It's day six of Best Shops in Ireland 2014 and the nominations are coming in fast and furious with over 5,500 nominations logged so far.
This is the third year of the Irish Times competition and this time we've enlisted experts in their fields to sit on our judging panel, a new feature of the competition. Simon Pratt, MD of Avoca, Edmund Shanahan, a retail, fashion and homewares consultant, fashion designers and Frockadvisor columnists Sonya Lennon and Brendan Courtney and Irish Times journalist Alanna Gallagher.
Counties Kerry, Wexford and Sligo are showing great pride in their shops and shopkeepers while readers in counties Carlow, Longford and Tyrone have been slow to nominate. We want to hear what are your favourite shop is and why?
Here are some comments from readers so far: Frewyn & Aylward, a menswear shop in Dún Laoghaire, a town decimated by independent shop closures, has been nominated in the Best Boutique category, by reader Judith Lawless who writes, “It is really rare to encounter this level of care and service these days. It reminds me of the kind of service you got in country shops when I was a child although the product is a lot more sophisticated.”
In the Best Specialist shop category Rosemarie Mangan nominates Hegarty’s in Belmullet, Co Mayo, a small family run establishment where “you can be sure that it’ll be a Hegarty serving you, whether it’s Mrs H, or Mary, or Patrick (when he’s not farming), or Paula, or Dana, or any one of the 14 siblings!” The shop sells everything from sweets and drinks to knick-knacks and local souvenirs. “Whenever I go in there to get something, I come out with something else entirely. To paraphrase Tom Hanks’s Forest Gump character she writes that “Hegarty’s is ‘like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get!’” The shop sells crabbers, €2.99 each. On its Facebook page there are great shots of kids leaning over the Docklands Pier catching crabs. Afterwards they go to the adjacent beach where they had a crab race. It doesn’t get any better than this.
When reader Teresa Byrne lost her hair to breast cancer two years ago and was too sick to go to the salon, the owners of Pamper Yourself, Lucan, would collect the real hair wig they’d sourced for her, to wash and style it. Stylist Wayne Byrne, one of the stylists used to don the wig, which they nicknamed Frances, while the owner, Oliver Barett styled it. “I would love to see their professionalism rewarded,” she writes.
We'd like to see more nominations for Best Shop Window, a category that is undersubscribed. The Stock Market, Gorey, Co Wexford has a beautifully dressed window, says reader Sandra Woods. Send us pictures of your favourite shop window and we will publish the best ones in our blog and on our Facebook page.
How do you nominate your favourite shop? Go to Irishtimes.com/bestshops and fill in the form. Follow the competition on social media using the hashtag #bestshops14