Q&A with No.19 Shop & Studio

It’s the end of an era and we’ve loved being part of the vibrant community of indie retailers in Norwich. A huge thank you to all of our local customers and staff over years, it has been great fun and quite a ride!

After years of trading at markets, print fairs and pop-up shops with Printer Johnson, we jumped at the opportunity to share a permanent premises on St Augustines Street, back in 2019.  As a joint venture and intending to sell other brands alongside our own, it was named No.31. It was a tiny shop on a street a little out of the way but we could afford it and we learnt a huge amount about physical retailing for the two years we spent there.

In need of more space, we took on the neighbouring premises with the plan to use this as a gallery space hosting exhibitions and for hire, named Circle Space. This was sadly a badly timed undertaking, the pandemic hit not long after we signed the lease making public events very difficult. During the pandemic we were trying to operate from multiple locations, packing and storing stock from a room on an industrial estate, selling from No.31 and trying to make use of the gallery while events were on hold. It was impractical to say the least. The pandemic was a horrible time for small businesses. We knew something needed to change and we started looking for a new space where we could do everything under one roof.

Exactly! When we looked around No.19 for the first time we knew it was the space for us (and what to call it!) Unusually it has a huge back room, which was perfect for our needs with our growing wholesale and online retail side of the business. We felt the location near the art school and theatre would work well for us for the shop side of things and give us more room to stock other brands and display our own collections more comfortably.   

No.19 Shop & Studio was soon up and running! It was such a joy to have everything operating from one place with our team working simultaneously in the shop front alongside processing online and wholesale orders out the back.

The shop has always been dedicated to showcasing and championing the work of illustrators and printmakers and providing top quality paper goods and gifts. We love paper, print and colour, it has been a joy to buy in and share products we love from some fantastic artists and brands over the last few years. Our customers have always appreciated the aesthetic of the space, the quality of the products we stock, our affordable pricing and the amazing roster of staff we’ve worked with over the years, many of whom are creatives in their own right.

There just isn’t enough time in the day to manage the shop, the wholesale business and continue to create new designs for Printer Johnson! Over the last few years each part of the business has needed more attention as we got more established. We have so much respect for our trade customers, running a successful retail space is a full time job. We could see that we were going to need to make some changes.

We began working with local artists to licence artwork for our greetings card ranges to keep new designs going out and to add diversity to our offering. This was well received and we’ve been slowly publishing work from new artists ever since. This is something we’d really like to invest more time and energy into moving forward.

It's been an extraordinary few years, the wholesale side of our business has continued to grow. It was time to make a decision on the direction of the business. After much debate we decided to move forward without a bricks-and-mortar shop. The move will free up time and resources to refocus on our own collections of paper goods, work with more artists and expand our product ranges. We are really excited for this new way of working and have a great new studio space lined up for October. We hope our local customers will stay in touch and continue to follow what’s next for Printer Johnson.

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Thanks for reading!