Photo courtesy of totally-locally.co.uk

What is Totally Locally?

Totally Locally is an award-winning social enterprise and shop local movement. It supports independent retailers with a free branding and marketing campaign for their town. Teams of volunteers use the campaign to promote the value of local shopping, celebrate their high street, create community events, and ultimately lift their local economy.

Totally Locally is more than a shop local campaign, it’s about working together to lift a whole town.

Why do we do it? We love our independent shops and businesses, and realised that the competition from the big multinationals was killing our high streets. Our background is in branding, marketing & business consultancy. We realised that what is missing from our towns is a structured branding and marketing approach (sorry this is sounding a bit corporate but bear with us), something that everyone can get their teeth into.

We’re a very small team, and most of us do this as a sideline to our jobs. We don’t charge, we don’t do advertising, we don’t ask for anything. If you want to give something, great, but that’s not what it’s about. We love what we do. We get excited that we could possibly make a big impact on the towns of the UK by being a bit clever, working with great people who care and playing the big boys at their own game.

Project: Totally Locally Shops

The Totally Locally Shops project began in June 2011 and the first Totally Locally shop opened in July 2012.

The idea behind the shops project was to create a blueprint and framework for people to use to create shops that would use the local supply chains as much as possible, give back to their communities and to improve the local economy both in terms of creating jobs, increasing revenues and keeping the money flowing around local producers and makers.

The project framework and blueprint was funded by local government money.

The Totally Locally team decided to go one step further and actually set out to open a pilot shop within the budget provided. After nearly one years work the very first “Café & Grocery” was opened at Dean Clough in July 2012. It was set up to run as a co-operative with minimal input from the Team, and when all was stable it was to be handed over completely to the group running it, with Totally Locally having no stake in it.

A Co-operative was one of 3 models considered, mainly due to its compatibility with the beliefs and ethics of Totally Locally. However, due to problems concerning leadership and working as a co-op, the original model had to be reconsidered after just 3 months. It was decided to offer the business to any group within the people working there to run as a management-led company. The shop was thus handed over to Pete Green and his existing family company 816 Espresso. Pete also took some of the staff from the co op with him.

Since then the Totally Locally Café & Grocery has gone from strength to strength, carving out a niche for itself in the surroundings of Dean Clough.

Case-study: Totally Locally Leek

For the town of Leek, the Totally Locally campaign came about when its Council (Calderdale Council in West Yorkshire) put some money aside to help small shops at the start of the economic downturn. Totally Locally, ‘the big idea put together by a small bunch of people’, has encouraged people to shop locally, showing that small changes in the way they live can make a huge impact. It tells them, for example, that by spending just £5 a week with independent shops, they will generate more than £4m for the area’s economy each year.

Jobs, increased affluence, and more investment in the town have resulted from the campaign. But more than anything Totally Locally has helped to deliver something that money can’t buy – a buzz; those who come to Leek now find it a much different place to 10 years ago.

“It’s really exciting,” says Leonie Wood, who runs The Wine Shop, in Russell Street, with husband David. “It’s almost like people are remembering how to shop again. Go to an independent shop and you get that personal service. People enjoy that. They’re starting to question whether that supermarket experience is really what they want. Totally Locally is about a lifestyle. There are more and more people, when it comes to retail parks and supermarkets, saying ‘it’s not for me’.”

Totally Locally has created a different atmosphere in the town, where people have really bought into the idea of keeping the money they spend local and the consequences of putting it back into the local economy.

For more info, visit the website of Totally Locally Leek.

Links and other sources