West Pinchbeck woman Alice Grant forced to close Cloth Spot fabric business after problems with Brexit and Covid restrictions

A business owner has been forced to wave goodbye to her prized project after an avalanche of problems with Brexit and the pandemic.

Alice Grant (59) first set up Cloth Spot 11 years ago, offering fabrics and fashion wear via an online store.

Selling to South Holland clients and customers in Scotland, Wales and countries throughout Europe, business was booming and - at one stage - Ms Grant employed four other staff members.

However, a cascade of issues during the last four years led to an untenable future - and Cloth Spot has now officially sold the last of its stock.

Ms Grant, from West Pinchbeck, said: “Every time there’s uncertainty - so all these elections and referendums - every time that happens, it throws people.

“As soon as Brexit happened, we lost about 15% of our trade overnight because we sell to Europe and customers in Europe.”

Leaving the European Union also created tax problems for the business. It was under the VAT registration threshold and therefore included that charge within its prices - but that meant European customers had to pay VAT twice.

“There was no real way around that - we just had to apologise, and there was a lot of uncertainty about shipping and so on,” Ms Grant added.

Complications began to pile up after Covid-19 restrictions were introduced, with changing habits meaning people no longer required new clothes to wear out.

Ms Grant said that even when rules were relaxed, people were then unlikely to sit in the house and sew - further hampering her business.

“We couldn’t just switch to something else, we had to do our best with those things - and we did,” she said.

“Some online businesses made a killing - we didn’t. We had some very good months, but it was very unpredictable.

“At the end of that first year of lockdown we’d done well, and we’d invested a little bit of money - but we’d not overtaken previous sales targets.”

Further changes to Brexit rules meant that sourcing high quality fabrics from the likes of Rome, Paris and Milan became increasingly difficult.

Cloth Spot was unable to provide the time and money required to maintain a sustainable business model - and that was before the cost of living crisis struck.

The ‘layer on layer’ of issues left Ms Grant with a sour taste in the mouth.

She said: “Some of the stuff was unavoidable. But I think for very small businesses in particular, Brexit has been an absolute disaster. That’s something we could do nothing about.

“It doesn’t make sense to us. It’s very, very frustrating and I am angry that a lot of small businesses, not just mine, have been skewered by that.”

However, she is very proud of what Cloth Spot managed to achieve in 11 years.

Staff were early to get involved with social media, and focused on taking high quality videos for online customers who were unable to test fabrics in person.

Ms Grant, who is now starting a new career as a swimming coach, added: “That went down an absolute storm. I was really proud that we set a bit of a standard.”