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This week, I turned 40. And as I sat with a cup of coffee reflecting on everything that has brought me here, I kept coming back to the same thought: TEGEN Accessories turns 14 this year too. We grew up together, this business and I.
So I wanted to take a moment, properly, for the first time, to share the story of how TEGEN came to be. Because behind every product you have ever ordered, every clip that has held your hair together on a busy morning, is a journey that began on an ordinary morning that turned out to be anything but.
I was 25, a few weeks shy of my 26th birthday, when the owners of the company I worked for came into the shop one morning, closed the door, and told me the company had gone into administration. My first thought wasn't, "What do I do now?" It was “How do I save the Brighton shop?”
I had been managing Jaffa Hair, a well-known shop in Brighton's famous Lanes, and I loved it. The colleagues had become genuine friends, the regulars felt like community, and the products (French handmade hair accessories, many from family-run suppliers with centuries of heritage) were unlike anything you could find anywhere else. Customers would tell us that all the time: "I've never come across anything like this anywhere else." We heard it so often that we stopped being surprised, but we never stopped being proud.
The business had been brought down by two pressures at once: the Canterbury branch was struggling with its high running costs, and wholesale sales had taken a hit as some clients switched to cheaper, China-made products.
Those French accessories couldn't just disappear. France has been crafting hair accessories since the 1600s. One of our main suppliers is a family business founded in 1892. There is a reason they have endured: they are simply, genuinely, the best in the world. Losing access to them felt unthinkable.
I went home and asked my now-husband Adam a slightly terrifying question: could I set up a business and open a shop?
He didn't hesitate. He said yes immediately, and that single moment of belief gave me the confidence I needed to think: I can actually do this.
I started calling suppliers. I called the landlord of the shop, which still sat exactly as it had been left on the day it closed. I wrote a business plan. And I ran straight into the first of many walls: no bank would lend money to a recent university graduate with no business experience who was also connected to a business that had just gone into administration, no matter how watertight my plan was.
So I negotiated hard with the landlord and the suppliers, asked my parents for a small loan to get me started (which I paid back), and six weeks after being made redundant, I reopened the shop and brought back some of the team who had worked there before the closure. Six weeks felt impossible at the time, but somehow we did it.
Over the months that followed, Adam and I refurbished and rebranded the shop into TEGEN Accessories. Because we couldn't afford to close during the day, we did most of the work late into the night, fitting it around trading hours. It was exhausting, but it was also exciting. This is where the boutique feel we had always wanted was finally born: a space that did the beautiful products proper justice. TEGEN is a Cornish word meaning "jewel" or "ornament," and, being Cornish myself, it felt exactly right for a business built around beautiful things. Our very first logo had Pretty Little Things as a tagline, a nod to that meaning, though we quietly dropped it when we realised it didn't quite capture everything we stood for.
Once the boutique felt like the kind of place our products deserved to live in, we turned our attention to the next enormous task: the website. With help from the team, we spent almost a year writing product descriptions, photographing everything, and slowly building what became the first version of the TEGEN Accessories website on Shopify, the same platform you shop on today.
I remember the small kindnesses of those early days vividly. The neighbouring shops in the Lanes rallied around us. One of them even let us add our parcels to their Royal Mail collection before we had our own business account set up. That's what community looks like.
Over the years, TEGEN grew and so did the people around me.
Brighton is lucky to have two universities, and the students who took part-time jobs in the shop brought so much energy and talent. Some of them went on to work with me full-time after graduating. The shop team packed orders, answered customer queries, advised people in person on what would work for their hair type, and helped build something that was far bigger than any of us could have managed alone.
We expanded the range to include bridal collections and fascinators for weddings and race days, and became something of a destination for Ascot hats. I loved that side of the business deeply. It drew on my degree in Theatre and Art, and the time I had spent working in costume jewellery and bridal wear. Helping someone find the perfect thing to wear to a wedding or a big occasion is genuinely joyful.
One person I have to mention is Sophia, our Customer Care Manager, who is currently on maternity leave with her second baby. Sophia and I worked together at Jaffa Hair almost eighteen years ago now. She left briefly to work at a jeweller's, and then came back. She told me she missed the team and the customers. That says everything, I think, about what TEGEN has always tried to be.
Over the years, some of the people who have worked at TEGEN have become lifelong friends. I have been to their weddings and met their children, and looking back at the photos now, I feel incredibly lucky to have shared so much of life with such wonderful people.
When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, we closed the shop and, as it turned out, we never reopened it.
The team adapted brilliantly. Customer service moved entirely online, and our customers (many of whom had been shopping with us for years) stayed loyal throughout. We are so grateful for that.
The pandemic also brought into focus something we had been quietly noticing for a while: footfall had been declining year on year, and the costs of running a physical shop only ever went in one direction. We decided to put everything into building the best online hair accessories destination we could.
It was the right decision, even if it was a bittersweet one.
We grew the team to ten people, a mix of graduates and talented young people who brought fresh ideas and real dedication. I have loved watching every single one of them grow. Some have gone on to their dream jobs. One has started their own business. Watching that happen is one of the things I'm most proud of.
In November 2024, I became a mum for the first time. My daughter Clara is, as it turns out, wonderfully bright and full of personality, and I suspect she and TEGEN Accessories will grow up together, just as TEGEN and I did.
TEGEN will always be my first baby. Fourteen years in, I still don't grow tired of it: the products, the problem-solving, the customers, the suppliers who have become friends over years of working together, the team who show up every day and care.
Over the years, we have been recognised for our marketing and shortlisted for awards, including Best Retailer, Best E-Commerce Company, Best Customer Service, and Best Overall Company. I have also worked with business coaches who have helped me shape the kind of company I always wanted to build. None of it happened overnight, and none of it happened alone.
Which brings me to the thing I most want to say.
None of this (not the reopened shop, not the website, not the team, not the fourteen years) would have been possible without you.
You are the customers who took a chance on a 26-year-old with no bank loan and a borrowed mail account. You are the ones who told your friends, who came back again and again, who trusted us to find something beautiful for your hair. Many of you have been with TEGEN since the very beginning. Some of you are finding us for the first time right now.
Either way: thank you. Thank you for supporting a female-founded business. Thank you for valuing the craft and heritage behind what we sell. And thank you for letting me do something I genuinely love, every single day.
Here's to the next fourteen years. I wonder where they'll take us.
With love and gratitude,
Tegen x
Founder, TEGEN Accessories
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