We caught up with Fabulous Female Founder of The Barn Little London and The Rare Brand Market, Emma Schwarz.
Founder Emma is a HUGE FOODIE, Great Taste Judge and Chair of Slow Food Sussex https://www.slowfood.org.uk. Emma has personally curated the product range for her newest venture The Barn Little London website. The suppliers she has curated are a very RARE selection, 75% of the range of products comes from a 30 mile radius of Chichester home to The Barn Little London.
Emma, I’ve known you for over 20 years and you’re not one to stand still! Tell me a little about yourself and life before The Rare Brand Market?
I've been in retail since I was 16 having worked at Marks & Spencer's as a Saturday girl and then I applied for the young management training program and managed to get in which was quite hard at that particular time given the sheer amount of people that went for it.
I started my career in the west country at 18 as a young management trainee and then when I turned 20, I had my first posting as Assistant Manager at the Tunbridge Wells Marks & Spencer's. From there I went on to one of the big sites in Southampton before managing my own store in Fareham and heading to Baker Street Head Office for a couple of years. I left to get married in 2001 and then I joined a start-up furniture company for seven years until I had Lorenza our first child. I moved south to join Sofa Workshop at their Head Office which gave me more flexibility.
I had a few years off enjoying being a mummy full time and then in 2009 I founded The Rare Brand Market (https://www.rarebrandmarket.co.uk/). I have always been a massive foodie and lover of food and entertaining and marrying Mark being a Jewish guy and all those amazing influences of travel and the Jewish faith have really really expanded my food tastes.
Where did you get the inspiration for such a great idea?
I was the actual consumer. I was the person who had moved out of London and didn't want to just resort to online shopping for nice lifestyle products. In London you get this lovely balance of big brand retail and independent emerging brands because of all the London suburbs. When you come out of London you seem to only get the big brand retail ...so I was the frustrated consumer and thus decided to create The Rare Brand Market based on that really. Plus I love shopping to be interactive, theatrical and face-to-face, retail should also be about people, stories and service too! Shopping should be a sensory pleasurable experience - you can’t get that from click click online!
When and how did you decide to start up The Rare Brand Market?
We had our first event in 2009 at the Pallant House Art Gallery and we actually made it into a real experience where you came to see the Art Gallery and do some amazing shopping at the same time. That’s how we started, and we convinced lots of amazing new brands to set up trade with us so that consumers could shop and it was great for brand awareness for these brands. We did the marketing ourselves because we didn’t have the budget in the beginning for some sort of big launch campaign, so it was very organic and it really took until year five for the Rare Brand Market to be properly established.
I am a massive reader of magazines and blogs as I like to keep at the nerve end of retail and products. It's probably my life experiences that have enabled me to sort of merge the two and then create a business which is fundamentally about good retail but also wonderful shopping experiences.
How did you adapt your business during lockdown?
We are hoping in September with the continual ease of social distancing that we can be advised by the event associations that we can carry on with our Christmas market which is in November on the Goodwood estate but with regards to the other business which is our new food arm which we were meant to open in May and of course we couldn't so we massively had to pivot and we've created an e-commerce site and been trading through drive-through collection of our food and delivery door-to-door and rather than not doing anything
Having run it now for 12 weeks with a fantastic start, better than we could have imagined, the deliveries and the food collection will still be a part of the business moving forward which is brilliant. We had no idea it would be such a success!
The Rare Brand Market will continue to exist as an event only business and will pop up mainly on the Goodwood Estate. Rare Life is the new umbrella brand and will have a website, app and a subscription membership allowing them to keep at the nerve end of rare brands, rare things to buy and experience.
An object that you would never part with
Goodness that's a really difficult one and probably my AGA
An unforgettable place you've travelled to in the past year
India, definitely. We went to an amazing wedding in India last October and now I've now got the bug. It's just a phenomenal place and after that I would say high on the list is New Zealand and then probably the islands off of Stockholm.
What are you dreaming of?
At the moment my dreams are totally obsessed with the eatery that we’re trying to open in September because it’s a dream and even though I love Rare Brand Market and the lifestyle products that we deal with my heart is in food and so I've wanted to own an eatery/food shop for a long long time so currently dreaming of that.
What is the eatery going to be called?
In 6 weeks’ time, we are opening a venue in Chichester called The Barn Little London (www.thebarnlittlelondon.com). It will celebrate slow food, community and wellness. There are two buildings and a huge outside courtyard.
One building is going to feel more like a retail experience and will be called The Barn’s Larder where there will be an artisan bakery, food hall and coffee bean re-fillery.
The other building is the actual barn. Originally it was a working Barn for a successful local Corn Merchant family! On the ground floor there will be an amazing eatery and espresso bar and on the top level we will have many things going on from the pop-up medical wellness clinics, wellness lectures, zoom yoga and meditation. There will also be a cookery school and a Slow Food education hub.
Both venues will be taken over up to 25 times a year to become an evening supper club and several Sundays a month a very cool and relaxed brunch venue.
The rest of the time the opening times will be Wednesday to Saturday for breakfast, brunch and lunch.
75% of what we do is celebrating Slow Food within a 30 mile radius of Chichester, the remaining 25% celebrate Slow Food or Rare Brand’s of food and drink from slightly further afield (but only because I’ve tried and failed to find it locally).
The top floor of the barn is going to be dedicated to wellness including nutrition, counselling, a hybrid of zoom Yoga and Meditation and acupuncture to start with.
Three travel essentials
I always like to take a list of what we’re planning or hoping to do and where we’re going to go. I always take some sort of pre-researched list of where we’re going to eat to avoid anything too touristy. Last but by no means least I like to take just one amazing book because hopefully you are going to slow down and you are going to get chance to read
Favourite website
My favourite website, mmmmm that's a really difficult one I think it might have to be an Instagram’s handle rather than website and that would have to be Serena Crawford www.instagram.com/serenacrawford because she's obsessed with travel and she's obsessed with people and she's obsessed with food and they’re all of my obsessions
A recent ‘find’
The most unbelievably old bakery counter that we're going to put in the new eatery. We found it at a couple of weeks ago.
The last music I downloaded
I think it was a bit of opera actually I think it was a version of Puccini sung by someone young that I'd heard on the radio.
My favourite drink
Coffee
Favourite Food
Ottolenghi style food, so beautiful fusion salads mixed with stunning organic meat.
The beauty staple I'm never without
Aurelia definitely Aurelia and the night-time face oil (https://www.aureliaskincare.com/)
Favourite hotel
Palazzo Terranova as that's where I got married but after that (as it’s now only available for private rental) it would have to be at Ett Hem (https://www.etthem.se/) in Stockholm
What book are you reading now
I am currently reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
What’s next?
Well it's all about the eatery that's opening in September, I’ll let you know all about it so you can update your readers!