Baby brand Dimples reopens Auckland store after fire devastation
Wednesday, 10 June 2026
Auckland baby goods boutique Dimples has reopened after a devastating fire burnt its store to the ground, damaging $200,000 worth of stock.
After eight months and a million-dollar rebuild, the Newmarket store on Kent St is again open, and the company’s founder Jane McAllister says she has turned the tragedy into a positive, with plans to open more stores now in the pipeline.
McAllister, who started the business after the birth of her 10th child - 34 years ago - says the reopening of the store was a relief and she was looking forward to get it “humming along” again.
The business had taken a hit on the sales front since September last year, after an arsonist threw a petrol bomb into the store, causing extensive damage.
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Dimples began as a handmade and hand-embroidered clothing brand for babies and children and has expanded over the years to sell a wide range of high end baby goods and big ticket purchases such as prams and car seats.
The store has become the country’s largest distributor of European baby brands Nuna and Stokke.
McAllister founded and has built the business while raising 14 children, all her own. It employs 22 staff today and six of her children and grandchildren.
She told The Post the reopening of the Newmarket store marked the start of a new phase for Dimples, and she was working towards opening another store in 12 months’ time.
“It was a very sad time when I got the phone call to say that the security guard could see flames in the shop. We were actually overseas at the time, three days into a six week trip, and not being able to be there to see what exactly was going on was horrible. Everything in the shop had to be destroyed,” McAllister said of the fire.
“What we've done with the shop is turn something bad into a good thing, we've made some great improvements in there. We’ll be bigger and better.”
McAllister, 68, who now works behind the scenes and still designs all of the clothes, said Dimples had more recently launched a new brand Little Bee, which it sells to retail stores across the country.
Her Dimples range was sold in Harrods for seven years before the exchange rate made it unviable. It is still sold overseas in Japan.
McAllister was tight-lipped on where she hoped to expand to next, but was excited by the possibility.
“My main focus at the moment is to get Newmarket humming along like it was - people coming in and getting the full experience - and then look to open more retail stores in New Zealand.
“I still want to keep Dimples very exclusive, but there are a few areas that I think we would do very well in.”
Dimples had been operating online and had a small temporary pop-up store since the fire, but sales had taken a hit. That had only spurred her on further, she said.
“When things like this happen, it makes me more competitive, more competitive to be up and running. I'm more determined to make it work,” McAllister said.
“We are in a down economy, that's why I'll concentrate on getting Newmarket back up, running and humming along, but you've got to plan ahead, and we've got to pick our time.”
McAllister has always been entrepreneurial, inheriting an interest in business from her father, who also ran businesses.
“At one stage he started up a cosmetic business and we used to help bottle all these cosmetics and label all the bottles. I think [going into business] was inevitable, being brought up in that environment,” she said.
“I loved making clothes, loved babies looking beautiful, and there was a limit to what you could actually buy back [when I started]. We weren't so connected to the rest of the world, so that was sort of the inspiration behind it. I developed this hand-embroidery that made it different from what everybody else was doing.”
Dimples initially began as a hobby, but became a serious business venture when eldest daughter Felicity, who was expecting, came back from an OE with her husband - while McAllister was expecting her thirteenth baby.
“She was really good at doing the day-to-day things that I wasn't good at. I'm more creative and like to be busy, I don't like to do the same things repeatedly, so she was like the stabiliser, and she's still a huge part of the business.”
Dimples, which also has a store in Christchurch, first set up shop in a small 60sqm store in Newmarket, later moving to the 120sqm Kent St store in 2015. Moving into that store allowed it to branch out to start selling other baby brands.
McAllister’s ambitions to pursue more stores is perhaps surprising even to her, as she said initially she never wanted to go into retail. “It was just that worry of being tied into a lease and not knowing if it was it going to be a success.
In the beginning, driving past her first store, “I saw the lease on it, and I thought, that's a cute little store, maybe we should give it a go. The lease was a really good price, so that's where it started, and we really haven't moved far in all the shops in Newmarket we’ve been in.”
She took the leap to move into the much larger store site on Kent St seven years ago. While it has been a financial success, her view is “I want to make it something that people want, that's the success for me.”