72 THE ROLLS ROYCE OF WALKING STICKS Charlotte Gillan, Managing Director of walking stick specialists Classic Canes, tells Gift Focus why their high standards of design and manufacture create forever products that are good for people and the planet When did you start up and why? Classic Canes was launched in 1982 by my mother, Diana Porter. My parents owned a small woodland in Somerset and realised it was naturally producing suitable raw material for walking sticks. They sold some wood to a walking stick factory and my mother had the idea of buying back the finished walking sticks and offering them to the local gift shops, tobacconists and gentlemen’s outfitters. To start with, all the stockists were local enough for her to visit them between doing school runs, but word spread and today we supply retailers in about thirty countries worldwide. What challenges have you overcome since the company’s launch? There were lots. Obvious ones such as weathering several major recessions, the Covid crisis and Brexit, but more specific factors such as illness of key employees, fires or floods at suppliers’ factories and non- or slow-payment of accounts have been just as challenging at times. Luckily, small businesses are usually very quick to react and inventive in how they overcome issues, so we have always found solutions to our challenges thus far. In the early, pre-internet days, it was difficult just finding suppliers or potential stockists – so many aspects of business are much easier now. Tell us about your product offering. Classic Canes is a very specialist business: we sell only traditional and contemporary walking sticks, seat sticks, umbrellas and related accessories such as rubber ferrules and wrist loops. We have many in-house designs and others produced exclusively for us. We are often described as the ‘Rolls-Royce of walking sticks’, which we find very gratifying. What are your most popular products? It depends on the type of retailer, but for gift shops and garden centres it would be a combination of sticks: wooden everyday, fashionable patterned, rustic country and folding canes.
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