Our Story
It must be in the jeans genes!
As a little girl I would help my grandma in her own lovely little shop in New Moston. Although my early days mainly consisted of me eating cream cakes with her in the back room when things were quiet…I was hooked!
In those days, ladies would come in for, lets say, a white jumper and my grandma would get three white jumpers out of a drawer in a big glass display counter and lay them all on the top for a customer to choose from. Imagine shopping like that now? My grandma was very encouraging and I was quickly ‘promoted’! Following her lead, I was allowed to sell boxed handkerchiefs, laying different designs out carefully on the counter, eagerly waiting for the customer to choose their favourite. It wasn’t long before I moved onto helping with the stock count. You could say that I started my apprenticeship very young! And so there it was…my dream of one day owning my own boutique had been well and truly sparked.
It was only a matter of time…
Well it may have taken twenty years of working in HR to realise my dream but the cogs never stopped whirring. And then, whilst taking part in a leadership coaching course to plan my next career move, instead of describing a role in HR, I drew my dream shop. The drawing was in so much detail and with so much enthusiasm that the tutor suggested it was time to say farewell to HR and quite literally set up shop. I am so glad that I kept that drawing and it always makes me smile to see how close it is to what we have now.
Well it might look easy!
It was so important for me to invest time in creating the kind of boutique that I would want to shop in…a luxurious one where I would be left alone to browse if I wanted but had knowledgeable assistants available if I needed advice. So, alongside learning the fundamentals of running a business, off I went to London to train as a style consultant with First Impressions. People often say that I have good instinct when it comes to style but this gave me added confidence in knowing why certain styles, fabrics, patterns, lengths and colours either work or don’t work for us. It has been invaluable to developing my buying skills and importantly, enables me to explain why an item, even though we may love it, sadly doesn’t always love us.
That’s the one…
In the end it all happened quite quickly. In fact just as I was organising my own wedding (what was I thinking!) I saw a shop in Uppermill that ticked so many boxes. I had to have it. After a frantic six weeks of business planning, shop fitting and buying we opened the doors of Lucy Cobb on 19.09.2006. Leigh, our highly creative boutique manager joined soon after and our brilliant team of ‘Cobbettes’ has grown so much since then.
The amazing Cobbettes
I am so proud to work with such a brilliant team.
Developing each individual is really important to me and I do genuinely love to see them grow in confidence.
What next for Lucy Cobb…
We started off with one floor and a handful of suppliers and before we knew it we had expended to two floors, a studio and an event company, providing fashion shows for charity fundraisers across the North-West. This year has been all about our new and exciting website which has grown to become a UK, European and even occasionally global online retailer. We still all get super excited to see our customers parcels being shipped off across the world.
It’s all thanks to you!
We are so grateful to our loyal customers and friends, from those who have been coming to us since day one and the new ones who have just discovered us. I hope that you will enjoy shopping with us for many years to come as we look forward to helping you to look and feel fabulous always.
