Who are you?
We are The Compartment Store, a mini department store on wheels! We are a collaborative shopping experience founded by Kitty Farrow, a specialist bookbinder and box maker, and gift-wrap enthusiast Victoria Jane of Gift Wrap HQ.
What do you do?
The Products - We make paper products and stationery. We
have created an inventory that celebrates paper paraphernalia from the past and
we have something for every occasion. We like to work with offcuts, saving all
wastage where we can. It allows us to make an interesting collection of
products that you won’t find in your average card shop. We particularly love
the postcard, and have given it a little makeover. We have created our own
version by incorporating our favourite technique, gold foil blocking. All our
products are made by hand in London
on vintage machines and using traditional techniques. You will find us folding,
creasing, cutting, blocking whenever we can.
The Store - We sell our handmade paper goods from our
travelling trunk, The Compartment Store. Our travelling trunk is reminiscent of
that of a travelling sales man. We absolutely love the fact that we can open
shop pretty much anywhere. The trunk gives us flexibility to move around and we
can adapt it to a number of situations and spaces. We also like to move the
compartments around and re-merchandise our shop as often as possible as we like
to keep the customers happy and excited to discover what we have for sale in
our Compartment Store, creating a mini shopping experience.
Friendship first then business! Originally we bonded over a
love of letter writing and used to write long elaborate letters to each other
for fun. It was in these letters that we dreamt up our idea for having our own
department store, where we could separate our creations into their own sections
or compartments. With a large ambition and no square footage quite in our price
range we decided to go small and invented The Compartment Store, our very own
mini department store on wheels! With lots of compartments to fill we began
making.
What’s next?
We have our own online store, thecompartmentstore.co.uk,
which is very exciting. So we are working on refining that and teaching
ourselves the ways of online shopping. We are also trying to do more fairs and
finding out where our market is and what our customers respond to. We are also
working on a few commissions.
What advise would you give yourself , if you could go back
to the beginning?
We are just starting out so we are at the beginning, any
advise for us would be gladly taken! We would love to do more events and
bespoke work for parties. We also love working in collections and themes so we
will hopefully get to work on some more special ranges for summer, maybe a
summer holiday compartment!
How can you resist all this gorgeousness!?! We both love stationary and paper goodies and so combining that with having a shop you can take wherever you want is amazing! I'm sure it won't be long before these girls have their own place though and are taking over the world, one postcard at a time!
H & Sammy, xxx
How can you resist all this gorgeousness!?! We both love stationary and paper goodies and so combining that with having a shop you can take wherever you want is amazing! I'm sure it won't be long before these girls have their own place though and are taking over the world, one postcard at a time!
H & Sammy, xxx
