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Talking Shop
Catching The Worm In the case of Heidi and Dom Early, the couple behind the publishing and retailing Earlybird business, these ‘early birds’ have done a lot more than catching a worm. They have stoked the community spirit with impressive results in Stoke Newington (where their shop in based), taken the local council to task over road closures successfully securing funding for a marketing campaign for fellow businesses - and took home two Retas trophies in the recent retailing awards. PG sprinted to catch up with Heidi and found out what’s on her slate for 2022. “I can’t tell you what winning those two Retas awards meant to Dom and I. We still feel so utterly proud,” exclaimed Heidi Early, who heads up the retailing side of the Earlybird business, a card shop in the north London enclave of Stoke Newington, while Dom concentrates on the publishing side. “It made us appreciate just how important awards are, especially for small businesses such as ours. We can’t really do appraisals on ourselves, so achieving recognition like this from the industry means so much. And having put the
trophies in our window, the comments from our customers have been wonderful,” adds Heidi about the reaction to Earlybird winning the Best Independent Greeting Card Retailer - London award as well as the Best Retail Initiative category for its Windows of Hope campaign. Heidi admits that winning The Retas awards prompted her and Dom to “take a step back and reflect on what we have achieved over the last 18 years since we first opened the shop. Normally we are thinking about what we haven’t done and what we need to get done!” Heidi is certainly a ‘doer’, but is also a great ideas person, as evidenced by the Windows of Hope campaign, which was feted in The Retas. This lockdown initiative, spearheaded by Heidi, saw many fellow retailers and businesses in the Stoke Newington area, create their own Top: Heidi and Dominic Early with their two Retas trophies at the awards event in November. Above right: A colourful mandrill design by Emma Jayne (which Earlybird publishes on cards) fronted its Signs of Hope window. Left: The festive window of Earlybird’s shop, complete with Christmas ‘tree’ made from upcycled card samples.
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PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
messages of ‘hope’ that they displayed in their respective windows to raise the spirits of the local community. “Hope is what we needed then to get us all through what was a very unsettled time. There was a feeling of helplessness and those messages in the windows along our street somehow united us, and made things feel a little bit better” recalled Heidi. The engagement and response this realised has spurred Heidi on to ever more ambitious projects to safeguard the Stoke Newington retail and business economy.
