We opened the first Jonzara 2008 –Jonathan and I were at university and had been talking about helping our mum Heather open a small boutique. I’m still not exactly sure what happened but next thing we were dropping out of university and the three of us were opening a larger than anticipated store in the middle of a recession. People thought we were mad, to be honest at times I did too, but 15 years later we are still here and enjoying running a family business.

Absolutely not at all, it was never my plan. I was studying Maths at university. Things in life just happened and take you on different paths to your plans.

Ladies’ fashion offering excellent customer service and quality brands not found easily on the high street. When we work with a brand, we pride ourselves on offering the largest selection of the label to give our customer the best choice.

Jonzara offers quality ladies’ clothing with excellent customer service. We want our customers to be able to find that perfect outfit in a welcoming and comfortable environment. A dual offering of stores and online is very important to us as we believe this enables us to offer better choice and service for our customers. Also, it’s quite handy to be able to nip onto the shop floor at the end of a busy day and pick up a dress for an evening out.

My passion is buying. I love putting together collections I know our customer will love and then comes the long wait and excitement before it begins to arrive in store. I enjoy merchandising the shop floor but don’t get a lot of time for this now.

Jonathan always has plenty of plans and a considerable part of my role is to reign these in. A large focus is our online store as we continue to offer a greater range of products available whenever and wherever our customer wants to shop.

Opening in a recession in 2008, navigating Brexit and enduring a global pandemic while starting my family and we are still here, I am very proud of that.

There are so many lessons we have learnt. Working in a family business can be challenging and learning to leave work at work has been an important lesson. My son coming along has really helped us as a family focus on the truly important things in life.

That we are a small family run business able to offer the broad choice of larger high street stores, while retaining our excellent customer service that is increasingly hard to find out there! We offer the largest ranges of our brands to our customers and we think in Northern Ireland that really sets us apart.

This is truly very difficult, as I am working with my husband, mum and brother. In the early days the business was all we talked about but thankfully we have become much better at separating the two. We do pride ourselves on being able to have a blazing row one minute and be in fits of giggles the next! The arrival of my son who also happens to be the first grandson and nephew has also really helped us focus on quality family time and a strong staff team enables us to have time away from Jonzara as a family too.

Our Co Director/brother Jonathan. He is the real driving force behind the business. We have different strengths and weaknesses and sometimes different opinions, but we trust and respect each other and we think, and complement each other well.