Images Magazine Digital Edition August 2018

www.images-magazine.com AUGUST 2018 images 27 school and so she joined him “just to earn some money“, she explains. “I had never touched an embroidery machine in my life. I didn‘t even know such a thing existed,“ she confesses. A few years later, he decided he wanted a change and put the business up for sale. “After a lot of head scratching we thought, we can buy the business, we can manage this. So, from a relatively remote site up in Fox Bay, which has 13 houses, we took all the machinery and brought it down to where we live in South Harbour, where there‘s one house.“ The couple converted an old stable block into a workshop to house the two Barudan single-heads and stock. “We just took the cladding off and rebuilt it. The frame is the same and the floor is the same – the stock room is the actual stable and has an interesting slope so when people go in there, they think, “‘Have I had too many glasses of wine at lunch?‘“ Her brother still helps with digitising if something complicated comes in, although Kerri has signed up to the Wilcom Tutorials that Dean Roscoe recently launched, which she says are “absolutely fantastic. Invaluable“. Now, five and a half years later, the couple are talking about adding an extension later this year as the space is already feeling a bit cramped with the four embroidery machines and their Roland BN-20 printer/cutter, and there will be a new heat press and a VersaCamm cutter joining them soon. Living off-grid To say that running a business in such a remote outpost brings with it unique challenges is an understatement. The place is entirely off-grid, for a start. “First thing in the morning, we check the and Roland are going to struggle to send an engineer out to South Harbour. “I don‘t know if I‘m good at fixing them, but necessity is the mother of invention. The companies are very good at talking me through fixes and sending us spares. We‘ve had to fix a few things, but on the whole, these machines are very robust. They need to be.“ Plane deliveries The next challenge is delivering the goods, which is where, Kerri says, it starts to get fun. “FIGAS, which is the Falkland Island Government Air Service, does island hopping and goes around the grass strips and does mail drops and people movement around the islands. We have an account with them so we put our packages on FIGAS and they go to town or wherever they‘re going, and the packages then get distributed from the post office.“ The local strip is at Port Stephens, about eight miles away – eight mainly off-road miles. “When we go to put our stuff on the plane or get packages off the plane, we have to hitch up our four-by-four to the fire tender and be the firemen for the plane landing. Every year they come state of the batteries before we turn the machinery on,“ explains Kerri. “We have a massive bank of batteries and a 3KW solar array, which we‘re going to expand this year by probably another 2KW. And we have a 2.4KW wind turbine, so we get the best of both worlds. In the summer it‘s great, we hardly ever need to run the generator because we get so much sunlight here, it‘s a very sunny place. It‘s also very windy.“ In the winter, however, the diesel generator is used quite a bit. To get the diesel, they have to put 40 gallon drums in the back of the pick-up, drive 35 miles on dirt tracks to Fox Bay, fill them up using the self-service pump, then go home and pump it into the generator. Stock is another challenge. They use Ralawise when ordering garments, who Kerri says “cope very well sending us stuff“. “We have to keep a certain amount in stock so it‘s money that‘s tied up, which in the UK just wouldn‘t happen. Basically, if it doesn‘t sell well, I get rid of it really quickly and replace it with something else as we are very limited on space. We don‘t do an awful lot of variation: T-shirts, polos, hoodies, sweatshirts, fleeces and some softshells. “At the moment, I can‘t keep enough olive sweatshirts on the shelves for the military. I‘ve tried overstocking, but I still had a month where I had none in large and it was a bit of a struggle.“ The main consumable in the business is thread, which comes via airmail from Madeira. “They break the laws of physics to get thread to us. You order it one week, it‘s here the next – and you think, surely there wasn‘t even a plane in that time!“ They also have to be able to fix the machines themselves, because much as the companies may wish to, Barudan Warrah Workshop is based in South Harbour on West Falkland The workshop is off-grid: power comes from a wind turbine, diesel-powered generator and solar panels, IS DECORATOR PROFILE FIGAS delivers to and picks up packages from WarrahWorkshop