On Friday we closed our Home Leone Charity shop in Luton. After an initial 4 months of growth and development, sales dropped off significantly and after a very poor December and January we decided to close it. As a friend said, if you are going to fail, fail quickly! This is disappointing as we had hoped to develop our name around Luton and develop an income stream, but if we cant make the sales then you can’t continue and it becomes a distraction. The other key issue was that the Landlord wanted us to sign the lease which would commit us to another 20 months and I didn’t have the confidence of the return.
Thank you so much to everyone who helped us with it, from my Church house group who put it together, our wonderful volunteers, managers Heather and Liz, Safyaan and Sisi. Thank you too to those who donated and bought. I am sorry we could not make a success of it. Many of the fixtures are in the next container and will be used by our projects in Sierra Leone