Catering for kids' needs is child's play for Evelyn

The Irish love their babies. The latest statistics from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) show we have the highest birth rate in the EU.

The birth rate of 17 per 1,000 of population is up from 14.4 per 1,000 in 2000.

So, in spite of – or is it because of? – the worst recessionary storm clouds since the 1930s we are reproducing more than our European counterparts.

It goes without saying where there’s babies there’s stuff.

One of the first things you will hear new mothers marvel about is the amount of gear a tiny creature generates. Just to leave the house requires a checklist of equipment worthy of an army reconnaissance.That is where Bella Baby steps in.

It’s not everyone brave enough to open a business geared to the middle-and high-end markets when the economy is crumbling around us.

But that’s exactly what Evelyn Garvey decided to do back in 2008.Just three years after setting up, the 34-year-old has opened her second shop in the upmarket Dundrum Shopping Centre in Dublin and has been shortlisted in the Maternity & Infant magazine awards for best baby store of the year, which are the Oscars of the baby world.

Back in 2007 she was a manager in a Vodafone store and expecting her first baby. She and her sister, Sheila who was also pregnant for the first time, would head off together shopping for the essentials for a newborn. But they found themselves feeling slightly intimidated.

“You’d have people saying, ‘didn’t you know you needed that?’. It wasn’t a nice shopping experience. I saw a gap in the market,” recalls Evelyn. “I wanted a nice looking shop, competitively priced with all the top quality products and brands. I wanted somewhere that had a very personal service.”

And so Bella Baby was born – named after Evelyn’s firstborn, Ella and her sister’s boy, Ben, who was born just six weeks later.While on maternity leave, they travelled to the trade shows and hit the suppliers and came away with the firm belief that this would be a nice business to get into.

The next job was to source a shop. As rents were still too high in town, they settled on Oranmore, which had the double advantage of having free parking and easy access from the dual carriageway.Evelyn had absolutely no previous knowledge or training about starting your own business.

After secondary school in Salerno, the Bushypark girl went to college in Birmingham to study tourism and business management.She returned to Galway to do a post grad in marketing then took a year off to work in Sydney, where she was in the recruitment industry.When the visa expired, she came home and worked for a while in the reception of the Skeff hotel on Eyre Square while waiting for her father’s pub on the other side of the square to be renovated. Here she met her husband, Paul Shaughnessy, who was the Skeff manager.

Evelyn believes it was through working with her father, Cathal, in Garvey’s pub that she got her work ethic, honed over many summers and weekends while in school.

Eleven months after Ella was born she opened the doors of Bella Baby and was astounded at the response.

“It just started off well. I was here working seven days a week. When you’ve a good bit of personality, people want to come into you. That’s half the battle. Everybody here has a personality,” Evelyn explains.

“I never thought we’d have people from outside Galway coming but we had customers from Limerick, Cork, Wexford. . . They came by word of mouth. We also developed a very strong web presence so had some customers who wanted to buy online. Of course there are always people who need to touch and feel things before they buy.”

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.