A POPULAR Barrow sweet shop is celebrating its first anniversary in business.

Sweets Aplenty, located on Crellin Street, marked one year of trading on January 14.

Owned and operated by John Eccles and his fiancee, the shop is well known for selling a variety of sweet boxes, retro and traditional sweets including pick 'n' mix, sweet bags, chocolate bouquets and Ice Cream Milkshakes. 

Despite opening in the midst of lockdown, the shop has come through the difficult year and is looking forward to a bright future in the community.

“We opened a year ago and it’s been tough but we are still here, and we are going from strength to strength," said John

“We’re looking forward to what the future will hold.

“We used to run a Crèche called Busy Kids Crèche which was affected by the Covid 19 pandemic and lockdowns. During the first lockdown whilst we were closed we began doing activity packs for children to give them something to do. 

"We decided to close the business after suffering a flood which forced us to move. We then started to do sweet boxes and activity packs.

"We took a gamble and decided to open our own shop.  

“It was difficult in lockdown for us but it was like that for all the businesses in the area.

“It was just about doing the best you could at the time.

“We ran that for a while but then lockdown started and we had to close and keep closing through the sequence of lockdowns.

“Then we took a gamble and opened our own place last year and we went on from there."

John said his background was in retail and he had never actually run a shop before.

“The both of us are learning new things every day and we love it.

“Covid impacted us a lot.

“At the beginning we couldn’t actually let anyone into our shop so we had a table across the door.

“It was a shame, having so much room but no way to let people in due to safety.

“We spoke to the council and they asked us what we did, and we said, ‘we’re a sweet shop’ and thankfully later on we were able to bring people in."

John said they had had a lot of happy customers who had given them some great feedback which they were really proud of.

“We are now expanding into doing new things like milkshakes which are proving really popular.

“The shop has taken on an apprentice on our new scheme which we’re very proud of. We’re looking forward to hopefully taking on more people in the future.

“The dream is to one day open more shops, maybe in Lancaster, Preston or Ulverston.

“We like to sell jars by their weight, we do a lot with our sweet boxes which are popular for all the kids. We make our slushes which are also doing very well and the mega lollies we do are going good too.

“We are currently building a website because we are hoping to move onto an online service. We do deliveries on Barrow Eats and Just Eat.”