More About Us

Writing about yourself is hard but here goes...

Until 1995, Antony was a Corporate Financial Planning Manager for HSBC bank (yes, a banker but a good one, honest) and I was the Director of a social enterprise called the Housing Diversity Network. Then one night after a few more glasses of wine than was probably good for us, we decided to change our lives completely.  We moved town, gave up our jobs and started our business Amanti.

You can find our more about Amanti at our website.  We didn't have anything you could grandly call a vision, just a very simple philosophy - let's find great gifts and home products that we'd like to own ourselves and give our customers brilliant service.  And that's what we've spent the last 7 years doing.

In the process, we've learnt a thing or two, made a million mistakes and had a lot of fun.  And we get to walk to work (BIG bonus).  We've also fallen a little in love with retail.  Shops are brilliant.  They're fun to browse, we need them for everyday essentials and for one-off purchases, they employ people, they're part of the community and they make a town centre worth walking around.  But while we've been falling in love, it seems that much of the world is falling out of love with real shops and town centres.  The news is full of stories about empty shops and clone towns.  It's sad.

And so we're on a mission.  A personal mission to SHOUT as loud as we can about shops.  Especially the local and independent kind.  We've already developed an Independent Beverley website to showcase all the brilliant shops in our town and that's what brought us here to writing this blog.  It's time we really practice what we preach and see just how much of our shopping we can do in our little & local shops.  We'll be blogging our progress, the highs and lows and how much it all costs.  And hopefully, it'll be a voyage of discovery into our own town.  We're up for it.  We've even written some rules!  We hope you'll come back and see how we're doing and post your comments.