DOWN TO BUSINESS - Valuing vintage in Islandeady

Name: Sean McCaughey

Occupation: Co-owner of Gaiety Antiques and Vintage Store in Islandeady

My wife Clodagh – she’s a local – and her dad has his own antiques place down the road there, so she would have grown up in the antiques business. Her grandfather would have been in the antiques business and her uncles as well.

This place was a dancehall from 1938 up until the mid ’70s. There was another local couple that had a sort of furniture shop here up until when we took over. It was a very different type of business; it was more second-hand furniture.

The building itself is kind of a feature of the community, and with Clodagh being from Islandeady, if we were going doing something we wanted it to be local.

In some ways it probably exceeded expectations at the start. When we opened in 2011, it was kind of a rough time economically. Whilst it did better than we thought, it was a struggle for the first few years. Now it’s doing really well and since Covid we’re selling a lot more stuff online and through social media, which was a blessing for us in some ways. Because up until Covid, even though we had a website and social media, people didn’t tend to buy furniture online.

Being able to sell from anywhere works in favour of people like us because you don’t have to be in that prime city-centre location, social media is your shop front. It’s not like we don’t sell a good bit of stuff through the store with people coming in, but that’s mainly where it is now. We have about 16,000 followers on Instagram. Going into Covid we had about 3,000 or 4,000.

We get a real mix of customers. We’re seeing a lot of people doing new builds. People who have been buying antiques for years, they are actually coming in trying to sell it to you rather than buy it. There might be one of two nice bits in it but the rest has woodworm or it just doesn’t have the look that we’re after.

There’s no value in it for us in driving all the way to Crossmolina to pick up one half-decent piece of furniture. We need to be buying in big volume, that’s where it’s at for us.

When I first came into the country ten or 15 years ago IKEA was the rage. Five years later people were throwing that furniture out. As a result of that experiment, people realised the value of antique furniture. It’s built to last because it’s been around for at least 100 years already.

There’s a big turnover of stuff. We have dealers that we work with all over the UK and Europe and we still go to antiques fairs in the UK every four to six weeks.

We often get people, particularly in the summer months, that would come in and they would say ‘We’ve sort of planned our holiday around stopping by here’. It has that reputation.

The summer months of July-August tend to be busier, just because Westport itself is busier. A lot of stuff would go up and down to Dublin during the summer months as well, probably more to people who have holiday homes.

For us, sourcing stuff is always an issue. The biggest challenge is that a lot of the people we work with and deal with are quite old. There’s not a lot of young people coming into it. Two of our main dealers are in their ’70s. They are not going to keep going forever.

Since the new N5 opened it’s been a busy couple of months. The people that would stop on a whim weren’t generally people that would buy, so the split online versus in store retail is still pretty much the same. There hasn’t been any slowdown in in-store sales that I can see.

I think we’re well established and we’re lucky in that it’s not a highly competitive market. There’s not a lot of new people coming in.

It’s not the sort of business that anybody can just walk into. You need some sort of a background, but you also need a real interest and a passion. It’s also really hard work.

There’s a lot of hard hours of moving furniture and over and back to England driving a truck and all of that. There’s the bookkeeping, there’s managing social media, it could be 24/7 if you let it. For that reason, it has to be a bit of a passion. If you’re just going into it for money – yes, you might make money, but you’ll burn out because you don’t have the interest or passion for it.

Tea break

Is the customer always right?

Yes. No matter how annoying that might be!

What’s your motto for success in business?

Persistence is key.

When do you get your best work done?

The real work of getting pieces in and out and making the place look amazing happens out of hours behind closed doors and whenever Clodagh gets time in her busy schedule.

What is your guilty pleasure?

Salt and vinegar Kettle Chips are my go-to when I’m on the road driving.

Sum up your business in three words?

Family, beauty, integrity.

Who is your inspiration in business?

As far as antiques go Clodagh’s dad, Herbie.

What makes you nervous?

Clodagh when she’s in buying mode, anything could happen!

Most famous person you’ve met in the course of work?

We’ve met Drew Pritchard from Salvage Hunters, and I also delivered one time to a house in Highgate in London whose next-door neighbours were Kate Moss and Jamie Oliver. I didn’t bump into either though!