Woohoo! Check me out at the launch of Rockpool’s flagship shop in The House that Jack Built on The Barbican, Plymouth!
Oh, we didn’t mentioned we’d packed in the day job and taken out a lease on a shop, throwing all the securities of employment to the wind in the pursuit of a long treasured dream…?
I’d better go back a few steps.
So, as some of you might know, I (with the help of Mr RT) ran Rockpool whilst also juggling our full time jobs and the child care of a 2 year old. We weren’t masochists – it was always our intention to nurture our little fledgling business to a stage where we could give up the 9-5 and run RT full time. However, 3 years of toiling online and at craft fairs, and this dream still felt a long way off. Fate clearly got sick of our fannying around, and intervened in the form of my compulsory redundancy notice. Never a nice piece of post to receive but in my case it felt like a weight had been lifted; now, I had a clear cut choice to make: I could look for alternative employment and continue with Rockpool in my spare time, or I could throw caution to the wind and GO FOR IT.
I decided to GO FOR IT.
In a strange twist of fate, one of our preferred locations for a shop, The House that Jack Built in Plymouth’s historic Barbican district, co0incidentally had an available unit – it felt too good any opportunity to pass up, so on mini-RT’s 2nd birthday at the end of January this year, we agreed to be the proud new inhabitants of units 4 & 6 in The House that Jack Built.
Since that time my feet have bared touched the ground: I had to work out my notice with the outgoing employer, contact all the lovely existing RT suppliers and beg them to start producing at the rate of knots, source new suppliers to join our band of merry men (and women), rebrand and redecorate, all in 5 weeks. Needless to say there were many late nights, heated discussions, takeaways, panicky phone calls, spontaneous decisions, more takeaways, tears, tantrums and triumphs. But with the invaluable help of an extended possee of workers we opened our beautiful little home on 7th March 2015, and we couldn’t be happier.
Who knows what the future will bring? For now it just feels pretty darned great to have stopped procrastinating, and started doing. At the risk of sounding like a bad Facebook quote, some chap once said “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop”. Amen to that.