Our Story

 

I closed The Staple Store in Ripponlea almost two ago, after it was on the market for 11 months. When the buyer’s offer finally came in, it was the first time I had realised I wasn’t done yet.  At the time I had no idea what that meant except I knew I hadn’t finished what I came here to do. 

I started The Staple Store in 2012. Being a clinical naturopath working with one person at a time and charging lots of money, just stopped being what I wanted to do full-time. I needed to help so many more people. I started with an $11k micro loan, a fit out that came from hard rubbish, dismantled film sets and demolition sites. And the love and sweat of friends. From the moment we opened, we really hit our stride.  Everyone was writing about us, visiting us from all over Melbourne, Staple had become a destination shop.   

Fast forward four years, and I had just become a new mum and our competition started to pop up everywhere. I remember realising one morning when Scout was 6 months old that The Staple Store was not going to survive. We held on to our principles of only selling foods that supported the health of our customers, producers and the enviroment. This meant we fell short of the variety of most others offered. We could not hold our values and compete at the same time.

I cried in the shower that morning, for a while. Then I got out and dried off and knew how we were going to stay. We diversified really quickly into body products and then ceramics and then incense and crystals. And we survived but we lost our way. We spent the next 5 years in survival mode, 2 of them during the hard lockdowns in Melbourne. I was running around fanning embers just to keep Staple alive. There was no time to do what we loved the most.

Now in our twelfth year, I know why I held on to Staple. It is to come full circle, to come home to our purpose and our commitment to make low environmental impact, healthy eating accessible to anyone that comes here. 

We will use our online presence through emails and social media to deliver information that is simple, clever and good.  

Over the next twelve months we will build the first Staple cookbook revealing all of our signature Staple recipes so that you can make them at home. Reducing food kilometres, transportation emissions and packaging. In a way that is accessible to anyone.

As a single parent I needed to reimagine a Staple Store that is sustainable for us as a family. So that we never fall onto the loop of surviving again. And so we can keep getting better at what we do. To do that, we will start small so that we are able to be the best that we can be. This means season-lead edits dropped every 3-4 months available for a limited time. These drops will be lead by you. We have time to listen to you now. All of our subscribers get the ability to vote for products, give us product ideas and tell us who to collaborate with in future drops. We get to grow Staple together and teach as many people as we can about how incredible and simple good food can be. 

x Catie, Scout + our team.