£50,000 investment for village store
Last updated 13:13, Thursday, 27 November 2008
AS THE credit crunch really starts to bite, many businesses are battening down the hatches and hoping to ride out the storm.
Not Gordon Moore, proprietor of the Border Reiver store at Otterburn.
He’s just spent in excess of £50,000 extending the premises – and that takes his outlay on the business to over £250,000 over the last eight years.
He said: “I’ve always been a risk taker, with the philosophy that sometimes you have to jump off the cliff to see if the parachute works.
“Someone once told me that I don’t seem to check whether I am even wearing a parachute, but everything has paid off so far.”
Gordon has shop-keeping in his genes, since his great-great-grandfather was founder of the Moore’s supermarket empire, which had more than 200 stores scattered across the North-East – including one in Hexham.
However, it took a long while to manifest itself, because Berwick-born Gordon spent most of his working life in the plastics industry, taking technical and senior management roles all over the country, as well as postings to America and Holland.
A bombshell dropped in 2000, when after working through a project of making 200 people redundant, he found he was 201 on the list.
He and his wife Joanne started looking for a business to invest in, and heard that the successful Border Reiver business established by Pam Peart at Otterburn was up for sale.
They decided to go for it, and with Joanne giving up her job as an electrical technician, it was all systems go.
Gordon looked after the retail side, while Joanne ran the coffee shop, but after three years they decided to double the size of the shop to sell more lines.
And the following year they took the dilapidated Knowesgate Service Station, a few miles down the Rede valley, into the Border Reiver family.
Gordon said: “It was a terrible advertisement for the area, so we decided to buy it and run it, even though we knew it would run at loss for the first couple of years.
“We spent another £100,000 on smartening it up, and now it is breaking even.”
It remains the first filling station a driver using the A696 from the A1M comes to after passing Washington services some 35 miles away.
Soon afterwards, they decided to close the coffee shop back at Otterburn, even though it was doing good business.
Gordon explained: “We only had nine parking spaces outside the shop, and we needed to ensure a quicker turnover of trade.”
The new £50,000 extension followed, with the work carried out in just 19 days by Ian Mackie of Padon Construction of Otterburn.
Gordon said: “We have laid our home on the line for this business, but the early signs are that it will be successful.
“Customer numbers are up by five per cent, and their average spend is up by 20 per cent.”
The shop now offers more than 5,000 different lines, selling everything from caviare to cornflakes, and home-made soup and pies to birthday cards.
More than 30 local suppliers are on the Border Reivers’ books, from butchers to beekeepers, and the kitchen is so busy that Gordon is looking for another cook to keep up with the demand for ready-to-cook meals such as Moroccan lamb.
The population of Otterburn village is only just over 400, but an average of 450 people each day come through the shop doors, with locals joined by visitors and soldiers from Otterburn Camp.
The shop is open from 6.30am to 7.30pm during the week with only marginally shorter hours at the weekend.
Gordon said: “We get a lot of support from the local people, who realise the importance of having a strong rural retailer in their midst.
“They realise they do not have to go to Tesco or elsewhere for their big shop, when they can get whatever they need, at similar prices, without the inconvenience of having to drive to Newcastle or Hexham.”
