BLOOM & BREW

As part of a new ongoing series in collaboration with Neighbourhood Coffee, we’re sitting down with the businesses using the beans. For this issue, we sat down with Charlotte from Bloom & Brew, a concept coffee store that sells carefully curated goods & homeware as well as specialty coffee and cakes. They’re bringing a new way of brewing to the traditional market town of Ormskirk in Lancashire. Here’s what she told us about being a force for change.

During the lockdown in 2020, I suddenly found myself with a lot of time to think about what I really wanted to do. Previously, I was an account manager for a brewery, driving up and down the country and looking after products in restaurants, pubs, hotels. But I was really driven towards doing my own thing. I’d always wanted to run a business and so in that free time I decided to take the leap and try my hand at opening up a shop.

I had no background in coffee or running my own business so I had to depend a lot on my passion for introducing positive change. My partner and I, who is now my business partner too, wanted to combine our love of coffee with our love for supporting independent businesses and making a difference. That’s how Bloom & Brew came about.

We wanted to make a show that is a force for change. Without being overbearing, we want to guide and educate our customers into a more low-waste sustainable way of consuming. We are as low-waste as we can be – like using recyclable milk pergals for our alternative milk and dairy milk (locally sourced) which eliminates the need for plastic cartons and tetra packs, this reduces our waste drastically. We also turn our spent coffee into coffee logs or use as fertiliser and all our take out coffee packaging is made from plant fibres and reward customers which many of our customers do. Beyond that, we ensure that we choose our suppliers very carefully, making sure to look at their ethics and credentials — that goes for everything in our store: from the coffee, to the coffee cups, the coffee machines, and the beans that are used.

My partner and I used to live in Ancoats in Manchester, which has a vibrant range of independent stores, coffee communities, and that ever-changing city dynamic. When we moved to Ormskirk, we realised that this beautiful town doesn’t really have anything like that. We wanted to bring that sense of coffee community to Ormskirk, a little hub that celebrates independent makers and locally roasted beans. We didn’t want to be conventional, we’ve never been conventional as people, so we didn’t want the shop to blend in with the chains that the town already had. We wanted to be vibrant, different, and do it all in a planet positive way.

Ormskirk may have a lot of students but it is a slightly older demographic, so for us it’s all about that education. We don’t want them to feel as though this metropolitan lifestyle is begrudgingly infringing on their own, no, we wanted to become a part of their day-to-day. The shop serves coffee and sells from independent businesses, yes, but we also have a refill station for liquids such as cleaning liquids and shampoos to herbs and spices, rices, pastas and snacks which actually really benefits them as well as reducing plastic waste.

The customers are really receptive, we can really see a growth in our community as well. People will come in one day to try a coffee and suddenly they’re here the next day and bringing their friends with them. Word of mouth has been really important to us which we’re extremely grateful for because it’s that organic marketing.

It’s not just been a change for the community either. Like I said, I had no experience with coffee before opening up Bloom & Brew. I was very much thrown in at the deep end but I wouldn’t change anything about it now. Being a barista, learning about the beans, and connecting with a growing community through coffee is where I feel the most settled, the most content.

Bloom & Brew is found on Church Street in Ormskirk.

Words

Beth Bennett

WITH SAINT LAURENT'S SPRING CAMPAIGN

When YSL debuted it’s SS23 offering last July, there was no denying the brooding nature of those sharpened shoulders and deep-necked jackets – who’s purpose seemed entirely to cast an accentuated shadow and enshroud the wearer in a haze of mystery. It was no surprise, then, when YSL released their latest campaign and, in a stoic, somewhat cryptic fashion, stood a sample of the world’s most provocative modern film directors.

Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara, David Cronenberg, and Pedro Almodóvar are unabashed in their mysticism and, as Art Director Anthony

Vaccarello is wholly aware of, need no flamboyance to stand sharp. Each director is accomplished in his own right, regarded as masters of genres, innovators of world cinema movements, maestros of the modern lens. No set pieces or overt photographic style are necessary for provocation because these men alone carry the emphatic weight of intrigue in themselves.

That’s the beauty of this campaign. In a world so entranced by gluttonous consumption, YSL have stood apart, allowing the grandiose status of the subjects to be effective enough. And it really is, don’t you think?