About this episode

Leslie Docherty and Gillian Frew joined Stuart Clark and Yvonne Webb on Glasgow Business Stories to talk about twenty-one years of running Fat Buddha Store — now the last remaining independent clothing store in Glasgow city centre.

They are brother and sister, born within a year of each other, and for four days a year they are the same age. Gillian spent 27 years in Police Scotland before joining the business full time; Leslie has been in it from the start. The conversation covers what has changed across two decades, why the shop still matters when 70% of the business is online, and what they have learned about suppliers, staff and stock along the way.

In this episode

  • 0:43 — Opening a lifestyle store in Glasgow before lifestyle stores existed, and finding out why nobody had done it before
  • 1:21 — Baking a cake: why niche brands need core brands alongside them to pay the bills
  • 2:00 — Where the idea came from — working at Flip, and the Edinburgh book shops Glasgow didn't have
  • 2:48 — "You'd only do an hour a month": Gillian investing while still serving in the police
  • 3:20 — Doing the wages six days after giving birth, with a Sage disc and a newborn
  • 4:22 — Irish twins, and what it's actually like working with your sibling
  • 4:53 — Swapping roles after Gillian retired, and why it was the best thing that happened to the business
  • 7:41 — Supplier relationships, extended payment terms, and why suppliers hate silence
  • 9:44 — If 70% is online, why keep a shop? Because the brands want bricks and mortar
  • 10:48 — How the store is what got Barbour on board
  • 11:29 — Storing tourist luggage at £3.50 a bag: 100% margin and a footfall driver
  • 13:05 — The James Watt Street warehouse, and why not owning one has been a blessing
  • 14:57 — Closing on Boxing Day and 2 January for the first time in twenty years
  • 15:22 — The Christmas Eve the courier didn't collect, and the emails that followed
  • 17:41 — How the customer has grown up, and what that did to Boxing Day trade
  • 19:35 — Buying nine to ten months ahead, and why gifts and paint work differently to clothing
  • 20:26 — Seventeen years of the same spray paint colours: it never goes out of fashion because it was never in fashion
  • 22:07 — Upcycling, lockdown, and the year paint was 95% of orders
  • 23:14 — Why paint customers come back and jacket customers don't
  • 24:34 — Selling to councils, Glasgow's mural artists, film sets and chalk spray
  • 28:43 — What happens when your biggest supplier opens their own shop down the road
  • 30:40 — Moving from Visualsoft to Shopify, and unifying the shop till with the website
  • 32:24 — Fewer emails, better targeted: nobody minds a voucher, everybody minds a newsletter
  • 33:29 — Paying the real Living Wage, growing up in Drumchapel, and why some staff resisted it
  • 35:51 — What you get to do in a small business that you never get to do at a big one
  • 36:53 — Living hours, and why they have never once sent someone home early
  • 38:10 — Two different definitions of success, and why the partnership works

Brands mentioned

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Timestamps refer to the video above.

Introductions (0:24)

Host: Gillian, Leslie, thank you for coming on Glasgow Business Stories. Nice to have you here. Let's start with you just telling us who you are and what you do.

Gillian: My name is Gillian Frew. I'm the Managing Director at Fat Buddha Store.

Leslie: I'm Leslie Docherty. I do mostly ecommerce at Fat Buddha Store.

Starting the shop (0:43)

Host: Tell us a bit about Fat Buddha Store, then.

Leslie: We started 20, 21 years ago — 21, yeah. Thinking that Glasgow needed a store that sold a mixture of things: toys, books, clothing, footwear, things that were quite interesting. Because at that point there weren't really many. We were a lifestyle store 20 years ago, before lifestyle stores kind of came about, and we opened it in Glasgow thinking it would be quite easy because no one else had done it before.

And sometimes you maybe realise the reason no one's done it before is because it's not a great business. But we made our mistakes and we evolved. We realised that selling cool niche brands is fine, but alongside the cool niche brands you maybe need more monster brands — brands like Nike, Carhartt, Patagonia, Fjällräven.

