retailer spotlight: the handpicked collection
Images this page and next: a selection of beautiful products sold by The Handpicked Collection
The pick of the bunch
Gift retailer The Handpicked Collection combines media savvy with delectable products.
Ever felt like, having trawled the shops and the internet for hours, if not days, you just can’t find that perfect gift? Well, perhaps as you are in the industry you don’t have that problem, but then if you are in the midst of your Christmas shopping then you may well empathise! It’s exactly what inspired The Handpicked Collection owner, Jo McGivern to launch the business.
Jo McGivern is the owner of The Handpicked Collection.
“After the birth of my second child, I got tired of never having enough time to go shopping and find what I wanted, liked or needed. The internet or mail order shopping was the solution, but when it came to gift buying, I found there was too much choice available. I seemed to spend hours and hours trawling through different websites looking at gift
14 Gifts & Housewares
ideas, and I could not tell if what I was looking at was going to be good quality or live up to the description of it.”
The Handpicked Collection
offers shoppers a carefully curated selection of gifts, selected and reviewed by a panel of journalists, experts and trendsetters. Shoppers can browse the products in the catalogue or online, and see why they were selected. “I used to work in PR and have always read magazines and liked buying things recommended by journalists, so I came up with the idea of combining journalistic reviews with a mail order catalogue,” explains Jo.The refreshing business model combines her acute awareness of the influence that the media has on shoppers’ behaviour, as she says, “Having spent years trying to get journalists to write about my clients, I knew that in most cases, consumers were more likely to
By Naomi Davis
trust a product if an independent journalist said it was good. I felt that applying this principle to a retail catalogue and website would give customers the kind of buying confidence they find in their favourite magazines. Only the highest rated products make the catalogue.”
The panel is a ‘who’s who’ of the consumer gift and housewares industry, including entrepreneurs, shopping experts, chefs, product designers, and writers and editors from names such as Tatler, Homes & Gardens, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Glamour, Condé Nast Traveller, Vogue, In Style, Red and Elle Decoration. It has two functions. Firstly, panel members recommend products that they like, which they come across in their work. Secondly, Jo and her team of buyers create a list of products that they feel appeal to Handpicked customers and the
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