At age 7, I worked in the local Deptford Market and then from age 14 onwards we moved to Anglesey and didn’t do very well at school because of dyslexia and found it hard to fit in with schools that only spoke in Welsh. My passion was always with food and then went to work in catering and then being a chef in Bangor where I qualified to be a chef.
I later moved to Chester but unfortunately there wasn’t much work to do with catering or being a chef so I decided to give retail a try and worked for Next for 11 years and worked my up to Store Manager and then another 11 years at Top Shop as Store Manager.
In 2017 Skinnys opened in Wrexham which is a health food shop. I worked there for a really good guy called Kane and his family. It was like meat, vegetables, chicken, steak, etc and I was lucky enough that Kane gave me a position, after a few months, to run the shop for him. 2017 was a real moment for meal preps for people and cooking for people who haven’t got time but wanted clean healthy food and meal preps are for fitness, bodybuilder people. I later run Skinnys new shop in Chester and help support that shop also.
In October 2017, I wanted to do something else so I went to help mum manage her cafe in Bangor. Her cafe was called Follow Your Bliss. We both enjoyed working with each other and it was a real buzz and we had ideas to take Follow Your Bliss to Chester. However, it wasn’t working. In November 2017, I had calls from old customers asking me to cook for them. Before I knew it, I was cooking for 75 clients and working 7 days a week in a small kitchen. I was at this time exhausted.
Then with luck or maybe universal law, one day I was delivering to a customer, I couldn’t park in my normal place, so I walked down Charles Street and I saw the shop that we’re in at the moment, 20 Charles Street, The Brockley Bean and the rest they say is history.”
