Help us stay open & support our covid recovery

Aim

We need to raise £20k to recover from Covid and continue trading so that we can add value to Northern Quarter and have a chance to thrive

Hello! We are Margot & Lux; a small independent brand who aim to provide a true alternative to fast fashion in Manchester. We focus on ‘slow fashion’; curated vintage and indie brands and we serve people who want to shop more consciously without compromising on their taste or style. 

We are crowdfunding to raise money so that we can recover from the impact of Covid, survive, and cement our place in the Northern Quarter, which is in desperate need of retail diversity. We’re the only store of our kind in the city, we’ve identified a niche (and a need) within an underrepresented demographic (women, particularly millennials) for our store. We want people to find us and the government won’t help us. 

Our store at 54 Port Street opened in mid November in the Northern Quarter and has been significantly impacted by very low foot traffic to the area due to the huge (and sudden) spike of new Covid cases shortly before December. Despite this, we have been told by Manchester City Council that we are ineligible for Covid support. We haven’t been given the chance to thrive and in a city with so many empty retail units it’s a huge shame to feel as though we aren’t worthy of support. 

Situation now 

Our situation at the moment is bleak. We’ve been refused grant money from Manchester City Council who have told us only that our business is ‘ineligible’. It’s impossible to plan for the future or to cope with overheads because we have days where we have zero customers in the shop. We’re in a vicious cycle, we need to spend money to improve our reach, but we have nothing spare to drive traffic to the store. People don’t know we exist. We’re mounting debt and facing the reality that we’ve been abandoned by the local council and government and we need to act now. Sales are almost non-existent at the moment, and we’ve had a few weeks where we’ve made as little as £20 per week. 

We deserve to survive

The business is in its infancy. We are a new shop, we opened on Port Street on the 15th of November 2021 and after the huge spike in Omicron cases from that period onwards, we haven’t been able to operate to our full potential. We haven’t had the opportunity to thrive, for people to discover us and because all of my savings have gone into the business, we have nothing spare to recover from the past few months of extremely low foot traffic to the city.

It's been super tough 

Affordable retail space is rare in Manchester and when 54 Port Street came up for rent it was an opportunity I could not turn down. It’s safe to say that we, as a nation, did not expect to have another wave of Covid, nor did we expect Plan B/WFH restrictions (which were sold to us as being ‘not as strict’ as previous measures) to have such a widespread negative impact on the service industry. All of my money has gone into this project. I took a chance on an amazing space, for a unique and one of a kind store, in an incredible part of the city and so far it has been an uphill battle with a new disaster almost weekly. 

The past few months have been tough for everyone in Manchester, but the latest wave of cases of Covid has meant that fewer people have visited the city generally. It was widely reported that hospitality suffered huge losses due to cancellations, but of course this had a knock on effect for retail as a whole. Towards the end of 2021, we had weeks where we took £20 for the entire week of trading, and this is proving impossible to recover from. Unfortunately it was not the case that the customer moved from shopping in store to shopping online. Due to the uncertainty and with so many cancelled plans, we also suffered extremely low website traffic and did not sell there at all as people’s needs changed so dramatically. Christmas should have been our saving grace, but this was not the case, the knock on effect of cancelled plans meant that people had no reason to buy clothes or go shopping. 

We need help now, so that we can get to a point where we are not just surviving, but thriving and therefore able to move forward with our ultimate goal and vision for the future. 

We have huge plans for the future

It has always been my vision to create an IRL and online women’s concept store catering to the fashion forward population of Manchester and beyond. Once we recover from Covid, I want to finally open the upper two floors of the store, and add incredible and sought after indie brands to sit alongside our vintage so that we can offer a true alternative to fast fashion, catering to those who are conscious of their environmental impact but also want to buy great, unique clothing. 

By now, we were expecting to have raised enough profit to be able to open our two upper floors. My plan is to create a ‘pop-up-shop in shop’; a space from which independent brands (primarily those in their first 1-2 years of trading) can join us for a few weeks/months and sell their products. It’s important to me to be able to help others thrive, so I want to use the top floor to create a studio space/shoot location available for rent, with discounts being offered to those on lower incomes, students and again, those in their first 1-2 years of business. 

Our survival encourages others to take (some of the many) empty retail units and really put Manchester on the map as a shopping destination. A thriving shopping destination supports other industries too, such as hospitality, so the success of stores like ours are beneficial to Manchester’s future. If the pandemic has proven anything, it’s that a city cannot rely on a night time economy forever.

About me, Hollie founder of Margot & Lux

After a lifetime of working in corporate, high street retail and leaving due to terrible work related mental health - I took the plunge to start my own vintage brand at the end of 2019. Fast forward to 2020 - after only two full months of trading, the global Covid-19 pandemic hit, and suddenly everything changed. I’ve wanted my own shop since I was 9 years old, but I wasn’t expecting to find anything as perfect as the three floor unit I stumbled upon and eventually rented. Being part of the community has been a dream come true, it feels like our home and we want nothing but a chance to show what we can do and to serve people who deserve an alternative to Manchester's current corporate retail offering. 

Three of us currently work as a team; Hollie (founder & director), Steph (assistant buyer/store manager) and Michaela (operations & e-commerce). All three of us have extremely similar experiences of toxic work cultures and we want to create something more inclusive and a welcoming environment from which we can nurture future retail stars.

In conclusion...

By contributing to this project, you are taking control of your own shopping space, you are voting for more independent retailers and you are opting in to diversify the retail landscape of Manchester. I know that there is huge potential for the shop, pop up space and shoot location. I opened in the first place because I saw a gap in the market and a niche that was not being catered to. Those who have managed to find us have been overwhelmingly positive about the store and are truly invested in our business, however, unfortunately we cannot rely on a handful of people - like all retail businesses, we need heavy foot traffic and word of mouth to thrive. 

This project closed unsuccessfully on 13th March 2022