The Art of Brand Storytelling With Cinematographer & Shopkeeper Toby Strong
In a small Devon shop, centuries-old Tibetan fabric, brass jewellery from Nairobi, and ceremonial Maasai beaded necklaces sit beside locally thrown pottery and whittled wooden spoons. Each object tells a story - of hands that shaped it, of traditions passed down, of connections made.
But perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to the shop’s owner…
Toby Strong on the right (it’s not often you ask for a profile picture and get sent one with David Attenborough!)
Toby Strong is a multi-Emmy and BAFTA-winning wildlife cameraman whose work has taken him to some of the most remote corners of the world for documentaries like Planet Earth. When I worked at the BBC, I was in awe of the Natural History teams. They had a kind of wildness about them - out of place in the corporate corridors and meeting rooms, with their deep tans, athletic builds, and tales of epic encounters with polar bears, whales, and elephants. They were master storytellers. And Toby is one of the best.
He’s also a shopkeeper, a dream he has held onto since childhood;
“From when I was maybe in my teens, there was a sketch of this shop I wanted to create - craft and art from around the world. It’s always been there.”
Some brand stories go beyond just beautiful products. They create an emotional connection, a sense of belonging, a feeling that something real and deeply personal has been woven into the business. Craftmongers, in Ashburton; on the edge of Dartmoor, and within distant sight of the sea, is one of those magical places — where story and people are at the heart of everything they do, create, and sell.
It was such a pleasure to interview Toby about his journey, his work, and the ethos behind Craftmongers. What made it even more special was that our conversation took place through voice notes sent from his filming location in Africa, transporting me from my desk in Wales in winter.
It’s a long read, but I promise it’s worth your time.
Q: Craftmongers shares a beautiful narrative of a slower, more sustainable way of life, of the changing seasons and the beauty in the handmade. Can you share the story of the shop and how and why you started it?
I grew up in Dorset in the countryside. My father was a carpenter, my grandmother and grandfather were gardeners, so nature, making and craft, and working with your hands have been an innate part of my life. I always saw beauty and wonder in the natural world, so I wanted to follow that. Initially, I led expeditions, and then I was introduced to a camera, and I realised that through that, I could reach so many more people and tell the wonderful stories of the world, but also highlight the wrongs and the injustices. So that started my career as a wildlife conservation documentary cinematographer.
As I travelled, I'd work with a lot of indigenous peoples around the world, and I would always be drawn to the craftspeople, the makers. I brought back so many things. I was clearing out a drawer the other day, and it had things from when I was maybe in my teens, and there was a sketch of this shop I wanted to do, of craft and art from around the world even then, and so it's always been there.
Filming can feel quite ethereal. I wanted something tangible and real. I've never had the opportunity because of always moving and then I got the chance in Ashburton of a space where I could live upstairs with my son, with a shop downstairs. That's how we started it with a few things I’d brought back, some rugs and some jewellery and bits and pieces collected over the years that, one day, if I have my shop, I could use.
We grew from there, and now we support dozens and dozens of local makers, but also still those from around the world. I was filming hyenas in the Maasai Mara, and as I came out through Nairobi, I stopped at a little market and met this lovely lady. She makes brass jewellery, and we've always supported her and a mother and daughter in Turkey with their linens. There's a cooperative of Maasai women we buy beaded, beautiful necklaces and jewellery from and I love that we have both local and international. We have never wanted it to feel like a space where you move from one maker to the next, and they're isolated, almost like in a museum or gallery.
You'll pick up a piece of clothing that we've made and designed in the shop, and it'll be sitting on a piece of fabric that's 300 years old from Tibet. And then next to it is some chocolates that are made just up the road from us, two or three doors up, and some dried flowers that were grown in somebody's garden, and the thing weaving through them is the texture, the colors. I love that we can do that, and you don't know if what you're picking up has something antique from faraway lands or something made yesterday. We all love that, and with regard to the question of a slower way of living,
We've lived a very similar way for 70,000 years, and our hands always worked. So in the evenings, in the winters, we would sit, and we would tell stories and mend and make. That's still in our DNA, and I feel evermore so in how our world is that we need it.
We desperately need to slow down, and we need to make. We need to be creative. We need our hands to be doing. Everything is so fast and everything revolves around money, and this striving and grasping for money that we need, but it shouldn't be the be all and end all.
So the unwritten code and rule of the shop was that we wanted people to come in and just, (exhales). We were always changing and evolving and moving things around, but we had all the books upstairs at one point, and we had a lovely old armchair in there, and we wanted people just to sit and read. I remember someone saying, but I might not be able to buy a book. It doesn't matter. Just sit all day and read a book, have a coffee, just stop. And the conversations that people have, they chat and meet, it's so vital. So, for us, it was about building community.
We decided to create our own, not to create something new, although it is new, but to champion those things that we value so highly, integrity, gentleness, empathy, kindness, creativity, love, compassion, and to weave those into the very fabric of the building.
People have responded so beautifully to it; the gifts of the conversations and the interactions we've had with people have filled our hearts a thousand times over.
Q: Why is it important to you to share the story of the items you stock, the makers, materials and processes? Do you think it matters to your customers, and how do they respond?
I think it's vital. I think now the vast majority of things are bought at the click of a button and arrive end of the day or the next day, and they come out of the same brown packet.
As I sit now talking to you, I have a cup I'm drinking coffee from made by Cliff, who lives five minutes away. And the coffee I'm drinking, I know where it's come from. And the plate in front of me is really old. I bought it from a little brocante in France.
The table this phone is on that I'm talking to you on, I made it, and it makes the everyday magical, the knife you cut with, the plate you eat, from the jumper you wear. It has a lineage and it has a story. We crave it. We want that more than ever now.
