The Early Years: Shmooz in St Andrews!

It's 2005 and there is something brewing in St Andrews...

In the year the first video was uploaded to YouTube, Kanye West was singing about gold diggers and there was over 1.5 billion less people on the planet - St Andrews was buzzing as Tiger Woods triumphed at the Old Course in the 134th Open Championship and Shmooz was officially open! We arrived in the university town at the end of May 2005, bringing popular brands (in 2005) such as Gio-Goi, Bench, G-Star and Firetrap to its historic streets. And so the Shmooz story began!

Our customers in St Andrews were a real mix. We catered to loyal locals, plus students and tourists from all corners of the world! We even had a few golf tourists who would regularly pay us a visit on trips to the town. The store was located on South Street in St Andrews. It was a huge store, bigger even than our current Dunfermline home. Back then, we also offered ladies clothing in addition to our mens and footwear ranges stocked today. This included ladies brands such as Vivienne Westwood, Desigual and 55DSL.

Why do we not stock ladies clothing nowadays? This is a question we hear a lot and the answer is fairly simple... Fast Fashion! The rise of stores - such as Primark - offering new ladies styles rapidly and at ultra-affordable rates resulted in a decline in our ladieswear sales while the mens designer market remained strong. But who knows what the future holds!

In the formative years of Shmooz, Michelle was key to our rise, taking on the role as Manager of the St Andrews store. The Shmooz brand grew in prominance under her leadership, becoming a respected name on the fashion scene.

None of the current team worked with Shmooz when we had a store in St Andrews (some were not even born) so we caught up with Ian to ask him a few questions that we thought you might be interested to know. Here's what he had to say...

Why St Andrews? - "We looked at various locations in Scotland to launch Shmooz and felt St Andrews fit the bill best - although a smallish town, it had/has a huge flow of visitors, golfers and students which we felt we could tap into by offering a directional, forward thinking, eclectic mix of products and brands; different to anything else available on the high street across Scotland at the time."
What was your vision? - "The vision was then to expand the model to other key Scottish towns and cities. 20 years on, we obviously don’t believe in rushing things but watch this space - the vision is still alive!"
Favourite memories? - "Favourite memories of St Andrews…. had to be the easy access to the Fisher and Donalson fudge donuts! Probably one of the daftest memories (but not very professional) was camping on the shop floor during the 2005 Open which Tiger won – had our own unofficial after-party in the shop – how it survived I don’t know!"

Unfortunately, Shmooz St Andrews is no more as the focus shifted towards our Dunfermline store. We left the town with a bang, holding a big party in the empty unit to say farewell! We've included some photos of the antics from that night here, as well as photos of how the shop looked, we bet lots of you have never seen our St Andrews store! If you did ever visit, let us know!

Enjoy the trip down memory lane...

The Shmooz Team 💙💜

Shmooz - St Andrews