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Little Lies – a rock ‘n roll inspired online boutique has bucked the pandemic trend – announcing a major expansion and recruitment drive despite Covid-19 hitting the High Street hard.
The company was founded in 2015 from the owners bedroom before setting up shop in Dundee city centre three years later as the brand expanded.
Just five years after its inception the retailer – whose range includes Boho inspired clothing, homeware and a vast range of band tees – have amassed almost 125,000 social media followers and dedicated customers around the globe.
When Covid-19 hit they feared their long standing expansion plans could be scuppered – but a huge upturn in sales instead followed, allowing the brand to accelerate their growth. Now the firm have quadrupled their workforce – creating nine new jobs at their newly opened HQ in Glencarse, Perthshire – and invested over £70,000 in more than doubling the size of their premises.
Little Lies founder Jade Robertson said the firm had planned to move away from their Dundee city centre location to a new facility to cater for their burgeoning online presence.
Those plans had to be accelarated after a huge sales spike in the spring – with a new unit in Glencarse, on the A90 between Perth and Dundee identified and transformed into offices, creative space and fulfilment centre for orders flying in from customers as far afield as Germany, Australia, the US and the middle east.
The firm’s expansion has allowed them to expand the company’s payroll from three to 12 – with more recruits soon to come on board.
They also plan to hire further creative staff in the coming months to bolster their online content and design teams – providing a welcome boost to creative industries hit hard by the pandemic.
Jade, 31, from Perth, said: “Like everyone in retail we were really worried when lockdown hit – there was a noticable drop in sales for a week or two and our city centre store was obviously closed.
“We refocussed and redoubled our online efforts – which was how we started and where most of our customers are anyway – and saw a huge uptick in sales as we got into April and May and right through the summer.
“That has allowed us to speed up our expansion plans – closing the city centre store and focussing all our efforts on our online boutique.
“We have customers around the world – on any given day we are shipping to North America, Europe, Asia as well as within the UK.
“And that customer base seems to be growing and staying loyal, so we need to expand to cater to them.
“We’ve brought in nine new staff so far to cope with the demand and maintain the high level customer service that we endeavour to provide.
“Our new facility allows us to have our fulfilment team, office staff and creative staff all in one place.
“We’ll be bringing in further creative staff over the coming months – we pride ourselves on the quality of content we create for our social media channels and are moving in to designing more of our own clothing and homeware lines in house.
“That will create jobs in the creative industry in this area – a sector that has been hit harder than even retail during the pandemic.
“We’re delighted to be able to invest in the local area – it is where I am from, it is where our business started and has grown and it is great to give something back to the community by creating jobs here.”
More information on Little Lies Rock n’ Roll can be found here little-lies.com
