Crafty mum turns hobby into a £1m family firm
NICHOLA Holtby has turned a handicraft hobby into a business on course to turnover £1m – and it’s been such a success her whole family is now involved.
Nichola, 44, lives in Romiley, Stockport, with husband Sean, 51, and their children Macie, 20, Evie, 18, and Spencer, 13 and together they run the creative gift company A Beautiful Sign.
Nichola writes heartfelt poems that are lasered onto hand-crafted wooden items.
Despite the difficulties of lockdown, the company came into its own over the past 12 months, as the signs became a huge online hit as gifts for those who could not meet up with family and friends.
In particular, her lockdown poems that family could send to say they were missing loved ones struck a pertinent chord – with orders flooding in from across the world.
The company recorded a six figure turnover for the last financial year and are now on course to make their first £1m.
Nichola feels passionately about giving help and advice to other budding creative business owners – and is now sharing her tips and experiences of turning a hobby into a career over the past decade with a dedicated instagram account @ buildingacreativebusiness.
“I have always had a love of words and poetry and all my verses are written from the heart. I create all the products you see on our website and am the author of all the poems,” she says.
“I love my job and I feel very proud to have made my hobby into a successful business. But I know how hard it is to get it up and running which is why I want to help other crafters to make the best of their own niche and avoid certain pitfalls.”
It all started for Nichola back in 2012.
“I was a stay at home mum for 12 years, and I had a hobby making handmade cards for family and friends,” she explains. “When my youngest was about to start nursery in around 2012 I had a website built and began selling other people’s crafts as my first business My Little Loves.
“I really enjoyed doing it but felt really envious – I was selling all these beautiful crafts but not making my own. At that time my husband had a business selling second-hand engraving machines and he said why don’t you have a play with one of the machines to make your own?
“I did a basic sign, put it on Facebook and sold it within 10 minutes. I started to work part time getting to know the machine and working on designs and finding somewhere I could buy the wood pre-cut and painted and then I could engrave onto it. I put it on the website and they were really popular. I used to wrap the orders up on the playroom floor when the children were in bed. It literally was a kitchen table business that has grown and grown to what we are today.”
By the time all the children were at school in 2013, Nichola decided to invest more time and money into the business – and A Beautiful Sign was born.
She says: “We were still very small at the time and weren’t making a lot of money from it. At that point I couldn’t afford a premises, but my husband had a little workshop in Romiley and I set myself up in a tiny corner during school hours. I attended craft fairs and school fairs getting my name out there and meeting local customers. I was only playing at it then, it was still more of a hobby.”
Nichola’s first year’s turnover as a sole trader was £18,000. To push the business to the next stage, the family decided in 2015 to take a stand at a national trade fair.
“The costs were really high but we decided to take a chance to get our products out there,” Nichola says. “But the night before the show started as we were setting up, I got an email to say that my supplier would not be making wood anymore from that point. We were taking orders but had no wood, that was the low point of it all, I was mortified.
“After that we decided to buy the wooden shapes in and individually paint them ourselves one by one, we took a member of staff on at that point but we were still very small.”
By Christmas 2016 they had moved to much larger premises in Stockport with seven staff, but the process was still too long and costly, with Nichola finding most of the profits were immediately spent on wages, postal costs and materials.
“After Christmas that year I knew I couldn’t go on like this so my husband came into the business, he had previously worked as a logistics manager so he took over the day-to-day running of the business and together we made big changes,” Nichola says.
“It also gave me more time to do what I do best which is designing our products and running our social media which now has a following of over 120k.”
In 2017 the couple received an inheritance of £25,000 which they decided to invest in two more laser machines and a router machine to cut the wood, while transforming an office into a spray room which immediately sped up the whole process. It would be a step that would ‘transform the business’.
In 2018 they became a limited company, and in 2020 eldest daughter Macie joined the business as a director.
Nichola says: “We are all directors in the business and while she’s only 20, she brings a whole new dimension to the brand, she’s practically running it! The money we have made we have invested back into the business with more machines and spray equipment.”
When lockdown hit in March 2020, the Holtbys switched to working entirely from home – in a workshop in their back garden.
Nichola says: “The impact of Covid has been huge on our business. By April 2020, we were purely working at home because we couldn’t have any staff during that first lockdown. That’s when we first set up at home. The four of us, including our 18-year-old daughter Evie, did lockdown in our garden on our own.
“We made a conscious decision to creatively adapt to the conditions and I designed lockdown signs. I wrote a poem to send to grandparents from grandchildren to say how much they were missing them and a general poem about lockdown on how it won’t break us. It just went mad.
“It really seemed to touch people what I was writing.
“I remember one day we had a wall of orders against my lounge wall. We were getting 300 orders a day, it just didn’t stop. We seemed to really tap into something.”
But the success came with a downside – for Nichola discovered companies in America and China were ripping off her poems to print onto gifts.
Nichola says: “We actually hired a legal team because it got that bad with people ripping off the poems and designs.”
A Beautiful Sign now sells through Etsy (which are often the site’s bestsellers) as well as through their own website.
Nichola says: “We’ve had a really successful year. I don’t think there’s any doubt that by next year the business will be well worth over a million.”
Mindful of social distancing, the company now has two workshops, one in Romiley that Macie runs with six members of staff and the second workshop at home where Nichola and Sean are now mostly based.
Nichola says: “Even though there’s quite a team of us now, I’m still the only product designer, to keep the business to its grassroots .
“We’ve just invested in a new state-of-the-art website, and I’ve been busy creating the platform to help other crafters to turn their hobby into a business, @buildingacreativebusiness.”
Nichola’s top tips on turning a hobby into a business
Find a niche – and research all your costs
Social media is the most important tool you can have when starting a business. I invested in Facebook and Instagram advertising from the start.
Get an accountant! We only did this in 2018 because before then I thought we could do it on our own, but getting an accountant was lifechanging.
Copyright designs – we learnt this the hard way!
Follow Nichola’s business building tips on Instagram @buildingacreativebusiness, and her company @abeautifulsign
“We were getting 300 orders a day – it just didn’t stop”