And how do people respond? People adore it, and they'll come in and go, what's this? who made it, and where are they from?
Each of us has our own compasses with regard to the shop, but one of us, at different times or another, will hold the others to account as well. We know we cannot stock that, we cannot buy this. Craftmongers isn't just about us who run it. It's about the community, and the community has defined what Mongers has become. It is all part of the same thing. It's not just a shop, it's a community.
I am blessed in that I get to travel the world and make wonderful films and work with extraordinary people and animals and in the most extraordinary places, the wild edges of this planet, but me doing that means I am not back working in the shop. Running the shop would be utterly impossible without everyone in it, and Jody and Lauren, who manage it, are extraordinary. My part is small now; I do what I can when I can, and often that’s putting up a shelf or painting a wall, but it’s them and everyone else who works in Craftmongers. That is why it is magical. It is a cooperative of extraordinary talents.
Q: Natural elements invariably feature in many of the products you stock as well as in the styling of the store itself; how do you use nature and the seasons in your brand storytelling?
A: Last Christmas, we put some beautiful birch that the National Park had cut down and thinned out the forests. We brought them down and put them in the window. I want to shout out to Judy, who's been a sort of horticulturalist in that, and we've had gone from winter with the sparsity of the birch and Christmas decorations, and then spring with primroses growing through moss and then strawberries. We want the outside to be inside. What we don't want is to people to walk into a shop and for it to be a year round, identical thing as you walk into a supermarket and can buy your avocados or your blackberries year round. We want to bring nature in, so you'll walk in and there may be autumnal leaves scattered on the floor. You can pick strawberries in the window, the first strawberries, and we want children to be impassioned by that. We sit inside and watch as they go to school. We want people to come back, not just to that way of life, but it's about reattaching us, inserting us back into nature, back into ecology. We are all animals. We are not separated from the natural world. We have to be reminded of that. So yes, come in and be reminded that it's spring and summer and autumn, and the amount of people who'll come in and go, oh, that reminds me. I must go blackberry picking, or I must go and find wild garlic and make pesto.
It's all about weaving magic and storytelling. We weave the stories on many levels. The greatest gift of Craftmongers is the people who work there. They’re all artists, they're all makers. They all step lightly on this earth through the natural world, and they bring that in, and they will weave it in their song and their words and how they interact with everyone. And it really does feel like magic.
The shop is imbued with the magic that is grown and added to by each Craftmonger, who joins and it's a very special thing.
Q: You’re a master storyteller capturing breathtaking footage of the natural world, including for the BBC programmes Planet Earth and Blue Planet. Those series are known for taking, often complex, scientific research or a particular act of nature or animal behaviour and communicating that through a story that audiences can understand and connect to emotionally. How do you approach creating stories, and what are the key elements of telling a story well?
A: It's really interesting. If you look at what Craftmongers put out to the world on social media, there are very few videos. There are very few films, and I've deliberately and maybe subconsciously not done that. It feels like Craftmongers has its own life and a different way of telling stories. Everyone in the shop is really good at photography, and everyone is a storyteller, whether it's signwriting, oil paintings, watercolours, photography, or writing; the talents we have amongst everyone who works there are extraordinary. Storytelling does not just have to be film. Storytelling is audio, it can be dance, song, it can be how a product is displayed.
Everything does come back to storytelling, and we crave storytelling. Storytelling has been stripped from us, and we must regain it. It's what all of our ancestors going back did, we fell asleep to stories as children and entertained our children in those long nights and summer evenings by fires and we see it as utterly vital to tell stories.
Q: How do you think storytelling can be used in business, and what do you think makes a great brand story?
A: Look at great brands. It's always storytelling. Look at Guinness. They have their lineage of the story and then each of their commercials that come out are the most exquisite stories told visually and narratively. They are absolute masterpieces.
The great brands all have stories. I think stories are told on many levels, and you build your brand as you tell your story and your story evolves. You need to know who you are, where you're going, and why and who you're telling your story to.
It's vitally important, I believe.
Q: What’s the next chapter for Craftmongers?
A: We are in a difficult period with the cost of living crisis and the economy as it is everyone is struggling. At the end of 2023, we were doing wonderfully, and we decided to try and expand, so we moved into probably the most wonderful spot in Ashburton. We moved all of the retail things down there, and in our old building, we had a bookshop at the bottom, a little cafe at the back, and we’d be making our clothes that we were designing upstairs and a space for workshops, and at the back was going to be a ceramic studio that we rented out to artists. It was very exciting.
Sadly, footfall, economy and planning for the building did not go our way, and we struggled. What we’ve had to do is to withdraw, as in the winter, sort of when you lose feeling first in your fingers and your toes; we need to withdraw to our core. So we’ve closed one building, and we’re keeping the core business of the crafts and the arts with some of our clothes and some books back to one property.
We’re going to ride out the current economic unknown, and then we will grow again.
As light follows dark and spring follows winter.
We have many ideas and really exciting things that aren’t just about support and buying and selling from artists and makers. We want everyone to make, and from my travels around the world, I want to support crafts and arts that are vanishing, not just here in Devon or England or Europe, but all around the world, everywhere I see it, the masters are vanishing, and these skills are going so we want to be able to support cooperatives in learning and supporting and making traditional skills and crafts around the world that we can then bring back and help support.
The greatest story ever told on crafts and art still needs to be told, and we want to be part of that narrative.
Thank you to Toby and the wonderful Craftmongers. Like all good love stories, it’s a story full of heart and hope.
You can visit their website here, follow them on Instagram, and the shop is at 4 East Street, Ashburton, Devon, TQ13 7AA
Toby also has a beautiful series of audio stories from his travels and adventures which I love listening to with my daughter https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/through-a-wild-lens/id1503466490
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