Once we realised that, it's like baking a cake. You need some core ones that pay all the bills, and then around that core you've got a set of nice interesting brands that make your shop cool and give the customers a reason to come back. We've been online now almost since we started, maybe 18 years, and online is maybe about 70% of what we do.

Where the idea came from (2:00)

Host: Where did the idea come from? What was the thing you couldn't buy that made you think this is what Glasgow needs?

Leslie: I used to work in a store most people in Glasgow remember called Flip. It was clothing retail, but we had a shop in Edinburgh, and every time I went to Edinburgh there were a couple of cool shops in the Grassmarket that sold books. I used to come back having spent a hundred pounds on design books and logo books, thinking there's nobody in Glasgow doing it.

I remember talking to one of the guys in the book shop in Edinburgh and saying, why don't you open in Glasgow? And he said Glasgow people just wouldn't get it, not cultured enough. And we were thinking, we could do stuff like that. So when we first started, that's why we had cool clothing and a mixture of design books and art supplies and bags and hats. Quite a mixture. But thinking that no one else had done it before was probably the biggest one.

Getting involved while still in the police (2:48)

Gillian: I always remember you saying to me, I've got a great idea for a shop — do you want to put some money into the business? You wouldn't need to do very much. You've done accounts at school, so you'll be able to maybe help with the accounts.

At that time I was in the police, in the city centre. I was just like, all right, how much money do you want? And he's like, maybe can you give me X amount. Our dad gave us some money as well. And he's like, you'd only maybe do an hour a month, just help with payroll, do the accounts, and so on.

One of the stories I always remember: before cloud-based accountancy systems, it was a disc with Sage on it, and our bookkeeper would have the disc. I was pregnant with my son, and four days after he was born — I was in hospital for five days — it was day six and I had to go and do the wages and meet the bookkeeper. So I've got this newborn baby and the Sage disc.

So much for one hour per week. I never got any maternity leave, because I'm the one that does all the governance, HMRC, all the payroll sort of stuff. I couldn't take a year off, because if I took a year off, who does all that? So it's gone from an hour a month to, recently over Christmas, seven days a week, 16-hour shifts. But when you're in your own business, that's what you need to do during Christmas. There are down times, obviously, when it isn't so busy and you can take a step back.

Brother and sister (4:22)

Host: We should just say, for people — you are brother and sister. So there's a bigger relationship there than business partners purely.

Gillian: Yes. We're called Irish twins — siblings born within one year of each other. So we're the same age for four days of the year. He's the older brother, I'm the younger sister, just in case anyone's in any doubt.

Swapping roles (4:53)

Leslie: I'm day-to-day in the trenches. Three years ago, when Gillian retired from the police, she became more involved rather than just doing things at weekends and evenings. She came on board four days a week initially.

Gillian: I said to Leslie, what title do I have? He says, I quite fancy Financial Director. Because obviously you think you're going to get a gold card and a nice car. He's like, no, you become Managing Director. And I was like, all right, okay. And since then — yep, I've still to get my gold card and I've still to get my fancy car.

Leslie: When Gillian retired, we kind of swapped roles. I maybe don't enjoy the staffing element. I don't enjoy disciplining staff. Gillian's quite firm. So we almost switched roles, where I was more in charge previously, and Gillian now does that and I can focus on what I enjoy. I can focus on online, on growing that. I don't have the distraction of all the other parts of the business, which Gillian enjoys.

Since Gillian retired it's probably been the best thing that's happened, because it's allowed us both to do the job we enjoy. Previously I was doing the job I didn't enjoy — all the bits of the business that are not fun. So I managed to pass all that non-fun stuff over, and my job now is fun. It's busy, but it's things I have an interest in. Gillian's job requires structure. Nobody gives me a bit of paper, because I will lose it. Gillian deals with all that now.

