Out of Hours: Sweet Dreams

It may be a bit obvious to compare Vicki Maguire, creative head at Grey London, to Willy Wonka, but it’s a comparison that makes perfect sense because Maguire is the highly personable proprietor of sweet shop Suck and Chew, located on Columbia Road in East London.  When she’s not working on campaigns like the recent British Heart Foundation film starring Vinnie Jones, Maguire can be found behind the counter of her shop dishing out sherbet Dip Dabs, sugar mice, liquorice allsorts and various barbed comments to taxing customers, more of which later.

For Maguire, it’s no surprise that she has ended up where she is. Her parents still run a stall in Leicester selling “second-hand crap” and, she says, “you do get a buzz from buying something that you think people are going to like, putting on a mark-up and then watching someone hand over cold, hard cash for it”.  Though retail is something of a family business, advertising is an environment that Maguire fell into by chance. After training as a fashion designer, she ended up working at places such as Vivienne Westwood and Ted Baker, but there was a fatal flaw in her fashion armoury. “I couldn’t draw,” she deadpans. “I was pretty shit, to be perfectly honest, and when I came out of college I had a series of design jobs but they were all pretty disastrous. I got fired from a couple of places.”

Maguire says that while she gave it a shot she was more of a talker than a designer. It was while working at Ted Baker that she noticed they were sharing offices with a new agency called Hal Henry. “I remember popping into their offices,” she explains, “and thinking, ‘God, here you get paid for sitting with your feet on the desk thinking of ideas. I want some of that’.” She was told she would need a creative partner and eventually met someone through Graham Fink “and blagged it from there, basically”. That was 16 years ago and, since then, Maguire has worked for, among others, Wieden + Kennedy London, Perfect Fools Stockholm and Publicis Mojo in Sydney and has now been at Grey London for three years.

It was while working at W+K London that the idea of opening a shop first took hold. W+K’s East London offices have a glass-fronted entrance area full of artefacts: toys, books and other nick-nacks. “There was all that stuff in the window,” says Maguire, “and people would come in each week because they thought it was a shop. I was like, ‘we should be selling stuff in here’.” Maguire admits to hankering to do something outside of her day job but without eating into the many hours the agency role requires. “I live in the East End and am familiar with Columbia Road, and the shops around there are only open at weekends. And I was down the pub one night and we saw a ‘To Let’ sign go up outside one of the shops and I thought, ‘I want that’, although I didn’t know what I would do with it at the time. I remember leaving a drunken message on the landlord’s phone and then waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘Actually, that’s still a good idea’. Also, if it did all go tits up, all I’d have to do is close the shop and eat all the sweets.”

Maguire decided on a sweet shop because, she says, she loves eating, shopping and selling, “plus they look great and in this age of austerity are like a little treat”. Suck and Chew sells not only the sort of sweets that you remember as a child – rhubarb and custards and Black Jacks are among the best sellers – but also what Maguire refers to as “vintage tat” and posters that advertise the shop designed by her and her agency friends. Suck and Chew also supplies sweets to Liberty’s, Paul Smith (an old tutor from fashion school) and various advertising companies. “The ad industry is great,” states Maguire. “I mean, it’s very competitive but if you’ve got a little idea like this it’s incredible how many people just gather round and want to help.”

Maguire works most Sundays and sometimes Saturdays with her boyfriend and loves every minute of it. She especially likes the relationships she builds with the customers, though she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. “My shop, my rules. We’ve barred a few people just for being idiots. ‘No, you can’t buy two bon bons, fuck off, you’re barred’. The weird thing is, the ruder you are, the more people come in.”