Raise a glass to the new economy
Julian Dobson · Policy Press eBooks · 2015
Sitting in the stripped-out hollow of an old-fashioned department store in Ripon, Anthony Blackburn was at his wits’ end. Philip Hall, the store he had taken over in the North Yorkshire town seven years earlier, had failed after 62 years of trading, with debts of more than £400,000. ‘You think about its former glory in the sixties and seventies, and I was sat there in the shell of a building thinking, it’s failed, what can I do? We had made 13 people redundant. In a local community that’s a big story as well, so every time you walk onto the high street someone’s looking at you thinking, “That’s the guy whose business has failed.” ‘It put my marriage under a lot of pressure, not least because I’d invested quite a lot of personal money. We ended up having to sell our house, so we were in a very, very low position. You do consider whether or not you can carry on because you feel you’ve let so many people down.’ (interview with the author) The story of those dark days of mid-2012 will be familiar to many retailers whose businesses have gone belly-up in recent years. It is one that will be repeated, too, as others collapse under the weight of historic debts and business models that no longer work. But this was the beginning of Anthony Blackburn’s journey, not the end. New stories are emerging of business models that are linking creators and consumers, and online and face-to-face businesses, in innovative and collaborative ways.