Gillian: This is a good thing about a brother and sister relationship. When I go into work I know when he's maybe had a bad day. Sometimes you just go up and give your brother a big hug and say I love you. It's simple things, and he can do that to me too. That's what a brother and sister relationship is all about. But I know I can kick his butt, and he can kick mine. Sometimes you need to have a shouting match. Sometimes you don't. I was on holiday in March and I sent him an email from my personal address, and you took it on board, didn't you? Sometimes you need to know the brevity of things before you take action.

Suppliers hate silence (7:41)

Gillian: The job I do now, I love talking to the suppliers. You need to build a relationship with them, because when you're in business and things go tough, you need a person you can contact. Say your cash flow is a bit tight and you're looking for extended payment terms. If you have that rapport, you can phone them up and say, we're having a bit of a tough time just now, can we get extended payment terms? If you weren't doing that, that could be the reason your business folds. So it's really important to speak to people, and to treat people how you'd like to be treated.

Leslie: One of the things suppliers hate is silence. They think you might have problems. You won't answer your phone, you won't answer your email, they don't know what's going on, they get very nervous. What a supplier wants to hear is: we are having slight problems, we need an extra 90 days to pay. They know they're getting paid in 90 days, as opposed to maybe not getting paid at all.

Any time you've got a problem, a good supplier will say, you should have told us earlier and we could have helped. Suppliers want relationships, because once you go, who else do they sell 50,000 of stock a year to? So it's in their interest for you to keep going. If they keep you supplied now, in three years' time you've doubled your order from 50,000 to 100,000, and then up to 200,000.

The supplier doesn't have to sell to you, and you don't have to buy from a supplier. You do it because you like it, because you got product at a price you want to buy, and he likes your retail store so he wants to sell to you, and you want to buy his product because the customer likes it. No one has to do it. I think sometimes people forget it's a relationship.

Why keep a shop? (9:44)

Host: How important is the retail store to that? You're saying 70% is online. If you've not got the bricks and mortar store, how do you still get people through the door?

Leslie: We have certain brands that drive footfall into the store. A customer will go online, see a Stubble & Co bag, really like it, and think it looks lovely but it's £120, I'd need to touch it first. They go to the store locator — oh, Fat Buddha in town, you sell it — and then they come into the shop to look at it. Once they're in, they go, this is a cool shop, I didn't realise you sold Patagonia, Fjällräven, Red Wing, Deus. I didn't realise you did Peanuts gifts. So the brands you sell online can also drive people into store.

Then the question we get asked is: if you do 70% online, why do you have a shop? Why don't you get rid of it? The reason you don't is that the brands don't want to sell to online-only retailers. The brands want bricks and mortar. We've got quite a few brands who will only stock retailers who have a physical store.

We recently managed to get Barbour to come on board. The reason we got Barbour isn't because we're 70% online. It's because we've got a really nice store in the centre of Glasgow. They want footfall. They want the people of Glasgow walking around to see Barbour in a nice environment, sitting alongside Carhartt, alongside Edwin, alongside Nudie. So the store serves the purpose of letting us get the brands in store to sell 70% online. You need both, and both work well together. The website has volume. The store has the credibility to get brands to sell that volume online.

Tourist luggage (11:29)

Leslie: One thing we did last year — we now take tourist luggage into the shop, because we've got capacity downstairs. That's another good driver of footfall. Tourists might just walk past us not knowing who we are, but because we take luggage, they'll come in, have a browse round, they might buy something. They might tell their friends: that's a really cool shop. And then you've got the second capture when they come back to retrieve their luggage. They might not have purchased at the beginning, but later on they think, oh, I remember seeing that. For giftware it's great.

Gillian: It's thinking outside the box. When we started saying to our staff we're going to take in luggage, they looked at us like, really, why would you want to do that? But once they realised what it does for footfall, they went, that's a really good idea. And for every suitcase you take in, you get £3.50.

Leslie: It's the only thing we do that's like money for nothing. 100% margin. You store a suitcase, the person comes in at 10, you store it until 4. And generally there might be three or four people and they've got two bags each. The main thing is you get a text to say these people are going to drop a bag off at 10. Oh, hi, how are you? And the more conversation you can have with a customer when they come in, you generally find that anyone who's got a positive thing to say about you will say it online.

