Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2010 | Page 21

INTERVIEW

February/March 2010

life

From rags to stitches
Roz Whistance meets the tiny dynamo that is Tori Trimming, who was
inspired by her toddler to start a business - and who is hatching ideas
to benefit the people of the Island

TORI Trimming puts you in mind of a box

ideas that would gently empower people

to have conquered most challenges

of matches. Small but once ignited packs

– like a coffee bar. “It’s crying out for

that come along. She left university

quite an incendiary punch. You can’t

a Starbucks-like place. I like the fact

with the intension of being an

meet her without feeling that the Island

Starbucks is a social environment, that

occupational psychologist but unlike most

is going in some way to benefit from the

you can bring your family there, there’s

wet-behind-the-ears ex-students, realised

fact that she and her family have left

a library corner, there’s a carpeted area,

that her diminutive height and youthful

London to settle here permanently.

that it’s got sofas, it’s welcoming, not

looks would make her advice to the

extortionately expensive, you can have

established workforce a little hard to take.

Tori is the founder of Raggy-Tag, an
idea she stumbled across and developed

coffee, stay as long as you like, go in and

while working in a very different role

have lunch and desert or just a cake.

in the City. Now, just 18 months after
settling herself, her children and her
still-commuting husband Steve here,
she is investigating the possibility of
employing Islanders to deal with certain
aspects of her business. She doesn’t let
the grass grow. The product went from
being an off-the-wall idea to selling

'Suddenly it was obvious
that there was something
about the size and
texture of the washing
instruction tag on a toy
that appealed to babies'

internationally in four years.
“Have you heard that expression: ‘What
would you do today if you knew you
could not fail?’” asks Tori, as we chat in

“I am very small and looked very young
at the time, and I thought no-one’s going
to take me seriously: I’m shorter than
everyone else and I look like I haven’t got
any experience at all.”
So she went into banking recruitment
for Andersons in the City and did well.
Two babies later she was still there part
time, working largely from home so that
she could be a hands-on mum. And it
was while out at a toddler group with

But you’re not pressured to spend lots of

her daughter Grace that she got the

money.”

inspiration which lit her imaginative

Quite a tirade, and an understandable

match – and led to an internationally

her flawlessly stylish home in Porchfield.

sentiment to all those ex-mainlanders who

She is a tiny woman (“The eldest and

miss the coffee-bar culture.