Partner Article

Redundancy and beyond

Following redundancy in October, two local entrepreneurs have come up with a new idea to help people renovate their period homes.

The gap was identified by businesswoman, Christine Pearce, who has spent years renovating her Edwardian home and was frustrated by the difficulty in sourcing suitable materials and building companies sympathetic to the needs of her home. Together with her business partner, Paula Smith, they are in the process of setting up Restoration & Beyond, an online department store for period homes which will be launched in the summer.

The website will provide everything from lime mortar to art along with craftspeople and specialist builders with the skills to restore homes to their former glory.

Paula Smith said: “We’ve had fantastic support from our Business Link Advisor and managed to secure funding from NEEIC. What’s also encouraging is that we have received advice and financial help from Be-Enterprising and Hartlepool’s Women’s Development Fund.

“We’ve had a great response to our home owners’ online survey with 96% of all respondents, so far, saying they would use the site to purchase goods and services for their homes and nobody has abandoned their plans due to the recession.”

Christine Pearce added: “We are now at the point where we need to gather information from suppliers of goods and services to this market, in order to fine tune our offering. We are hoping that your readers may help us in this task by filling out our short survey on our temporary website at www.restorationandbeyond.co.uk by 31 March. There are links to our surveys for service providers, suppliers of goods and home owners.

“We aim to provide a low cost but very effective marketing platform for SME’s to increase their online presence and secure them more sales.

“In the current economic climate, if small companies can unite to help each other and by pooling resources, then together we may have a better chance of survival. The knock on effect will be to bring positive publicity to the North East in a sector that we currently have little presence.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .