Here’s a great interview with Emma, as well her shop Book-ish being named as the UK’s best independent bookshop, starting loads of great initiatives and being a huge supporter of good things in Crickhowell, Emma was the person who introduced Totally Locally to Crickhowell.
NatWest Cymru’s Gemma Casey chats with Emma about her personal story of how her now famous bookshop came to be, grew to be so much more and how the pandemic and recent events have changed how the business works.
Emma: “You can’t run a retail business in the current climate by just staying behind the counter and expecting things to fly off the shelves, it just doesn’t work that way any more. There is such strong competition, big online giants, supermarkets. You really have to be innovative, collaborative… and get out there and talk to lots of people and make things happen.”
At 20 minutes in the chat turns to the story of Totally Locally Crickhowell and how it helped rejuvenate and focus the community spirit that was already in the town.
The Five Pound message was really important to their local campaign, but more importantly Totally Locally taught local businesses to see what everyone else is doing so they can recommend each other more. Also a key message is that “it’s about championing the high street as a whole, not just about you.”
“Totally Locally is about loving where you live… it creates a spark and then good things happen.. it gets people talking, gets you caring about community again and gets that town feeling back… and it helped revive the local community spirit. All local schemes are result of conversations, so it’s important to talk to other business owners, this leads to ideas and projects, and can have massive impact on businesses.”
You can view the whole conversation here: