Handbag healer Charlotte Staerck
Charlotte StaerCk, 30, co-founded the handbag Clinic — which repairs, buys and sells luxury pre-owned handbags — with husband Ben in 2013. they live in london and Newcastle.
I’VE been obsessed with handbags ever since I was a little girl, growing up in a village just outside Newcastle. I’m not sure why. My mum isn’t interested in them at all.
As soon as I got a Saturday job, age 18, I bought my first branded bag: a cream Luella tote.
When it got covered in dye transferred from my jeans, a colleague told me there was a local company, Furniture Clinic, that did repairs. She gave me the number, but I lost the piece of paper. If I had gone, I’d have met my husband, Ben, two years earlier than I did. When we eventually met at a bar, I learned he had been running the business with his dad since 2004.
By then I was working as a pharmaceutical buyer in local government. But my passion was still luxury handbags. I’d spend ages browsing pre-owned ones and buying and selling so I could have the latest It-bag. I’d work with Ben to restore and add value.
It was amazing what the team could do, from repairing zips and straps to removing stains.
More and more handbags were being sent to Furniture Clinic for restoration. So, I encouraged Ben to officially incorporate Handbag Clinic as its own offshoot in 2013.
We opened our first store on King’s Road in Chelsea in 2015. Restoration was still the heart of the business, but we had so much retail space. This was my lightbulb moment. I suggested that we repaired and sold pre-owned handbags. No one else was combining restoration with resale. I left my career and joined Handbag Clinic as a buyer.
Within our first year we opened another store in Leeds, and we experienced as much as 186 per cent growth in six months.
Today, we operate through four stores and have affiliations with brands including Jimmy Choo and Aspinal of London. Prices for bags start at £15, and our most popular service is the full restoration, from £255. We’ve handled more than £50million worth of bags and our turnover was £1 million last year. It’s eco-friendly too, reducing waste.
During lockdown, we temporarily shut our stores, but online sales increased by 500 per cent year on year. And we have celebrity clients, from Poppy Delevingne to Ronan Keating’s wife Storm (who needed a bag repaired after a flood).
If you didn’t have a clear-out earlier this year, now’s the time!