A Cheltenham craft shop crowdfunder has been launched by the three founders of The Kiwi Fruit Is Cute, who say doubled overheads following a forced relocation have pushed their community-focused business to the edge.
The shop, which operates from the first floor of Normandy House on High Street, Cheltenham, is seeking £5,000 to restock shelves and cover higher running costs at its new premises while sales recover.
Forced out by Cavendish House closure
The shop’s previous home was inside Cavendish House, the Cheltenham department store that BBC News reported closed for the final time on 11 April 2024 after 201 years, as part of wider House of Fraser closures. The Kiwi Fruit Is Cute had begun trading there in August 2024, meaning the founders had barely months in their original home before being uprooted.
The move to Normandy House brought the shop a permanent address, but at a price. Founder Siobhan Westmacott told BBC Radio Gloucestershire that overheads had ‘doubled,’ and that she and her fellow founders are not drawing wages from the business.
‘We are working other jobs and don’t take a wage from the business at all, we put everything back in,’ Westmacott said. ‘We are personally pushing our own finances into it to try and keep things going.’
The Cheltenham craft shop crowdfunder and what it is for
The Crowdfunder campaign is explicit about its purpose: restock the shop, grow sales, and cover higher running costs ‘while we build back up.’ The founders describe it as money for ‘the practical stuff that keeps the doors open,’ not an investment in expansion.
Co-founder Samantha Potter struck a blunt tone. ‘We’ve been best friends for well over five years. We don’t want to give up, we want to keep making this work,’ she said. Zarina Ismail is the third founder.
Westmacott was similarly direct about what is at stake. ‘This [the fundraiser] is so we keep open and keep things inclusive and affordable,’ she said. ‘As much as the business is growing… it is a real struggle at the moment.’
More than a retail shop
The Kiwi Fruit Is Cute is known for its Make and Mingle sessions, where people bring their own knitting, sewing, or craft projects to work on in company. The format draws visitors from beyond Cheltenham, and several local organisations use the space for their own activities.
Among them is Oscar’s Community Corner, a Community Interest Company (CIC) that offers inclusive literacy, crafting, and sensory storytime experiences to families. The snippet describes it as a charity; it is constituted as a CIC, a distinct legal structure.
Separately, the founders are in the process of establishing a ‘Kiwi Community Craft Project’ as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), focused on free and affordable craft sessions, reducing loneliness, and supporting wellbeing through creativity. According to the Cheltenham Times, the two entities are being kept legally separate so customers can distinguish what belongs to the shop from what belongs to the community project. A charity application is pending and expected to take several months.
The tension the founders are managing is a familiar one for community retail: the shop must be commercially viable enough to survive, but its value to local people depends on keeping it accessible. If the crowdfunder hits its £5,000 target, it buys time. Whether the sales follow is the question that will settle things.
