Welly Collective blooms in tough times

Saturday, 8 February 2025

When someone told Libby Dearnley she should open a full-time shop her immediate gut response was … absolutely not.

Already juggling a hectic schedule running pop-up markets under the Craft Central name a couple of times a year, being a nanny, and raising her own three children, a permanent store never seemed within the realm of possibility.

Circa 2019, inside her Craft Central pop-up at Reading Cinemas on Wellington’s Courtenay Place, Dearnley was stocking plant products by Hiroki (Hiro) Ogata, while he was stocking Dearnley’s soap products in his own pop-up down the road on Manners St.

When Ogata lost his lease, Dearnley came up with the idea of his using the Reading site through the year, and Dearnley taking over the pop-up lease as normal at Christmas. But Reading wasn’t keen to start a new relationship with somebody else.

Dearnley offered to be his guarantor, which Reading was happy with. “But he wasn’t,” Dearnley said. “He said, ‘well, if you’re going to be my guarantor, why don’t we do it together?’”

The pair opened their joint store eight days prior to the first national lockdown. When the alert level eased, they decided to never close the doors, and rebranded as Welly Collective on Courtenay.

It was a name Dearnley initially felt was too long, but has proved useful as the brand expanded to different locations. Now, in addition to Courtenay Pl, there are Welly Collective stores in Featherston St, Cuba St, Porirua, Johnsonville, Queensgate, Lambton Quay and one other publicly inaccessible one inside Wellington’s port, which sells to cruise ship customers directly. It had a Miramar store, but that one closed at the end of 2024, bringing the grand total to eight.

She feels the collective took off so fast because when people were allowed to come back to trade after strict lockdown measures were removed the public were pretty fed up with overwhelmed couriers, not to mention the huge push to support local struggling businesses, which was what Welly Collective’s kaupapa was all about.

Travel restrictions meant people wanted to invest in their homes where they were spending so much time (hence decorating those bare white walls with things like art), while others had discovered a new craft hobby like knitting or crochet or jewellery-making and were wondering what to do with the 400 pairs of earrings they made out of boredom.

“We opened at the perfect time … So many people wanted to get involved,” Dearnley said.

It got to the point where it was basically forced to open more stores due to demand. Some vendors feature in all the collective’s locations, while others target their products to particular stores. Different locations have different customer bases, this means just because a product sells well in one place doesn’t mean it will go gangbusters in another.

Teams run shops via Facebook Messenger and there’s healthy competition with who can make the prettier store on any given day, plus staff are able to feed back to vendors directly on how their products are doing and give them suggestions for layout.

Welly Collective takes a 15% commission on sales, plus the vendor pays a set fee for renting a space to sell their product in a shop for a particular time period, say a week, a fortnight, a month and so on. Vendors are paid out for their sales fortnightly.

Dearnley is up front that the collective isn’t right for everyone. Some people won’t make enough money to stay with them for whatever reason ‒ maybe their products are too niche, even if they are amazing: “To make it work for everyone would just be magic. At the moment, it works for most people ‒ it's just not always.”

Ultimately the model is like a market, in which a vendor is able to design their own display space with a QR code and any other info they want to include. But the best bit?They don’t actually have to be present for the sales transactions.

Dearnley and her staff are always moving things around within stores to ensure everyone gets good exposure, and to keep the customer experience varied. There are some limitations to this, for example larger works may need to remain in fixed spots, and jewellery and smaller items need to be in specific eyelines of security cameras.

But she and Ogata also often rearrange things so people have to wander around the entire shop, compared to being able to skip areas. “You’re forced to just keep walking.”

The collective has now become a springboard platform for some artists. One vendor is getting advice about opening their own store, Dearnley says, while many others have got huge in their own right and are now selling at national gift fairs, where wholesale suppliers/retail buyers come to stock for major outlets.

It’s not unusual to find Dearnley working in the middle of the night, which she reckons has been a sort of gasoline making the fire build faster. Where she’s good with the people side of things and putting in flexible hours, Ogata is the go-to for all the collective’s admin and spreadsheets.

“Together, we make quite a functional whole person … We just make it work,” Dearnley says.

As one example, the collective was asked to open a shop on the wharf for cruise ships within a 10-day period, which the pair were somehow able to pull off. Tourists love the stock, as the items are not available in other parts of the country.

Ogata was asked for a quote for this story, but simply said: “Whatever you believe is what I believe,” regarding Dearnley.

“I didn’t even bribe him to say it,” the latter joked. “He is right though. We have worked together so long now and communicate so often, our heads are usually in the same space and are aiming for the same goals for the shops.”

A majority of the vendors are Wellington-based, however a few are in Auckland. The locality helps as staff are able to give customers a story with each purchase. “They go away feeling extra excited about the little bit of Wellington they’ve just taken back.”

One misconception is that all Welly Collective products are handmade ‒ while they do have to be a local business, the products don’t have to be all 100% locally made.

Dearnley says she’s wholly driven by what will work for its vendors. “When you put your energy and your effort into something, you want it to do well ‒ you have hopes for it. But I didn’t expect it to get this big or be this wonderful.”