NAKED BRACE SUPPORTS BOOMERANG BAGS
We often finish Christmas and look to a new year with plans and intentions to change, any successful business must adapt every week in order to stay fresh for customers and staff alike. Brace of Butchers is small and that ultimately means its nible and our mantra is to do what supermarkets can’t and stock suppliers that can’t supply supermarkets.
Last summer I was swimming Weymouth Bay with Ben who leads the Duchy team at Poundbury and he strongly advised we take up the offer to expand. The challenge is not interest in expansion but what would we do, everyone wanted another restaurant but everyone needed something new and exciting; and that was going to be a packaging free alternative to the successful mother Business and we would call it NAKED BRACE.
The touchpaper was lit and no sooner did we get dry from that swim i started to plan and argue with myself for weeks on how it would look, act and feel. The most important part of any launch is to do it fast as possible, and not all at one time. Businesses and ideas need to mature and staff and customers need to feel it’s their doing not the hot headed office based business boy coming up with endless suggestions on the phone. Listening to the community on ideas that flow with a narrative is the easiest way, and adapting to the contours of the media machine - but it’s really important to focus on positives and not the negatives in the media, it’s all too easy to become occupied by the rhetoric and not the solutions needed to resolve the problem in hand. If you get that right you have the a solution to the declining high street.
We worked fast and achieved a launch in 3 weeks from taking the keys officially, helped by staff and their children we had only hours left before HRH Prince of Wales arrived for a private viewing of the Business in November 2018. He’s been to our shop several times before and has supported our ethos with very kind words which means so much to the whole team.
As I said, you then have to listen and prepare for the ideas and also implement quickly. Since the opening we have started to stock milk from a dispenser eliminating plastic milk bottles, we also stock cleaning liquids and body/hair soaps eliminating more plastic bottles and finally the week raw honey from self dispenser.
The latest and most important update for this blog is the Boomerang Bags. Again, a suggestion from the community and in particular Edd Moore who is a fountain of ideas as he and his pupils at Damers School are very well known for their sustainable ideas as they won national awards for their WAXTASTIC alternative to cling film.
The principle was established in Australia and its simple, the community make bags from donated fabric, then give the to organisations looking to eliminate plastic bag use and the customers get them for free - they just have to honor the return and reuse policy.
It’s easy to understand…we have only just started the process but like all things that are effective and simple - they just work it out for themselves!
