A farming family that began by selling pink wellington boots from their grandma's kitchen table has grown its country clothing business to more than £10m in annual online sales, and has now opened its first physical store in Cheshire.
The Holland family have been farming in Disley, near Stockport, for the past 200 years. In 1978, Malcolm Holland began diversifying by supplementing his income from selling hay at Chelford Agricultural Centre with a few pairs of wellingtons. Overalls and wax coats soon followed, though there was the occasional wrong turn - such as when they ordered a job lot of army surplus shirts that turned out to be skirts.
Before long, the clothing business began to outsell farming altogether. The next generation of Hollands has grown the business from around 35 orders a day, packed by hand around Grandma Mavis's kitchen table, to more than 5,000 per day in winter.
From foot-and-mouth to online pivot
There have been highs and lows along the way. Their first big test arrived in 2001, in the form of the foot-and-mouth crisis that shut down the country shows and markets Hollands relied on. Undeterred, Malcolm's son Mark took the decision to attend night school to learn web skills and HTML, enabling the family to pivot from physical sales to online - and the first Hollands website was built.
It worked, with the first-ever online order being a pair of pink wellingtons. What started as a small farm gate operation has grown from a £180,000 turnover in 2014 to more than £10m in sales online over the past year, making the firm one of the biggest online retailers of country clothing in the UK.
The firm has been developed by Malcolm's children Mark and Julie, and the next generation too, with his grandchildren Matt, Sarah and Rob now all running the company.
From kitchen table to 24/7 warehouse
Managing Director Matt Holland has previously spoken about the journey from packing orders on his grandma Mavis's kitchen table to the £10m turnover of today. Speaking on the Just Pull The Trigger business podcast, he said: "At the time when I joined in 2014 we were doing £180,000 a year, but we were doing handwritten royal mail labels, we were still packing the parcels on my grandma's kitchen table, and the stock was stored in an agricultural barn on the farm on pallets on a dirt floor - that's how it was."
"Now that warehouse is barcode scanners, concreted, it's slick, it runs 24/7 in the winter peak and it's an insane thing that we've built. Sometimes I forget that we were packing on my grandma's table."
Now, the family has added its first physical store, opening at a farm shop village in Cheshire. It means that two decades after launching their website, there is now a shop customers can walk into to view a huge range of country clothing.
New store at Lowe's Farm Shop
The new store sits on the busy site of Lowe's Farm Shop, a destination with its own long farming history. The Lowe family have been growing vegetables on the same Cheshire land for six generations, since David and Doreen Lowe were given the original 30-acre farm as a wedding present in 1958, which has since grown to more than 500 acres.
What began with market stalls at Middlewich and Crewe grew into a proper farm shop in 2001. Today the site is also home to the Ginger & Pickles tearoom, an award-winning butcher, and eleven independent Cheshire businesses, from a garden centre and Pilates to a pottery studio. The line-up now includes the Hollands country clothing boutique.
The farm shop is run by three generations of the Lowe family: Graham Lowe, his wife Tracy, and their sons Tom and Sam. Inside Hollands, customers can browse a curated edit of the site's bestselling brands, including clothing, footwear, and accessories, chat with a team who live the lifestyle themselves, and order anything from the full online range in store.
A specially commissioned mural inside the shop tells the Hollands' story in pictures, with a watercolour map of the family's original farmland. There are also details like a tractor, a milk bottle, and the old farmhouse where the family began, plus imagery of the original founder, Malcolm, and the many generations of farming and family on the walls around the store.
Matt said: "I am exceptionally proud of the new store opening at Lowe's Farm, as it is something which I have wanted to do for many years. The store encompasses our brand and story perfectly and will hopefully be the first of many Hollands Country Clothing stores across the UK."
Sarah Holland, Director of the firm, added: "Our connection to the countryside goes back generations, and there's something really special about being able to welcome people into a physical space that reflects that, rather than just a screen."
Hollands Country Clothing will mark the store's opening with a launch celebration on Friday 25th September, with the wider public warmly invited to visit the store at Lowe's Farm Shop, Moss Lane, Byley, Middlewich, Cheshire, CW10 9NG.
