When Venetia Steele was made redundant during lockdown, she sat at her kitchen table and started something new. Her idea quickly moved to bigger premises - a shed in her garden.
Now, Venetia has her own shop in her home town of Bridgend and is planning to expand to a second premises as business booms - but one thing is missing - someone who can get their head around video sharing platform TikTok.
Venetia Steele Boutiques in Caroline street, Bridgend sells clothes specifically for women aged over 40 and has been attracting people from all over to come and visit. She said social media was at the heart of its success, but that she believed the hugely successful app TikTok could be crucial to her future success. You can get more Bridgend news and other story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.
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She has been trying to get to grips with it herself but is keen to find a social media expert to give her a few tips. “The support on our Facebook page has been phenomenal”, Venetia explained. “I’m trying to learn TikTok now. I’m not doing the dancing videos but I’m trying to get onto it too, so I can learn all the fancy things they’re doing and it’s all new."
She added: “What I need is a social media savvy person to give me a few ideas on how to get to grips with it, but slowly but steadily, I am getting there. Without social media I wouldn’t have a business to be honest because throughout lockdown it was my only portal to get out there so people would see me... When they see it on Facebook they want to come into the shop so that’s bringing them into the town centre which you normally wouldn’t have.
"A lot of people of my own generation don't use social media enough, and they don't use it very well for business. So people definitely need help sometimes to move forward, and they need it to get their business and their brand out there and bring people in - it's fantastic for advertising but sometimes people don't see that."
Venetia's Facebook group, which brings her shoppers and fashion lovers together, now has 4,600 members, and is full of women supporting each other, and interacting with Venetia, which she said had helped bring about more of a spotlight on her work.
Venetia added: “It has rocketed. I cannot believe that it has gone from a kitchen table to a high street store, still online, still on Facebook, still on Instagram. And we get busloads of women from Cheltenham, from Devon, because we specialise for women over 40. Especially for women over 40, they don’t know what suits them anymore and when they come to me they come in their jeans that they don’t fit in but I make sure that they leave feeling how they used to feel - feeling confident.”
Venetia said she hoped her second store would be complete within 18 months, and was looking around lots of different areas, including Swansea, Neath, Cardiff, Cowbridge and Porthcawl, all not too far away from where she is based in Bridgend, but far enough to attract a different set of people.
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