Bringing Bond Street to the Bay, we meet
MAGGIE & SARAH Maggie Dawson and her daughter Sarah Williams run Maggie & Co, a much-loved haven for luxury fashion brands that brings the elegance of Paris and London to Torquay.
M
aggie Dawson’s life sounds wonderful; she spends lots of her time on fashion buying trips to London, Paris and Milan to bring back luxury designer collections to Maggie & Co in Torquay. This morning we are chatting from the comfort of two enormous and rather glamorous armchairs towards the back of the store. Maggie & Co is much bigger than it looks from the outside – a long, elegant space – perfect for the catwalk shows that are regularly held here. I admire a stunning evening dress by Italian designer Sara Roka. Maggie tells me, “It’s a new brand for us – an experiment as the pieces are really quite different.” We are now making a tour of the thirty-four collections that Maggie & Co currently stocks. We waft past pieces by Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Cain, Amina Rubinacci, Chiara Boni, Belstaff, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Moschino, Escada and many more. Maggie explains, “You have to stock global brands which sit along side each other before you are accepted as a stockist. The first question we are always asked is ‘What are your other labels?’ For example, we only got Diane von Furstenberg because we had Armani
16 | April/May 2020
at the time. We only got Burberry because we were stockists for Armani, Cerruti, Hugo Boss, and DKNY.” I am wondering how they manage to attract enough customers to sustain sales of these exclusive, high value brands. Maggie tells me, “There are a lot of wealthy people in Torbay and of course we have the marina with fabulous yachts that people use as their second (floating) home and others who own holiday homes in this lovely Bay.” Maggie & Co also has customers who come from far and wide purely to visit the store. One customer arrives by helicopter and is chauffeur driven to the shop, leaving with a large number of the distinctive Maggie & Co shopping bags. It’s Maggie’s 46th year in the business and she just loves Torquay. She tells me that she was born in Scotland in a village called Penicuik near Edinburgh but later moved to England. She left school at sixteen when she saw an advert seeking a position for a junior at a high class fashion shop Hammells and applied. Two candidates were given a trial period of one week and the shop’s staff were asked to choose, which girl would get the job. They chose Maggie
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