The warehouse (13:05)

Host: Where's the warehouse for the online orders? Is that in Glasgow as well?

Leslie: It depends how fast you walk — nine to ten minutes from the shop. Any orders get transported by foot from James Watt Street, where our premises are. It's an old tobacco warehouse built in 18-something or other. We've got a couple of storage units in there and a couple of offices. We've been there about nine years.

At various points along the way we have considered having our own warehouse, and we are so glad we've never done it. The storage place we've got is fabulous, the people who work there are great. We can take another 2,000 square feet tomorrow, or hand back 2,000 square feet tomorrow. So we don't have the problem where the business grows and we're stuck with a smaller warehouse, or in five years' time we're trying to exit a warehouse and do dilapidations.

We've also got the benefit that the warehouse closes at 6 every day. He'd be in there at 12 or 2 in the morning if he could. At Christmas the staff said to both of us, you should have a set of keys for this place, because you're in here more than anyone. So the downside is it shuts at 6. The upside is it shuts at 6. You need to go home. It's a set of guardrails.

Closing over Christmas (14:57)

Leslie: At Christmas and New Year, for the first time ever last year, we closed on Boxing Day and closed on the 2nd of January. First time in 20 years. It was nice to give the staff a wee reward — the ones working in the warehouse and the ones in the shop could do things with their families. And one of the drivers was that the warehouse was shut anyway.

Gillian: Me and him had two days off after Christmas, because I had PTSD after Christmas. I really did. I came away and I was actually shaking. On Christmas Eve — people don't realise customer expectations — I came in and realised the courier had not picked up customer orders from the day before, and I burst into tears. I was like, I have now ruined people's Christmases. And I got plenty of emails from customers to say, you have ruined my Christmas.

It's not that the customer should maybe have ordered a few days before. I take things really on board. I think I've got a thick skin, but sometimes I've not got a thick skin, because I take things to heart. And that's why I love the business so much. On Christmas Eve, seeing that bag full of parcels, thinking I've ruined people's Christmases — that nearly killed me. I phoned them and they said, oh, we'll pick them up four days later. But four days later is four days after Christmas. It was awful.

Taking the 1st and 2nd off as well was really good, it reset you a wee bit. And the staff were really thankful.

The customer has grown up (17:41)

Leslie: One of the things I'd say about Christmas is that we've evolved over the years, and our customer now is different from 10 or 15 years ago. Our customer has grown up. Ten years ago our customer was maybe a 16, 17, 18-year-old and we sold a lot of trainers. Boxing Day, they had all their money and they went into town to spend it.

Now our customer is late 20s, 30s, a guy in his 40s. They don't go to town on Boxing Day. They're spending time with family. They'll come to town on the 27th and 28th. So we can afford to close. We were open on Boxing Day out of habit. It's really hard to look at the figures and go, we did two grand last Boxing Day — but if you just close, everyone's happy, and that two grand you actually made on the 27th anyway.

Buying and stock (19:35)

Host: Help me understand how you manage the inventory. From an online perspective, how do you know how much to have of a particular product, sizing, returns?

Gillian: With the clothing brands, you buy everything. We are now doing appointments for the stuff we're going to buy for next winter. You order it pretty much nine or ten months in advance.

Leslie: For context, we're sitting here in May, ordering for next winter. We've just started receiving deliveries for this winter, two weeks ago. So we've not even finished summer and we've started receiving our winter deliveries, and at the same time we need to start ordering for the winter after.

That's generally clothing and footwear. The spray paint we sell and the gifts are all stock items. You phone up on a Monday and it arrives on a Wednesday. Because we sell a range of products, it's advantageous — if you run out of a gift towards Christmas, just order more and it comes Wednesday. Whereas with clothing, once it's gone, it's gone. With fashion, you sell a t-shirt out and the next season it's a slightly different t-shirt. Whereas with Peanuts mugs, you'll be selling the same mug for 10 years.

