goods In, with his wife Jenny. They sell household goods and vintage supplies and have been operating since 2021. He joined the Blueprint because he wanted a springboard to refine the business that he loved, but had never been a hundred percent happy with.
Tell us how your business began and what your journey has been to getting to where you are today.
I think it’s a common story with a lot of people who started up business at the same time. COVID hit and I was furloughed from my regular job. It gave me the impetus to do something that I'd always wanted to do, which was to start my own business.
I've always collected things and I've always been interested in history. I've thought about starting this business previously and it just came about at the right time.
I started really slowly selling bits and bats here and there online because we couldn't really go out and do anything. It snowballed from there. I took the decision to go full time about a year after I'd started it. We were doing pop up fairs and markets where we'd sell our vintage bits. We were also selling online. I'd started a website but I wasn't a hundred percent happy with it and the direction that it was taking.
I had an initial brand but I still wasn't a hundred percent that my brand was saying and doing all the things that I knew the business was saying and doing.
Before you joined the Blueprint, what were the challenges you had in your business?
I just had a weird feeling that something wasn't quite connecting: that it wasn't quite all coming together in the right way.
It's sometimes really hard to put your finger on it and I think I was always striving for more with the business. Whether that was more sales, or to really portray the image that I wanted to, and get our story across to people. It would get me down a little bit. I would get into these ruts where I felt the need to change everything. Like nothing was quite right. I think it was many sleepless nights that was the biggest push to reach out and to have a conversation with you. And I eventually end up joining the Blueprint.
Did this feeling stop you doing anything with your business?
Yeah, it did. It could be quite crippling at times. I knew I could certain things, for example say I wanted to launch a new collection of items on my website, I felt well placed to do that and to find the items, to photograph them, etc.
But sometimes I felt like people wouldn’t understand it, you know? It seems like a simple thing that you would say, “hey, there's like new stuff on the website, go and have a look” But if the website isn't exactly where you want it, it’s not going to be quite right.
That was always a hang up for me. If I put out a collection of workshop items for example, another category might be kitchen, and I really worried that if I put out a workshop collection, people are going to think that's the only thing we do. Or they’d get confused about what we actually do.
I knew that through our brand we could tie all this together and get a much more coherent story. I felt held back from doing a lot of little things I needed to do, and sometimes much bigger things too.
How did Your Brand Blueprint solve those challenges?
The process was massive. The whole journey was massive for me. I've done a lot of professional development work in other roles, and I've always found that, the journey is the thing that really helped me feel like I was investing in myself and my business.
Being in the Blueprint with a small group of people, talking to them, hearing their stories, their issues and problems, how they were solving them, and helping them solve them was massively beneficial.
I think that was my favourite part of it. You have to submit yourself to the process and and hope you get to where you want to be. But you will. That's a key like takeaway: if you do commit to it you’ll have the guidance and the space to be able to work out the answers. The consistency of the sessions really helped me find my path. There wasn’t a huge ‘ta-dah’ moments at the end, but a little bit later, I realised it was all in place: it all makes sense to me now.
A lot of the Blueprint is about doing the thinking. It gives you that time to think, and that's often what is missing for many of us.What was the most important topic for you?
I think it was talking about our brand’s story and our values that underpinned everything for the rest of the course.
I went through plenty of different drafts of who we are, what we do, why we do it. I had the thinking time to really drill down into why we started the business or why we do things in a certain way: things you don't actually ever consider.
That really reinforced the values that we had in the business and also underpinned the rest of the work that we did over the weeks. It meant that I didn't feel as worried if I wasn't getting a part of because I knew that I had that basic work in place, which was nice.
What was so useful about your values and story for you? What did cementing them do?
I always wanted to start a business, but I didn't realise I wanted to have a business with a purpose. Our business is quite sustainable in that we don't buy any new products. All of our products are vintage, antique, reclaimed, or salvaged in some way. So that was a happy accident in a way. And when we went back and looked at it, that was a key value for us and I hadn't even really considered it. Bringing those things to the forefront was really, really important for us.
It gave me loads of motivation and conviction in what we were doing.I know we're making a bit of a difference, which is lovely to think that we could do that.
