Thorntons - Thorntons Expands

Thorntons Expands

They had not been at London Road very long when they were told that the property had been put up for sale and they would lose their tenancy unless they could purchase it themselves. This included six shops and four houses. The asking price was £5,000 but the brothers took a chance and were offered what seems like a very good business deal. They paid £250 there and then with an agreement to pay a further £250 in March each subsequent year. This then put great pressure on the business to increase earnings in the early part of the year, writing people’s names on Easter eggs doesn’t seem to have been a particularly original idea but it did prove to be a very successful one right from the start, increasing sales considerably.

In 1924 Thorntons were still selling Mackintosh's Deluxe Toffee but with only modest sales. The two brothers felt they could make something better than this and at a greater profit. Stanley started to experiment, first at home in the kitchen and then in the basement of the shop on The Moor, using his university experience to produce a home-made toffee that everybody seemed to like. They sold it for the relatively high price of 6d (2½p) a quarter - a quarter pound being roughly the equivalent of 114g. It became so popular that it soon made up half of the total sales of the business and remained the company’s pre-eminent product for the next 50 years. It was sold at that same price for 15 years, indicating the negligible inflation in the national economy until the outbreak of the Second World War. This product was the engine that drove the business for many years, and in many people’s minds the words ‘Thorntons’ and ‘toffee’ became synonymous.

Sales rocketed, even during this difficult period of the 1920s, and an even better Special Toffee was introduced along with an increasing variety of chocolates. Vigorous promotions, such as the ‘Saturday Specials’, a precursor to the ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offers of today, ensured that customers were reminded of the excellence of the brand. A further two shops opened in 1926, the year of the General Strike, one in neighbouring Rotherham and the other on Union Street. The Rotherham shop was the first outside of Sheffield and was a great success but the one on Union Street was less so and became the company’s first shop to be considered a failure. It closed within a year.

The brothers now had to split their responsibilities: Norman managed the shops and did all the administration, Stanley oversaw all the manufacturing. They still took important decisions together following what were described by Stanley as “heated but friendly arguments”. As it was then a buyer’s market for shops they could always get short leases with a three-year break clause. A successful format had been established and in 1928 a new shop was opened in Castle Street followed in 1930 by shops in Leopold Street and in Spital Hill, all in Sheffield. The latter soon closed, but a very successful shop appeared in 1931 in the heart of the city at Fitzalan Square.