Spray paint (20:26)

Leslie: We sell spray paint. It's maybe about 15% of what we do. We've been selling the same spray paint colours for 17 years. It never goes out of stock, it never goes out of fashion, because it's never in fashion. All you have to do is rotate the stock so you're selling the older paint first. Paint has a ten-year shelf life.

It's one of the silent things we do that people don't know about, but it's probably the best thing we do, because there is no newness. You don't have to sell product out on sale. As long as you're carrying all the colours, you will always be the place people want to go.

It's not so much graffiti, it's more art-based. Our customers are upcycling kitchens, bicycles, plant pots. Covid was when paint really took off for us, because everyone was at home with nothing to do and everyone had bicycles. Everyone wanted to spray their bicycle, everyone wanted to do garden furniture. During Covid, paint was probably 95% of the orders we were doing.

Gillian: And that saved us, didn't it? Having spray paint really did save our life. We were also the only place who could ship same-day and next-day, because everyone was distancing, and it was me and my brother working in there. There's no social distancing, because we're a family. So we were the only place where you could order paint up until half past and get it the following day. We were maybe doing 200 orders a day just of spray paint.

But look at the margin. You're selling a jacket at £400 and you're selling a can of spray paint at £5.95. It still costs the same amount of time to pick and pack. So although we were doing lots and lots of orders, profitability was quite different during Covid.

Why paint customers come back (23:14)

Leslie: The good thing about paint is you buy cans to do a project, you run out of paint, you buy more paint. So paint is probably the thing where we've got the highest rate of returning customers.

What you'll find is a customer will buy a jacket. They'll go online, put in "Carhartt Michigan jacket", who's the cheapest, who's got a discount code, and buy from that person. And then a month later, if you ask them where they bought their jacket, they have no recollection. People think customers are loyal — you're probably quite silly if you think customers are loyal. If one person's selling a product at £180 and somebody else at £200, where's the customer going to go? He's not going to pay £20 more because he likes you.

Whereas the customer who buys paint does a bit of research on a project. They go online, look at videos, research the paint brands. Once they've done that initial work and bought it once, and the paint arrived the following day, next time they open the colour chart and it's got the wee Fat Buddha sticker on it saying where they bought it — they buy from you again. They accept that they did all the work last time to figure out the best place to buy. So that's one of the few things we do where we have constant repeat business.

Councils, murals and film sets (24:34)

Gillian: We also sell to councils. There are quite a lot of graffiti artists in Glasgow — Rogue-One, Smug. Rogue is one of our best spray paint customers. He's done loads on the Glasgow Mural Trail. We also sell to Warner Bros down south, and Glasgow's been used for a lot of film sets, so we get people coming in buying spray paint for film sets. It's good when you look at the invoice and think, that's going to Warner Bros, I wonder what film that's going to be in.

Leslie: We sold 24 cans of chalk spray paint to a police force last week. Chalk spray is temporary — if you're doing an art gallery, you can put a stencil on the ground and spray it, and it says "this way", and then the rain comes and the chalk washes away.

That's the good thing about when fashion is slower. We've got a wider range of products that keeps us going. If we were only a clothing store it would be really boring. Having a mix of products and customers — we do gifts, men's grooming, spray paint, books. It's not just a men's shop. You can go in as a woman and buy things as well.

Cash flow and the product mix (26:09)

Host: From a cash flow perspective, most retail is that surge and then it drops off a cliff.

Leslie: When fashion slows down, paint carries on. Paint picks up from March all the way through to September — in the middle of summer when it's hot, people are outside doing projects in the garden. At Christmas nobody buys paint, everyone's thinking of gifts. So we've got gifts. Having the wider range helps you benefit from the peaks and troughs. But a wider range of product is also more cash intensive, because you've got to carry stock of more brands and more products. So it's beneficial on that basis, but cash flow, it really hurts.

