THE owners of a Porthmadog pottery shop have said their loyal customers helped them to come out of lockdown stronger.

Tom and Myfanwy Gloster have run Glosters on the town’s High Street since 2014.

When the first lockdown hit in March 2020, the couple looked at what they could do to survive. They already had a website which was doing well, but if the Glosters were to cover the costs of running an empty shop, the website would need to do better.

Myfanwy said: “Our online sales were already growing in 2020. We were putting more effort into it, I think.

“And then we got closed down, and we had the initial panic of ‘oh my goodness, how are we going to pay for everything?’ We had a grant so we spent a good chunk of that on redoing our website. We just ploughed all our time into it, and it paid off.”

Another challenge was keeping up with online orders when the kilns kept blowing the electricity in the workshop which was above the shop. Myfanwy and Tom had already been trying to find a way to deal with this problem, but lockdown gave them the opportunity to sort this out sooner.

She added: “We had two options of digging up the road outside the shop and putting a three-phase supply in, or we could move.

“The only place we could move to was massive, and we weren’t turning over enough or making enough to warrant that.

“Then everything locked down and the business started growing at an alarming rate, and our kilns were still playing up.

“We realised that if we were going to keep being locked down, then the kilns needed to work, otherwise we wouldn’t survive.

“I didn’t anticipate that it would be quite that successful.”

Myfanwy is full of praise for their customers for helping them to make the move a success.

“They’re so loyal, and they are so into it being two people and a small business and helping them grow. I think at that time when everything was a little bit rubbish, it was that feel good factor of contributing to something good. The day we got locked down in March was the day that we launched a new, smaller mug.

“For seven months we had this mug that we were selling that nobody had ever really seen or held or knew how it felt or anything.

“I think lockdown definitely pushed us to expand bigger and quicker and maybe that was a good thing, otherwise I think we’d still be umming and ahhing about it!”