Greta Holm runs Holm & Holm, a homeware and textiles shop in a small coastal town. She opened it with her sister in 2012, bought her sister out in 2018, and has been running it alone since. We spoke for twenty minutes on a Thursday morning before the shop opened.
Folio: You’ve been doing this for thirteen years. What’s changed most?
Greta: The cost of everything. Rent, stock, the broadband. But also what customers expect from a small shop. When we opened, people were surprised we had a website. Now they’re surprised if your Instagram isn’t updated this week. The expectation is that you’re everywhere, all the time, and you’re doing it alone.
Folio: How do you manage that?
Greta: I don’t, mostly. I made peace a few years ago with the idea that I can’t be a retailer, a photographer, a copywriter, and a social media manager simultaneously. So I chose what I’m good at and I’m very good at it, and I let the other things be mediocre.
Folio: Which things did you let be mediocre?
Greta: Instagram. My newsletter is fine — I write it myself and people tell me they look forward to it — but Instagram I’ve nearly given up on. The algorithm doesn’t reward what I want to put out there, which is thoughtful photographs of beautiful things. It rewards the other stuff.
On the accountant
Folio: You hired an accountant two years ago. You said it changed things?
Greta: It changed everything. I was doing my own accounts for eleven years. Which means I was spending about ten hours a month on something I hate and am not good at, and I was probably making mistakes I didn’t know about.
Hiring an accountant costs me £250 a month. She does my VAT, my accounts, my year-end, all of it. That’s £3,000 a year. But I got back ten hours a month, which is 120 hours a year. I use those hours to buy better stock, to think about the shop, to write the newsletter.
Folio: Do you think you were making mistakes before?
Greta: Almost certainly. Nothing catastrophic — I would have noticed — but I wasn’t claiming everything I could, I wasn’t structuring things optimally, I didn’t fully understand my margins. She showed me in the first meeting that I had been underpricing a whole category of product for two years. That conversation paid for three years of her fees.
On buying from small businesses
Folio: You sell things that people could buy more cheaply elsewhere. How do you communicate the value of buying from you?
Greta: I don’t compete on price. I can’t and I won’t. What I can do is know everything about what I sell. If someone picks up a blanket, I can tell them where the wool came from, who made it, why the weight is what it is. That’s not available on a product page. It’s available from me.
I also think people who shop with us know what they’re doing. They’re making a deliberate choice to support a shop like this instead of a platform. I try to make sure that choice feels good — good packaging, a note with every order, no fuss when something needs to be returned.
Folio: The note. You write those yourself?
Greta: Every one. My handwriting is not particularly good but it doesn’t matter. People keep them. Someone came into the shop last year and showed me a note I’d written her four years ago. She’d kept it because no one does that anymore.
What she’d tell herself at the beginning
“Get an accountant earlier. And stop trying to be on every platform. Pick the one where your customers actually are and do it properly.”
Maren spent eight years running marketing for a regional dental group before starting Folio. She writes mostly about reviews, retention, and the unglamorous bits of getting a small business found.
All articles by Maren →
