Tiger Forest was a successful agency at the time and doing good work. Consolidation work, brand development, interiors, and a lot of document work: editing, creation, publishing, physical and digital. It was good work, especially for the time period, given we started coming out of the 2008 crash.

I believed in having a street level storefront to the studio. That traditional quality, that mark of trust, that you could walk down the street, open the door, go into the office. Somebody can come and check you out, whether that is on Google Maps or in person. So I had taken an old store and restored it, and it made a great studio for the business. It was a lovely space.

And I still felt I wasn't presenting the studio well enough. We would talk about how we could get the sort of work we wanted, how we could expand inside the accounts we already had, whether we could go after awards. Then it was November, and we were young, and I thought: right. We are just going to show what we can do. We are going to create our own brand. I am going to walk the walk.

We started the discussion for the project on 1 November and we opened the doors on 28 November 2013. It began as a pop-up. It became a permanent store, and we held the launch party for that on 28 November 2014.

In that time we created the brand, built the website, made custom wrapping paper, and I sourced the products. Some of that used accounts we already had: String furniture were a supplier of ours, along with a range of other brands, because our studio style was a hybrid between office and home. We wanted something that felt human, either a little bit lived in or ready to be lived in. Nothing too cold or clinical. So the suppliers were already there, and they became part of the project. I brought over my design books and objects I had collected from my work and my travels, and they went on the shelves. We sourced locally made products.

And from the start I set a rule, which was that everything had to be definitive, innovative or original. That rule ran through the entire existence of the store, and I stand by it today.

The first sale was inside the first hour, which was incredibly exciting.

Early on, we took bitcoin. I thought it was an exciting area, and The Brotique was where we could experiment with design live in a way Tiger Forest couldn't, because Tiger Forest worked for clients who were often in regulated industries. I don't know who paid in it first, one of our online customers, for what I think was a £23 order. I wasn't sure what bitcoin would do, so it cashed out automatically every night at midnight. Obviously that order would be worth a great deal more now. Its value was the experiment: testing the code and the gateways, and giving the studio something to talk about. And I believed in meeting your customer where they are.

What the shopkeeper did and what the designer did were different jobs in the same room. The shopkeeper did the stock takes, cleaned the shelves every day, swept the front door when it opened, welcomed people in, and had the conversations. The designer did the identity of the store and the standard of the store. It was in that custom wrapping paper, in the fact that anything and everything could be gift wrapped. I would train our team on how to gift wrap. Every touchpoint of the brand was elevated and personalised. The curation was that everything went together, that it was cohesive. But even in a 20 metre store, as the first one was, even at that scale, there was a proper sense of discovery. You wouldn't know what you were going to find on the next shelf.

We started in St Stephen Street, a beautiful lane down in Stockbridge in Edinburgh, which was also the original studio. The store outgrew it inside a year, so we took another unit a few blocks up, 39 Queen Street, on a corner in the very heart of Edinburgh: two floors, six rooms, taken over from a local firm called Margiotta. That opened in October 2015. Then pop-ups in other places, and events across Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and London. We really became part of the fabric of the city. Where a lot of design engagements you are in and you are out, we were connected. Always connected.

It was recognised by the Wallpaper* City Guide for Edinburgh. We acquired suppliers to extend the range, and at one point we offered the world's largest beard oil collection. We worked with partners including Facebook, Instagram, The Crown Estate, Lululemon and B&O, and with a number of charities.

2026

I decided to close the physical stores. I am relaunching it.

It is going to be that point of reference, the authority, helping people find the objects, the gifts, the grooming they need. Helping them cut through the noise, cut through the bullshit.

I am building it as an agentic business. I will still do the sourcing and the testing, and I have some people who want to be part of that. The core, the value, is human. But the infrastructure and the digital operations are intelligent and autonomous and agentic.

Still a work in progress. Building the agentic structures now.