Upcycling Your Lifestyle | Touchwood Boutique

Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present. 

My very, very clever son built this for me. And he’s an absolute angel. It’s going to hold for people for workshop class. Once it’s finished, it’s going to be my new home. My new plating

This is Linda Robinson. Linda is the founder of touch with vintage designs a business to upcycle his old furniture and gives it a fresh lease of life. We first met Linda at the pop up business event in Croydon in 2016, where she arrived with nothing more than an ideal. Look next years, we caught up with Linda now two years into her business, to see how she’s getting on and to discuss the highs and lows of starting your own business.

My name is Linda, I built up touch with vintage designs, but two and a half years ago now. And it’s become a passion. Basically, my best friend, she said to me, why don’t you paint some furniture. So I sort of like thought about it. And I basically went out and got a small chest of drawers painted it. Put bit take apart on and the rest is history really I haven’t stopped since so it’s just been. It’s just been a real adventure. Challenging, really challenging at times. And I’ve given up a few times as well. But I’m just so glad that I stuck with it really, my life was pretty, pretty crap. I’d suffered a breakdown. I’m not ashamed of it. Why should anybody be ashamed of having a breakdown, lots of people go through these stages, wasn’t from afraid NJ sort of suggesting or paint some furniture for time being you know, see how I get older. I don’t think you know, Horner been doing what I’m doing now. But if somebody had asked me like five years ago, you’d be upcycling vintage furniture for a living. I would have just laughed at them, basically, first year, timeline wise, was, you know, it was just a play. Oh, wow, I’ve got business, you know, wasn’t anybody like that? I went to national enterprise Lowrance. And they thought I was pretty bummed because really, because you sort of buy furniture, you know, old furniture. So they weren’t interested. But it’s just so exciting now. Yeah, I’ve gone from not knowing what I want to do with my life, being 50 being made redundant is not good. Every piece of furniture I get now I just get well, yeah, I’ll go do this, go do that. He just really picks me up, it just makes me feel better. Got to cool the stage. So my very, very clever son built this for me, it’s going to hold for people for workshop class, once it’s finished, it’s going to be my new home, we’re going to have a table in the middle. And then it’s going to be for people that each workshop basically, I’m going to be teaching them how to upcycle a small table. One of the reasons why I’m on this doing is because it’s just going to be Congress can be organised. The moment I’ve got pieces, I’ve got all my designs over my bedroom. So everything’s all over the place. And it’d be just nice to have all my tools and everything in one place. So I don’t have to keep looking for, you know, as I said, I gave up quite a few times, because I hadn’t sold anything. And I just speak to my friend and she would just just like say, don’t give up if you’ve got something good. You know, you could just push forward and just carry on 2016 was when I first started doing it, and when I looked back now the work wasn’t that brilliant. I realised that now you as you go along, you start realising what you love, if you love and you’ve got that passion obsession for it, you will do well, whatever you do, to actually have that free session with you guys but just really helped me and I mean really was motivating, really picked me up and thought you know, I can do this, you will realise that if you’ve got this idea and it’s gonna be big, and you’re gonna love it. That first most important thing I think is go out there meet people meet pop up business school because they are absolute diamonds and rebellion people that just go along and just enjoy the day. Take some ideas back and and just you know, go with the flow and never give up. Even that’s up days. Don’t give up. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, you can’t do on your own. You need to you need support, and also be positive people around you. And definitely Alan’s assignment of focus to people. Allen was really helpful towards me because he wasn’t in a good place. But he really did sort of by sort of spurred me on, I suppose they’d like to talk about, think about the past too much because the future is is now going to be Rosie this time next year I’m going to be on the high street