Blackburn is not what comes to mind when you think of ‘ideal towns to live’. But it’s charming in its own ways — abandoned cotton mills covered in graffiti, a 1950s era renovated suburb and a town centre that rivals the best in the north.
But the hippy bars and steampunk coffee shops hide a much darker tale of deprivation. The other sides of the story are boarded up antique shops and sooted clothing factories, signs of a town once in decline and only now recovering. Transitions always make some groups better and leave some behind, Angela Cole was one of the ones left behind. Fancy coffee shops may attract the hippest crowd in the region but they’re never going to replace the livelihood that raw industry provided.
Angela was once a part of one of Blackburns most established cotton mills, but it was a matter of if, not when, it was to shut down. The pandemic turned out to be the last straw, and the mother of two was made redundant. This will become a common theme as we explore these stories, across Britain and the world.
Everyone offers advice when it comes to losing jobs in fading industries. Cheeky articles on websites that call on people to learn new skills and admonish them for being “too emotional” to give up their old occupations and retrain themselves for more current jobs. Everyone fails to give the collective conscience of the towns grieve the loss of identity that comes with the decline of an entire industry. People don’t just stop being “millworkers” or “tailors” when they leave their jobs. The scars of losing their livelihood and their identity run deep, as was the case of cotton mills in Blackburn — and indeed Angela herself.
No job, two kids — but at least she owned her own house, a refurbished mid century two-bedroom in one of the nicer bits of town. This was the shining light in bad situation, she had a stable living space with no obligations. Paying for utilities and taxes was a whole another problem, but all in all, she had a place to start.
The most obvious place to start was clothing, an industry she’d spent most of her adult life in. With no textile jobs on the horizon, and Angela’s unwillingness to completely change sectors at her age, she needed to look elsewhere. Think out of the box. That’s where the internet came in. Turns out that clothing is an immensely saturated market, but upholstered furniture? Not so much.
Angela was never what you’d call ‘tech savvy’; working in a cotton mill, she never had to be. But to her immense credit she was willing to learn, and her kids – to their immense credit were more than eager to show her the ropes. From millworker to internet dropshipper, that’s quite a career change wouldn’t we say? It certainly didn’t come along with little effort.
After she’d learnt to turn on a computer and ride, sorry surf, the web, she began to painstakingly look for ways to earn money in the clothing industry. One word kept turning up — dropship. The premise was almost too good to be true, promising no stock holding and shipping management on the part of the dropshipper. When she was sure it wasn’t a scam, like many, many others she’d read about and almost fell for, she realised the most important fact of all. Dropship is easy to get into but that means she needs to differentiate herself from the competition.
How to do that? Well that was to take a bit more thinking, until the eureka moment struck as she was taking a peek at the websites of many, many clothing sellers online. Returns.
It didn’t take long for Angela to comprehend that returns are a bit of a thorny point in the dropshipping world. Rules varied, but by and large, returns weren’t accepted by the dropship supplier except in the case of manufacturing defects and transit damages. This meant that many small dropshippers were stuck in this void of being unable to offer returns unless they could store them, and indeed fix minor defects that the supplier wouldn’t. Thankfully for Angela, being a millworker who spent her life around cloth has its advantages.
She did what all of us should do at some point — use the assets we already have. In her case, the fully paid off house with a cellar. It was right there, just waiting to be used for something other than storing old (not to be mistaken with vintage) wine bottles and a washing machine from 2004.
She decided to offer a comprehensive returns package in her e-commerce business, something almost unheard of in the dropshipping world. Returns within 7 days, no questions asked. This may be normal for bigger, more established companies but for the smaller dropshippers she was competing against, it was quite the model.
The only issue was storing the goods, and fixing and replacing them quickly enough to satisfy the impatient minds of modern consumers. This is a dig on all of us, not to worry. She could even resell the change of mind returns by virtue of her own little private warehouse down in the cellar — something not many other independent sellers could do.
As you may have already figured out, the first part was easy. Simply pile the goods in the basement; it wasn’t going to look worse than the washing machine already did. The second part was trickier — turning around slightly damaged products that her supplier wouldn’t consider “damaged”. The wonders of bureaucracy hold no bounds.
Her background as a millworker helped, it’s impossible to be around cotton for that long without picking up seaming and stitching skills. So off she went, balancing her kids, her house (with kids, it’s important to note) and her job managing the e-commerce accounts, responding to customers, marketing and returns. Not to mention fixing up the minor imperfections products and stocking returns that had been returned for no reason other than “i don’t want this anymore”.
As for marketing, being in the mills comes with a lot of respect in these parts. She spread the word, and asked her connections to do the same. Sometimes it’s as easy as that if you’re living in a smaller town, the internet is your friend but it isn’t the only tool you should rely on. Angela found her own niche — marketing herself as a local entrepreneur and pillar of the community. It worked, thankfully for her and Blackburn.
Mums can be incredible, mums of two even more so. It’s a wonder how much motivation providing for your children can give to a person, and Angela certainly used it effectively.
The journey was never going to be easy, and she knew that, but by utilising her assets and her skillset, she got her little upholstered furniture business up and running in little time. All while not giving up her millworker roots, and that of Blackburn. A lot of her customers were local, after all. Drawn by the promise of a local business who fixes and returns products from her house, while managing to be a truly fantastic mum of two. Take a bow, Angela.