The Guild Dumfries C.I.C want to provide our community of makers, creatives and producers with a platform so they can flourish and grow. We want to showcase our talented community and raise awareness of the importance of shopping small and local. Sharing their story and the beautiful covetable products they take care and passion to make and produce. We are busy working hard behind the scenes and hope to open a longer term retail collective with workshop|meeting space and possibly studio spaces in the heart of Dumfries. We hope you'll want to get involved!
We want to continue to encourage people to shop small and support local businesses that live and work in our region and would love a more permanent space in the town centre. We are in the process of searching for the perfect premises and confirming finer details. Knowing how many businesses would love to be involved and collaborate is going to make our final choice much easier.
Please complete our Survey!
We'd be really grateful if you could complete our survey aswell as registering your interest. By completing the survey you’ll also allow us to better understand the needs of our community and also find out if the project is viable. We hope to be able to announce an open call to apply to take part by the end of August.
The Guild has already demonstrated a strong need for a retail collective in Dumfries. We have piloted two previous Pop Up Shops in 2018 and our 2020, which were both an overwhelming success. We now have a business model in place that has been tried and tested, a wealth of skills and experience to deliver this type of project in house including retail management, merchandising, marketing and design. Plus we’ve built up a reputation for delivering high quality community events that provide a platform and support for small independent businesses and have a loyal following.
Over the last 3 years we have developed the trust of our community of makers & producers which grows each time we organise events and projects. We currently have a thriving membership of over 170 businesses, 307 people are ‘Friends of the Guild’, who support our vision and aims and there are 100 active volunteers, who support the delivery of the street market festivals and pop up events.
Now that restrictions are easing we hope that this year we can take over a bigger premises, open for a longer period so we can allow visitors a safe place to shop but also allow us to collaborate with even more businesses, offer workshops, activities, training and possibly also have room for studio spaces.
So if your a maker, designer. artist, producer or indie business and are keen to find new ways to get your products in front of new customers then sign up and express an interest to find out more, just click the link below. We'll also be programming a series of events, live installations, talks, tastings and workshops during the period we will be open. We are keen to collaborate with makers from across the region & beyond and strive to create an exciting and innovative experiential pop up shop in a town centre location in Dumfries. We hope that we can work together to offer makers support and opportunities to grow their business and build their audience.
Please do help us spread the word if you know anyone that might be interested. We will be sharing lots more details in the coming weeks and months on social media and to our mailing list. So if you're interested and keen to collaborate and be part of our collective then sign up here, if you register your interest you'll be the first to know!