Name: Maria MacNae

Business Name: Refill your Boots

Opening times: We are 9am to 5pm Tuesday to Saturday.

Generally, we are closed on a Monday when bank holidays are so we don't open anyway.

But we were open during the Jubilee as normal.

So if it is a working day for us we will normally open.

When did you open your business and why?

We opened in July 2020 between the first and second lockdown.

We opened it because we wanted to shop more like this and started to find it difficult where we used to live.

Then it became a lot easier and this became quite normal in Manchester but when we moved here we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to do it ourselves.

Why in this location?

We ended up moving to Malpas at the start but now live in Whitchurch and decided Whitchurch was a good little hub and we thought the high street was lovely.

We got together with other independents and fell in love with this particular shop.

We saw it, we thought it was really nice little shop and perfect for what we were trying to do.

Tell us about your business?

We are an eco-friendly re-fill shop.

We are trying to encourage people to use less plastic.

So that will be by reusing containers or packaging that they already have for their food and make eco-friendly swaps for things that normally contain plastic to other things that do not.

So plastic toothbrushes, you can swap for a bamboo one, plastic sponges change out for coconut fibre that kind of thing.

What has been your proudest moment so far?

Probably still being here after everything that has been going on.

Almost making it to two years touchwood.

I think people really are getting on board with trying to do better for the environment.

I do think at the moment it is a bit of a struggle because money but I think overall people are looking to make switches.

And we always say do a small switch at a time and kind of make that achievable before moving on to something else.

Once they do one thing they feel they can progress to another.

What has been your strangest request?

We get all sorts of strange requests, we get them frequently.

We get asked for all types of different flours but we can only stock a certain amount.

I think we could fill the shop with different pasta shapes if customers were given the choice.

They want a particular type each time.

We would literally have rows and rows of pasta.

Other than that, that is all I can think of.