How the mix evolved (27:11)

Leslie: A lot of the brands we had in the beginning were graffiti guys who had t-shirt brands, so we'd have some of their t-shirts and also some art and design books, and then spray paint. You figure out that the person who's interested in art and design is a bit more educated — they've got more interest in design books, logo books — and they're also a bit more arts and crafty. That's where the spray paint came in.

They also appreciated some of the nicer brands. If you buy a pair of Red Wing boots they'll last you a lifetime, you can hand them down to your kids. Yes, they're expensive, but you're paying once. So it's realising that your customer who likes nicer things is also more likely to want design books on old American logos. And if they're interested in those, they might be interested in sketching. It's trying to figure out what else a customer would like, and what makes us more unique.

If we're selling Barbour and Frasers are selling Barbour, why would someone come to us? Because you can also get pens, mugs, grooming products.

When your supplier opens a shop (28:43)

Leslie: One of our biggest suppliers, Carhartt, are opening a huge shop in Glasgow. It's been delayed till next year. So why would a customer come to us to buy Carhartt when there's a Carhartt shop? Because not only can you buy Carhartt from us, you can buy Dickies, you can buy Fjällräven, you can buy Red Wing boots, you can buy Novesta trainers. Whereas when you go to a Carhartt store, you can only buy Carhartt.

So we need to accept that the multiple of brands we do is what gets customers in the door. Having more interesting product is what keeps customers coming back. You're trying to get on people's shopping list. When people come into town, there are certain stores you always go into. Once your customer stops coming in and you're off that shopping list, it's really hard to get them back. So you need to keep interesting product and keep trying to reinvent what you do.

Moving to Shopify (30:40)

Gillian: We've now moved to Shopify. We had a website through Visualsoft and we now have a Shopify website. What drove that was giving the customer a better experience. Before, if you bought a gift voucher in the shop you couldn't use it online. Now it's seamless. If you buy a gift voucher online, you can use it in store.

When a customer comes in and you put their details into the till, it will tell you how many previous orders they've had. Especially if you're new and don't really know the customer — some of the Saturday staff might not know that's one of our long-standing customers. Now, using Shopify, you can find that out quite quickly.

Leslie: One of the advantages is we've got Shopify POS — the Shopify till and the Shopify back end share the same merchant number. What that means is: if you buy something online and bring it back, previously the shop staff couldn't refund you, because you can't refund a card you've never taken money from. So the staff would have to send the item back to the warehouse, we'd check it, we'd do the refund there, and that takes a couple of days. Whereas now a customer can buy something online, come into store, return it and get a refund on the spot. From a customer point of view, so many benefits. And now, rather than customers having an online account and an in-store account, we've got customers with just one account.

Email that people actually want (32:24)

Leslie: Everything needs to be super targeted. No customer is interested in a general email about what your new products are. If you've bought a Carhartt t-shirt and you get an email about Carhartt, you'll engage with it. If you get an email saying we've received Peanuts mugs — why are you sending them that?

No one minds when Domino's sends them a two-for-one voucher. But no one's really interested in "we've got a new flavour of pizza". So there needs to be something in it for the customer. If a customer buys Carhartt and you send them an email about the Carhartt history, or a Carhartt evening you're launching, they're really interested. Less emails, but more targeted emails.

Gillian: If you're buying Red Wing boots, you want an email the next month to say we do insoles, we do laces, we do boot creams to maintain your boots. It's about the customer journey, and knowing where we can dip in and out of it.

The Living Wage (33:29)

Host: How important is it to have the right people on board?

Gillian: We pay the Living Wage. We started paying it two and a half years ago, and we won the Newcomer Award at the Living Wage Awards the very first year we implemented it.

Why did we do it? Me and Leslie were brought up in schemes in Drumchapel. We know what poverty is. When you employ someone and they tell you they're skint — if I say I'm skint, that means I don't have 20p in my purse, but I can go and use a credit card, I can use an overdraft. When your staff tell you they're skint, you don't know what goes on behind closed doors. You don't know how they can afford to get a bus into work, whether they're able to feed their family, whether they're going to food banks.

