Profile: Catriona Marshall, HobbyCraft chief executive

The day after winning a gong at the Oracle Retail Week Awards 2012, Catriona Marshall, chief executive of HobbyCraft, is preparing to make a Mother’s Day card, in typical crafting fashion.

A keen knitter and clay-modeller, Marshall, who won the AlixPartners Emerging Retail Leader of the Year award, plans to display the hefty trophy in her “craft-haven” office. It is a change from the dozen dogs, lizards and fish that populated her office in her previous role at Pets at Home.

But she believes she has helped take that “magical culture” she and her team created while at Pets at Home with her to HobbyCraft, where she has named each meeting room after a craft and where she knows the store teams personally.

“There was a really strong management team [at Pets at Home] with a high calibre of people. There was a lot of product innovation and focus on customer service,” she says. It is a culture she has strived to take with her to HobbyCraft.

It is the first chief executive role for Marshall, who was brought on board by Bridgepoint last year after the private equity firm bought HobbyCraft in 2010. She has been charged with overhauling the retailer’s operations.

“It’s been about winning hearts and minds,” says Marshall. “I am very much a hands-on manager and a people person.”

Following a successful year at HobbyCraft, Marshall’s impact on the business and passion and enthusiasm for retail is what caught the judges’ attention.

“Winning the award, I felt a great desire to do an even better job. It really motivated me to get back to work in the morning,” she says.

Marshall is half-way through what she sees as a “transformation” of HobbyCraft, a push that she launched in spring last year with a new branding and store model, to be rolled out across new and existing shops.

She has also looked at product, pushing for a faster turnaround of new lines to keep the offer fresh, as well as focused customer service. Under Marshall, HobbyCraft has introduced classes and events for customers to learn new skills in stores.

Marshall says her relentless drive to make HobbyCraft bigger and better has been influenced by previous jobs in her career. She worked at Kraft as marketing and brand manager before making a move into retail with a job at Asda, where she worked through a number of trading roles, latterly director of own label.

She worked under retail veterans Archie Norman and Allan Leighton, who were at the time revitalising the grocer’s fortunes.

“I had the benefit of learning from some great leadership in the Norman-Leighton days.

“It was the best job in the world.

I used to sit opposite the development kitchens where they would show me how to recreate the dishes myself, so I used to throw the most superb dinner parties. I was making hand-made appetisers to hand-made truffles.”

After seven years at the retailer, Marshall moved to Pets at Home in 2003 where she spent eight years, latterly as trading and marketing director.

Her seamless move to HobbyCraft has been yet another big change in terms of product category, but the two do have things in common: they are both specialist out-of-town retailers that attract passionate customers and employees.

“There are certain similarities with Pets at Home but operationally HobbyCraft is a very different challenge,” she says.

Marshall intends to have the HobbyCraft revamp sewn up as fast as she can.