You love history and doing the story exercise pulled your background together and explained why you run this business.
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of that came from my mum from her love of history. She worked in libraries, she was a researcher. Growing up with her, it was obviously ingrained in me and folding that into the business was an amazing feeling. It's another one of those things you just don't have time to consider or think about.
Writing our brand story reminded me of what I’m passionate about. It keeps you loving the business, even in the harder moments.
When you joined the Blueprint you were reluctant to use the word ‘vintage’. Now you use it to describe your business. Can you explain how you got to the point of using the word?
I think all business owners will know you can get in your head about things. For some of those things, it's good because, you can look at your values and think “our values say that we're not going to be pretentious” or “we're not going to do this or that or the other”.
I didn’t like the word vintage because of what I associated with it. When I looked at my values, nowhere in them did it say “you're not going to use the word vintage” because that words actually best describes what we do to our audience. My connotations of that word don't have to be everyone else's. We're no Apple, but you've got to set the trend or tell people what you mean.
Exploring how to describe what we do backed up that I could change perceptions of that word and I could use it with confidence and still be able to describe the type of items that we sell. So, I had to get over myself a little bit with that.
And now it's in our strapline.
What differences have you seen in your business since putting your Blueprint together?
There has been a lot of change for the business with. We opened a physical store in the Corn Exchange in Leeds. That wasn't actually on the cards when I first started the Blueprint. The process got me thinking about things in a totally different way.
What I took from the course was that you can bring together parts of your business or you can combine all the elements of your business in a really obvious umbrella. That was something I'd struggled with a lot. I felt like we were giving out mixed messages and I felt like everything was a little bit muddled, and the course helped me embrace all of that and see how it was all connected, to bring it back to values and the things that we'd set out at the start.
Everything ended up feeling like it was coming from the same place: I now have that notion of everything feels connected.
I asked David at Walker Design Co to help me with the visual rebrand of the business. It was so easy to tell him what I was looking for. He's a fantastic artist but I was able to give him all the right prompts that he needed to know the direction we wanted to go in.
I knew exactly what assets I wanted to end up with, and when we decided on the physical shop, that only got bigger and bigger. At the end of it, we ended up with a cohesive message, and look and feel. So that came out of the course.
As well as the visual brand changing and, a physical shop, we’ve got a really good document to explain to employees, prospective employees, investors or anyone what our whole business is about.
But overall, for me, it was the confidence. The bringing together of everything and feeling like things are all pulling in the same direction. I bet it feels really proud when you see it up there on your storefront.
Yeah. I forget to look up at the sign but every now and again I'll come in and see the big orange doors and big sign above it, along with everything inside from our swing tags, to our compliment slips, and business cards: everything works together. It's really nice to see.
I don't I don't think we could have got as much out of that process of rebranding if it hadn't been for the Blueprint.
How did you make those changes so quickly?
The fear dropped away, which was amazing. I had a really clear path ahead of me. We set goals or objectives at the beginning of the Blueprint, and one of them was around a physical space. When we first started the programme, our space wasn't available and it wasn't something that we were considering immediately. I actually had a different idea for what a physical space for the business would look like. When you keep your mind open about what the vision is for the business, then opportunities start to look right.
So we just said let's go for it.
And we just had the conviction to do it, which was massively down to the course for making me feel confident. I'm definitely someone who would err on the side of caution in terms of big decisions like that.
It gave me confidence in our decision making. When you make a decision about a certain part of your brand or who your customers are, or how you want to market to people and you get that ‘right’, then that tells you that the next decision you make is probably going to be a good one as well.What's one bit of advice you could give somebody who's feeling a bit lost in their business and things aren't really making sense?
It's a big step. I never thought I was someone who would find it difficult to ask for help. When you start a business and it's just you, or a couple of you, it can be difficult to feel proud of what you've done, and at the same time, struggle to know exactly which direction to go in to admit get more.
I needed someone to sit down with me and help me talk it through. That doesn’t mean you’re giving away control or ownership of your business. At the end of the day, you'll, you can still do whatever you want with it. It just gives you a lot of things to consider and someone else to help you think through what you're normally turning round and round in your own head.
