They started by selling wellies, now this farming family is making £10m

It all started on their grandma’s kitchen table, but now this family run one of the leading country clothing retailers in the UK

It all started with a pair of pink wellington boots… but now this farming family have made a businesss success out of selling country clothing to the masses. The Holland family have been farming in Disley, near Stockport, for the past 200 years.

But farming alone has never been an easy living. Back in 1978 Malcolm Holland started to look for ways to diversify, and decided to supplement his income from selling hay at Chelford Agricultural Centre with a few pairs of wellingtons.

Overalls and wax coats soon followed, although there was also the odd wrong turn – like when they ordered a job lot of army surplus shirts that turned out, on closer inspection, to be skirts!

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But before long, the clothing business began to outsell farming altogether. The next generation of Hollands have now grown the business from around 35 orders a day, packed by hand around Grandma Mavis’s kitchen table, to now over 5,000 per day in winter.

There have been plenty of highs and lows along the way though. Their first big test arrived in 2001, in the form of the foot-and-mouth crisis that shut down the country shows and markets Hollands relied on.

Undeterred, Malcolm’s son Mark took the fateful decision to head to night school to learn web skills and HTML. It enabled the family to make the pivot from physical sales to online – and the very first Hollands website was built.

To everyone’s surprise, it worked, with the first-ever online order being a pair of pink wellingtons! What started as a small, farm gate operation, has gone on to grow from a £180,000 turnover in 2014 to more than £10milllion in sales online over the past year. They are now one of the biggest online retailers of country clothing in the UK.

The firm would go on to be developed by Malcolm’s children Mark and Julie, and the next generation too with his grandchildren Matt, Sarah and Rob all now running the firm.

Managing Director Matt Holland has previously spoken about the journey from packing orders on his grandma Mavis’s kitchen table to scaling up to the £10million turnover of today.

Speaking on the Just Pull The Trigger business podcast he said: “At the time when I joined in 2014 we were doing £180,000 a year, but we were doing handwritten royal mail labels, we were still packing the parcels on my grandma’s kitchen table, and the stock was stored in an agricultural barn on the farm on pallets on a dirt floor that’s how it was.

“Now that warehouse is barcode scanners, concreted, it’s slick, it runs 24/7 in the winter peak and it’s an insane thing that we’ve built. Sometimes I forget that we were packing on my grandma’s table.”

Now, the family have added their first physical store into the mix, opening up at a farm shop village in Cheshire. It means two decades since first launching their website, now for the first time there is also a shop customers can walk into to view a huge range of country clothing.

The new store sits on the busy site of Lowe’s Farm Shop, a destination with its own long farming history. The Lowe family have been growing vegetables on the same Cheshire land for six generations, since David and Doreen Lowe were given the original 30-acre farm as a wedding present in 1958, which has since grown to more than 500 acres.

What began much like Hollands, with market stalls at Middlewich and Crewe, grew into a proper farm shop in 2001, and today the site is also home to the Ginger & Pickles tearoom, an award-winning butcher, and eleven independent Cheshire businesses, from a garden centre and Pilates to a pottery studio. Now the line-up includes the Hollands country clothing boutique as well.

The farm shop is now run by three generations of the Lowe family: Graham Lowe, his wife Tracy, and their sons Tom and Sam. It’s a fitting pairing for Hollands – celebrating two family businesses, generations deep, both built on the same stretch of Cheshire countryside and the same values of hard work and great service.

Inside Hollands, customers can now browse a curated edit of the site’s bestselling brands, including clothing, footwear, and plenty of accessories, chat with a team who live the lifestyle themselves, and order anything from the full online range in store.

A specially commissioned mural inside the shop tells the Hollands’ story in pictures, with a watercolour map of the family’s original farmland. There are also details like a tractor, a milk bottle, and the old farmhouse where the family began.

You can even find imagery of the original founder, Malcolm, and the many generations of farming and family on the walls around the store.

Matt said: “I am exceptionally proud of the new store opening at Lowe’s Farm, as it is something which I have wanted to do for many years. The store encompasses our brand and story perfectly and will hopefully be the first of many Hollands Country Clothing stores across the UK.”

Sarah Holland, Director of the firm added: “‘Our connection to the countryside goes back generations, and there’s something really special about being able to welcome people into a physical space that reflects that, rather than just a screen.”

Hollands Country Clothing will mark the store’s opening with a launch celebration on Friday 25th September, with the wider public warmly invited to visit the store at Lowe’s Farm Shop, Moss Lane, Byley, Middlewich, Cheshire, CW10 9NG.