Success after toying with
the idea of a cottage industry

 [From an article in The Sentinel newspaper, Tues August 10, 1999]
By Diane Sellers

JANET Granger was 20 before she realised her childhood ambition to own a dolls' house. She had always wanted one, but never dreamed that her fascination for miniature home-making would change her life - enabling her to turn her back on a job she hated and start afresh in a country cottage in the Staffordshire Moorlands.


Janet's hobby inspired her to risk her £700 savings to set up in business as Janet Granger Designs - making carpets for dolls' houses. Now she is established as the country's leading supplier of needlepoint stitching kits for dolls' house carpets, cushions and footstools.
Her kits are so popular she's exporting them to six different countries and her husband, Chris, has given up his job as a science teacher to help run the business. 		[Photo: Dave Randle]
What's more, she now has the perfect address - Rose Cottage in Waterhouses - from which to run her cottage industry. And she is hoping to employ outworkers to help prepare and pack the stitching kits which are stocked in 150 shops throughout the country. Janet, aged 37, from Romford in Essex, explained: "From leaving school I worked in a public library and always hated it. I had been tinkering with designs for my own dolls' house and, after I married Chris in 1991, I walked out on my job and decided to go for it. I used my entire savings of £700 advertising in trade magazines and started going to dolls' house fairs and needlework shows."
Janet's ambition was simply to make a profit - she never dreamed she would one day earn enough to keep her husband in work. 		But, by 1996 she realised dolls' house furnishing was big business and definitely not child's play. She explained: "My customers are all adult, many of them in their 80s, and they like to collect flirnishings which are historically accurate."

Janet, who has no plans to have children herself, said: "My designs are my babies." She pours all her energies into new designs with customers often starting out with an impulse buy of a £3.50 sampler measuring less than two inches square and going on to collect the whole matching range of carpet, cushion and footstool. She says her intricate tapestry patterns are easy to sew in simple cross-stitch. And to prove it, Chris is the one to demonstrate the craft at the numerous shows they visit. 		Carpet kits range in price up to £17 and Janet hand stitches every design herself to produce a sample and make sure it is workable. She reckons the carpets, once stitched, are worth up to £300 each as so many hours' work goes into them.

Already, thanks to her mail order business and Internet website, Janet's designs are selling in America, Australia, France, Spain, Germany and Japan. Now she's out to conquer new foreign markets and dreams of exhibiting at European trade shows.

Best of all, Janet reckons the beautiful countryside surrounding her home on the edge of the Peak District will provide new inspiration for her designs.