Are you sure you’re Shaw?
Are you sure you’re Shaw?
Hello all. My name is Cat Shaw. I am the fourth generation of Shaw’s at Alvingham and I would like to share a little of my story with you.
For most of my youth my father did his best to persuade me not to go into the family business. Instead to find my own calling, he hoped for different things for me. I found that calling in the hospitality sector. I still made my way back again though and since 2008 I have worked alongside Dad to try and keep the wheels turning. Each year seemed to bring different circumstances, different challenges, different high and lows. As many of you will know in 2021 we made major changes to our operations and structure and decided to focus upon our retail shop in Alvingham.
It was our (and in particular my) hope, ambition and dream to be able to keep our family business going but find a sustainable, balanced working life. Life is short and I wanted to be able to look back on mine with more to show than just working 90 hours a week as we were doing. I also wanted to see my Dad, Mum and brother enjoying some of the simple pleasures they loved such as gardening.
For the business, I really wanted to focus upon maintaining the unpretentious, welcoming, friendly village shop Grandad and Dad had created. Building on the heart of the community we had become over the years in our rural, farming ideal. Selling potatoes, vegetables, salad and fruit are at the core of our being. I did want to add a bit of ‘Cat sparkle’ and the team and I set about painting up shelving, rearranging the shop to have a new flow and layout to really help the fresh produce sing.
We all know that there is a place and a need for supermarkets, I also use them for nappies for my daughter, bulk packs of wash powder, lots of things. For Shaw’s though as a team we wanted something different. Something a bit quirky, creative and to focus on inspiring fantastic home cooking using our lovely fresh ingredients. That’s why we loved the last few weeks when you sent us all those fabulous pictures of what you had been making.
Supporting local is essential to our being also, we try to buy as much local produce as we can, where that’s not available we buy British and where that’s not available to offer variety we do buy from abroad. For example, this last week Dad (Rob) bought some beautiful Amalfi lemons and Vitelotte Potatoes which just flew out.
In addition to fresh produce, we also stock a great range of Lincolnshire products such as local bread, honey, eggs, ice-cream, coffee, cheese, preserves, tea, gift cards, pottery, crisps, rapeseed oil and more.
I feel we really achieved what we set out to achieve. We have an amazing group of regular, valued customers who spend their hard-earned wages with us. We have built up a community of truly wonderful, engaged customers both on and offline. For this we thank you tremendously.
Since April 2021, as everyone is acutely aware, the cost of living has just been going up, up and up! The impact on Shaw’s being that whilst our fixed costs having been going up, we haven’t kept pace with the margin increases needed to keep up with that. Hence my call out on social media a few weeks ago after sitting down with our accountant.
It was clear from a lot of the responses that many people didn’t know we were here; had forgotten we were here or thought we were closed! Obviously, we needed to work on reintroducing people to Shaw’s and your support over these last few weeks has been heart-warming. The shares, posts and comments you have made have really had an impact as we have seen lots of new faces in our shop. The feedback has been wonderful.
If the above resonates with you my small favour would be to keep on sharing the news about us so that we can build our sales to help overcome the growing costs of operating. We have so much more would like to achieve, so much more to offer, lots of ideas to bring into fruition. We are working on a lot of the suggestions you gave us so watch this space!
Thank you so much for reading.
With love and gratitude, Cat SHAW.