Having always had a keen interest in business and a love of gift shops and craft fayres I launched Noah Home & Gifts along with my mum in 2011 – wholly online. At the time, I was working as a Business Manager for a Scottish Bank. Towards the end of 2012, I took a redundancy package and decided to focus full time on the business.
To help gain traction online, we opened a pop-up (on a Retail Merchandising Unit) in Silverburn Shopping Centre in May 2013. Initially, we were on monthly rolling contracts, but before long, we saw the potential of having a permanent physical presence in the mall. In November 2015, we built our own purpose-built kiosk and signed a 5-year lease. We opened our second kiosk in Braehead Shopping Centre, Glasgow, in October 2019.
During this time, our main focus was on the kiosks, so we put developing our website on the back burner. However, in hindsight, this was a mistake, as when Covid hit, we had all our eggs in one basket.
We re-launched online during lockdown and have been using our physical presence in the malls and daily contact with customers to promote our online offering. We encourage our customers to sign up to our newsletter or follow us on social media to keep up to date with new products and more.
Our niche range of gifts includes many of which feature slogans or sentiments, across the main gifting categories. Our range includes Scottish themed gifts - some funny, some stylish - from suppliers based throughout Scotland.
We currently have 19 part-time employees (FTE 5). Having a physical presence all year round allows us to keep them in continued employment.