So paying the Living Wage is a way of rewarding your staff. For me personally, and Leslie's the same, I'd rather give it to my staff than give it to the taxman. I'd rather see lower profits if we're going to reward our staff, because the staff make the business. If you get the right staff, that'll increase footfall and increase your profits.

I'm also Co-Chair of Make Glasgow Region a Living Wage City. That's about trying to get other businesses on board to pay the Living Wage, because it's really important that staff are looked after.

Leslie: We had wanted to do the Living Wage maybe three years before we actually did it. The reason we didn't do it as quickly — and this is incredible — is that some of the staff were more against it than us.

Why would staff be against it? Because there's a seniority. Staff who've been there longer get paid a bit more. And then as soon as you do it, everyone's getting paid almost the same as them. So they're like, well, I've been here five, six years, how come he's getting paid the same as me? We looked at it once or twice and it's adding 10% onto your payroll.

Then it came to a point where we realised we need to give staff a reason to stay, and we need to get better at what we do. And we just took the plunge. Since we've done the Living Wage it's probably the best thing we've done.

Growing people in a small business (35:51)

Leslie: It also makes you more aware that it's not just paying a wage. It's creating an environment where staff can grow, and where staff can get other jobs to do. All our staff now — the guys in the store do socials. They maybe came from somewhere like JD Sports where their role was so limited. JD will have a social media department, a buying department. Whereas now the guys who run the shop can do the buying for the shop, they can do the videos, they can do the social, they can do rotas, they can do stock reordering.

When you work for one of the bigger guys you don't get to do any of that. You're a manager at JD and you're very good at managing what's in front of you. But you go and work independent and you get to do everything — editing, Canva, flyers for your shop. Somebody says, are you interested in that? Yeah, I'd love to design the A-board outside and do the A-board every week. Great. When you work for someone small, you get to do all these things.

Living hours (36:53)

Leslie: The next thing we're looking at is living hours, where we guarantee staff a minimum of 16 hours, and you get your rota a month in advance. We've never cancelled a shift. If it's quiet today, we have never in 20 years said to someone, it's quiet, you should go home.

What we will say is, it's quite quiet today, do you want to go? And some will say, I'd love to, I've got an exam — a lot of our staff are students — or I'm going out tonight, I'd love to finish at 4. But we have never sent a member of staff home because it's quiet. We've got so many other jobs we can do. It's really unfair. You send someone home early and they've lost two hours' pay. You might think it's not a lot, but when you're skint, two hours' pay is a lot of money. That's your bus fare for a week.

Host: I suppose now you've got things like social media, so if it's quiet you can plan the next few weeks of posts.

Leslie: Have a list of quiet-day jobs. Those jobs you can never do because you don't have time — pulling the boxes out, cleaning behind them, dusting. Do those when it's quiet, because you won't be able to in November and December.

Guiding principles (38:10)

Host: The last question we always ask before we finish is: what's your guiding principle in business?

Leslie: This is what makes us different. Success for me is having a business which is organised, more efficient, more streamlined, where everything runs smoother, where staff are happier, where we've got a better product. Gillian's success is financial. I'm the person who sees things, who does all the buying — I'm like a butterfly, I see things and go, oh, what's that? I'm easily distracted. Whereas Gillian is more focused, more driven, more financially led, more disciplined. So for me it's having a better product and a better store. For Gillian it's having a business that's more successful.

Gillian: Definitely financials for me. We've been going 20 years. We are now, I think, Glasgow city centre's only independent clothing store. Blitz shut down — was that eight weeks ago? So there is no one left in Glasgow.

Why have we been going for 20 years? Because we both know each other. You go into work and, as I say, you give him a cuddle. Working with your brother can be hard work, but I don't see it as hard work. It's just continuing on the way we've always been. It's having the honesty, when there's something you're not happy about, to just say it. And having the ability to be honest with each other, and knowing that if you do fall out, you come in the next day and say, hey, how are you feeling today? I had a good sleep.

Host: That sounds like a great partnership. Well done on your success so far, and here's to another 20 years.