Colin Robinson used to travel all over the country doing various jobs including lorry driving and security at music events. He took a single day off work to sort out some family affairs and avoided the Manchester arena bombing. Now he has stopped travelling and has opened a new gothic gift shop in Blackpool to be closer to and spend more time with his family.
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00:00at Blackpool in 2004, I've always been a big rock, goth fan anyway, and it wasn't until
00:10two years ago that I decided that I was going to venture out. In my previous jobs, I've
00:16got a young family, and I needed to spend more time with them. I decided to come away
00:22from the jobs that I was doing, coach driving, lorry driving, and decided that I'd noticed
00:31that over the past 10 or 15 years, that these sort of shops that sell all your goth, rock,
00:39spiritual stuff, had disappeared. The inspiration was that a local company had closed down.
00:48I bought some of their stock, ended up buying all of it, and I went off to do local markets
00:55and car boots. From there, I had inquiries if I had a shop, and that was the turning
01:03point for me, would have been October, November 2022. To inquire about getting a shop, I made
01:20inquiries. I was actually in talks with the previous owners of a shop just around the
01:25corner called Bubble's Den to take over their business. In the meantime, I opened what
01:34is Gothica Light and Dark Limited on South King Street in March of this year. Four weeks
01:43ago, I'd noticed that this shop was available, inquired, and signed the lease at the start
01:52of this month, moved in. I got all my stock in, and I've only been open here a week. Blackpool
01:59Business News noticed. We've exploded on social media, and we're getting people comparing
02:07us now to a pretty big store in Manchester, an indoor market called Affleck's, where we
02:19stock clothing, jewellery, figures, wallets, purses. You name it, we've pretty much got
02:27everything. We've also got a big online store that, at the moment, holds about 2,500 items
02:37on it. Some of our biggest suppliers will actually post their mail items out to our
02:44customers for us, so that we don't have to physically have them in store, because our
02:50storage isn't massive. That helps us. It helps the business. Recently, because the business
03:00has grown, I've had to employ my sister. When my other store moves into here, she'll be
03:07working here as well. I've always been into music. I used to do security at big music
03:18festivals, like Download, and places like Manchester Arena. A little bit of a back story, I
03:31had to come out of that, because I was almost involved in the bombing at Manchester Arena. I
03:38should have been working that night. I took the night off, yes. I'm actually a special
03:49guardian. If people don't know what that is, it's like a foster parent, but you foster
03:56relatives. My two young children are actually my niece and my nephew. Because I was in the
04:05process of taking the oldest one on, I had a couple of important appointments the morning
04:12after Manchester Arena happened, back in 2017. I decided that I wasn't going to go to work that
04:22night. I had friends messaging me, are you okay? I didn't know what was happening at the time.
04:30Yeah, I'm fine. I'm at home. Have you not seen the news? I subsequently looked at the news,
04:37found out what was happening. I was then texting my friends to see if they were okay, my colleagues
04:44that I was working with. I count myself lucky, but unfortunately, those that lost their lives
04:52that night, not so much. I still keep in contact with my old colleagues to see how they are.
05:00But for me, that night probably changed a lot for me as well. I feel that bringing this back
05:11into Blackpool, where it had been lost, and the feedback that I'm getting, like I say,
05:17I'm having people that are coming into the store, into here, considering we've only been open a
05:24week. And like I say, comparing us to somewhere like Athlex in Manchester, which is like a market
05:29type place, similar to Abingdon Street, where you've got individual stores that sell maybe
05:36clothing, crystals. We've got it under one roof here. So for us, it's a big thing. And to be
05:43compared to a place like that is a big statement for us. The biggest for me was I used to work away
05:59a lot. I'm doing security where I used to go away and work at places like the arena, places like
06:07Download, V Festival, Greenfield. I used to be away from home two or three weeks at a time. I'd
06:15go from one venue to another. I used to travel all over the country, even right up into the highlands
06:21of Scotland for music events. And that incident for me, realized that life was too short. At the
06:33time that that happened, I was like 40 years old. And spending time with my family, especially
06:43having young children that I look after, was more important than putting my life at risk for an
06:51incident like that, where I could have gone to work that night, and I may never have gone home
06:56again. And now, leaving that job, I've got the experience. I've got years of customer service
07:07behind my back. When I was driving coaches, I used to go all over the UK and Europe, different
07:13nationalities. And now it's time for me, especially with young children, to spend more time with them,
07:23bring them up. My youngest one is three years old, or just coming up to three years old. With the
07:34backing of most of my family, my mum, my dad, my sisters, they've all been very helpful in getting
07:43me set up here as quick as I managed to.
07:47So would you say that one of the benefits of this, and your last business in Blackpool, is that you get to spend more time with your family?
07:56Yeah, I get to spend more time with my family. And with Blackpool being an area that is well
08:05known for festivals or events like Rebellion, Walk the Gardens, Valhalla, which is a recent
08:13one where you have your rock fans, Rebellion being the punk weekend. We have the mods and
08:25rockers that come here a couple of times a year. Having a store like this is beneficial to them
08:35because they had nowhere to go. They'd look around, can't find anything.