Meet our merchandising consultants
Flourish Retail brings big business merchandising to smaller retailers
Every business should be able to access the power of merchandising, no matter whether you’re an established brand with employees, offices and warehouses or run your business from your front room.
It’s all a matter of scale
Flourish Retail’s merchandising consultants provide bespoke support to businesses of all sizes.
“Flourish Retail offers services, affordable to everyone, that allow us to price and plan correctly… It takes a major stress out of a huge chunk of our business.”
—ALEX AND LAURA, OLIVE & WALLIS
Meet our founder, Sarah
With over two decades of merchandising experience from high street names to online retail giant ASOS (plus with her own small creative business thrown into the mix), Sarah is perfectly placed to help your business to thrive.
After cutting her merchandising teeth at River Island, Debenhams and Arcadia, Sarah moved to online retailer ASOS in 2008 (a pivotal point in the retail world as customers increasingly moved online). At ASOS she implemented processes and structures across buying and merchandising, eventually rising to manage the merchandising for multi-million-pound departments including womenswear and ASOS China.
Whilst working for ASOS China, Sarah was tasked with building, leading and developing the retail team in London and Shanghai, exposing her to all elements of running a business. As a result of her (and her team’s!) work, she proudly received a company award for being ‘Restlessly Innovative’.
After her second maternity leave, Sarah decided to refocus on her own small business, designing, creating and selling baby mobiles and bunting. It was then that she spotted a gap for helping small and growing businesses with their merchandising, and, in 2018, Flourish was born.
Alongside her work at Flourish, Sarah has co-founded The Merchandising School with fellow consultant, Anna Whalley, to bring comprehensive, high quality training to the retail sector.
Sarah has featured in numerous publications, podcasts and interviews, from the BBC to Retail Gazette.
She’s also won several awards:
Meet our Merchandising Consultants
As well as bringing merchandising consultancy to smaller retailers, we also bring flexible working to merchandisers as part of the Flourish team.
Kathryn
With a love of spreadsheets, vast volumes of data and finessing processes, Kathryn was born to be a merchandiser. Looking for a way to balance her flourishing (!) career with her family, Kathryn’s former colleague and manager, Sarah, had the answer…
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Kathryn’s interest in merchandising started as a teenager, working in a shoe shop and wondering how the shoes got to the shelves. She went on to achieve a first-class BA Hons degree in Fashion Merchandising Management, which included six months at NYC’s Fashion Institute of Technology, an internship at Donna Karen NYC, and a year at Marks & Spencer.
After graduating, Kathryn worked for Tesco F&F before joining Habitat for four years. Looking for a faster pace, she moved to ASOS (where she helped to launch Outlet, Petite, Maternity and Curve) and then took a project management role focusing on systems and processes for ASOS China.
Nine years on and Kathryn’s young children meant another change of pace and a move to Flourish!
Tory
Tory’s love for all things fashion, accessories and jewellery is matched by a career that covers many familiar high street fashion brands, from River Island to Warehouse, via Miss Selfridge. These days, she shares her enthusiasm for merchandising with small retailers through Flourish.
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Tory laid the foundations of her merchandising career with a degree in buying and merchandising from London College of Fashion. After graduating she joined River Island, where she spent most of the next seven years (punctuated by six months working for Miss Selfridge). Over this time she worked her way up to the role of merchandiser.
After a quick trip around the world, Tory then joined Warehouse (where she’d been an intern during her degree course) and remained there for five years. As a merchandising manager, she worked on projects around recruitment, system implementation and training, as well as managing the international franchise department.
Tory left Warehouse to focus on her family and to move to Copenhagen. She now works for Flourish, bringing a renewed excitement for helping small retailers transform their businesses with the magic of merchandising.
Rob
From Buyer’s Admin Assistant at Superdrug to Operations Manager for Dorothy Perkins, Burton and Miss Selfridge, Rob has been on quite the merchandising journey! These days he brings all that experience to help small businesses grow, through Flourish.
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Leaving university, Rob joined Superdrug first as a Buyer’s Admin Assistant, and then in logistics. After a brief spell at Homebase, he then moved to Debenhams and learned the skills that became the foundation for his whole career (and also met Sarah!). He went on to use those skills at New Look and Marks & Spencer, where he shifted into change management and became the lead designer for a successful new WSSI system.
Rob enjoyed that role so much that he took up an identical one back with Debenhams, which also saw him involved in projects from cost accounting and warehouse management design, to single pool of inventory design and wholesale stock management.
Eventually, Rob joined Arcadia as a domain architect and became increasingly immersed in the world of IT (with a business angle). He went on to become Operations Manager for buying, merchandising and wholesale at Dorothy Perkins, Burton and Miss Selfridge. As the days of Arcadia drew to a close, Rob heard about the exciting things happening at Flourish, and the rest is history…
Interested in joining the team?
We’re always on the lookout for talented merchandisers who love working with smaller brands! Get in touch for a chat and we can take it from there.